The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Read online

  Not all the aphorisms attributed to Johnson were actually written or uttered by him. He never said that ‘A fishing rod has a hook at one end and a fool at the other’, or that ‘I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead’. It is not true that he was interrupted in bed with his wife by a maid who exclaimed ‘I am surprised, Dr Johnson’; nor did he reply, ‘No, my dear, it is we who are surprised; you are astonished.’ It’s telling, though, that these lines are often taken to be his. Among the reasons for his lasting fame is a facility for witticism, so it is natural to attach his name to stray examples.

  Yet even the authentic Johnsonisms that fill the pages of dictionaries of quotations are only part of his story. His observations are the product of strenuous thought, and rather than simply firing off bons mots he likes to untie the knot of an aphorism. While he can come up with glorious new sayings of his own, other people’s exist to be unravelled. Are they true? Are they consistent? Are they helpful? His idea of instruction isn’t the soothing banality of the modern self-help guru, who plays shamelessly on the reader’s insecurities; his willingness to argue, explain and exemplify means that his wisdom is less reductive than aphoristic writing tends to be.

  We could dwell on any of the quotations I have cited. But what’s most striking is that, although they appear impersonal, Johnson is present in all of them; these are distillations of his experience, and his voice reverberates in each. When he speaks of want and of the intervals of absence that renew love, he is drawing on memories of his own suffering and missteps, and when he refers to the absurdity of imitating people we can never match, he is in fact thinking of a particular type of person, who has come by the idea that retreating to the countryside – or into solitude – is a guarantee of creative freedom, yet in practice has managed only ‘to quit one scene of idleness for another, and, after having trifled in public, to sleep in secrecy’.

  Because of his abilities as an aphorist, there is a tendency to think of him as a sententious man with a sharp pen and no less sharp a tongue. We may also imagine him as a master of the imperative mood, issuing diktats from a lofty perch. But though at times Johnson’s talk is high-handed, that is seldom how he writes. In the Rambler he describes ‘the task of the author’, which is either ‘to let new light in upon the mind’ or ‘to vary the dress and situation of common objects’ and in doing so ‘spread such flowers over the regions through which the intellect has already made its progress, as may tempt it to return, and take a second view of things’. The key words here are the last. The author who takes a second view is changing perspective, challenging their existing notions, renewing the act of looking. As he writes in another of his periodicals, the Adventurer, ‘we see a little, and form an opinion; we see more, and change it’. This is something Johnson does on a pedestrian level – for instance conceding that pigs, which he’d once held in low regard, are ‘unjustly calumniated’ – and on a more elevated one – such as by revising his Dictionary to beef up its stock of morally instructive quotations. Taking a second view isn’t just a task for authors; it is the essence of the examined life, in which we seek to understand events and ideas, or indeed people and emotions, from more than one vantage point. Here we begin to see a more supple and empathetic Johnson, among whose favourite words are yet and but.

  Even once we get the measure of this two-handed Samuel Johnson, he continues to surprise, looking with approval or interest on something we might expect him to deplore or dismiss. He argues that playing card games ‘consolidates society’, and writes the preface for a book on the game of draughts (which he believes can sharpen one’s foresight and vigilance), though he doesn’t go in for either activity himself. He recognizes that women who become prostitutes do so out of necessity rather than weakness – not a remarkable insight now, but a bold one at the time. He claims that gambling is less likely than flashy business ideas to be a cause of harm, and can even make the case for smoking – ‘a shocking thing’ that involves ‘blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people’s mouths, eyes and noses’, yet one that ‘requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity’. This willingness to deviate from received wisdom also allows him to condemn popular pursuits, as when he reflects that ‘It is very strange and very melancholy that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.’

  One of the special qualities of Johnson’s judgement is its power to jolt us, perhaps because it feels radically truthful or lays its emphasis somewhere unanticipated: ‘all intellectual improvement arises from leisure’, ‘the insolence of wealth will creep out’, ‘vivacity is much an art, and depends greatly upon habit’, ‘histories of the downfall of kingdoms, and revolution of empires, are read with great tranquillity’. As we trace his personal journey, these moments when his ideas unsettle us are frequent – and invaluable.

  2

  Of personal oddity, which is no obstacle to personal authority

  Johnson’s existence calls to mind an image coined by his fellow poet Alexander Pope – ‘this long disease, my life’ – and it began with ominous difficulty in September 1709. On Wednesday the 18th, late in the afternoon, he was ‘born almost dead’. The phrase is his, used in one of his few fragments of autobiography. This inauspicious start was one he shared with some of the eighteenth century’s most august figures – Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, Newton. To be born almost dead and to know that this was so is to understand the preciousness and precariousness of life, to think that one has been given a second chance and that whatever follows is a gift.

  ‘Here is a brave boy,’ said the man-midwife George Hector, hoping to reassure the child’s mother. Forty-year-old Sarah Johnson was exhausted by her difficult labour, and her newborn was placed with a wet-nurse, Joan Marklew. He returned from her care after just ten weeks, ‘a poor, diseased infant, almost blind’; whether from her milk or exposure to some other source of infection, he contracted scrofula, a disease of the lymph nodes that caused angry abscesses. He would later be taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne – the royal touch was supposed to cure the condition – but the scars remained with him till he died. From infancy, his hearing was imperfect and he had little sight in his left eye.

  The mature Johnson struggled with asthma, gout and rheumatism; other afflictions included a painful swelling inside his scrotum. Worse, he suffered from a deep melancholy that seems to have caused two collapses (of a kind we might now call nervous breakdowns), and his efforts to overcome dark thoughts often failed. James Boswell, the most influential of his biographers, provides a vivid image of his mind, which ‘resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Coliseum at Rome’. In its very centre ‘stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him’. At length ‘he drove them back into their dens’, but they could at any moment return to assail him. This has long struck me as a peculiarly powerful vision of mental disturbance and the recurrent need to withstand its assaults. It suggests, too, that life itself is a trap and that the individual caught in the trap is an object of voyeuristic fascination, perpetually being given a thumbs up or thumbs down.

  Though Johnson had it in him to be jovial and gregarious – and coined the word ‘unclubbable’ to describe his self-important, difficult friend Sir John Hawkins – he kicked against the conventions of polite society. He was ‘beastly in dress’, according to one squeamish observer; his protégée Frances Reynolds (sister of Sir Joshua) thought he looked like a beggar, and those meeting him for the first time commented on his loose clothes and his shrivelled wig, which sat askew. In other respects he lacked polish, and he was either puzzled or amused by refined manners. He treated books with cavalier disregard; his personal library was ‘miserably ragged’, and when the actor David Garrick lent him some fine volumes of Shakespeare, he defaced them and then rather implausibly claimed that such marks as he had made coul
d be rubbed away using breadcrumbs.

  There is evidence that he suffered from what we now call Tourette’s syndrome (after Gilles de la Tourette, who described the disorder a hundred years after Johnson’s death). Certainly he had symptoms of Tourette’s. He didn’t engage in the involuntary bursts of profanity that the name now brings to mind – in fact exhibited by only 10 per cent of sufferers – but there were other forms of disturbance and excitability, tics and jerks and grimaces and noises that sometimes embarrassed him and deepened his feelings of guilt and unworthiness.

  In his later years, his odd mannerisms attracted the startled attention of people wedded to new ideas about the body as an instrument of politeness. Those ideas derived from many sources: the writings of the French surgeon Nicolas Andry, whose notions about correcting physical deformity began to impress an urbane English audience in the 1740s; the philosopher David Hartley, whose Observations of Man (1749) emphasized that the functions of the body and the mind were related; and works of less medical and philosophical substance, such as the letters of the Earl of Chesterfield (published in 1774), which aimed to inculcate politesse and preached total mastery over the movement of one’s limbs and face. The result was a surge of interest in the mechanisms – both mental and physical – for regulating the body. Johnson, it’s fair to say, failed by some distance to meet the standards required by the votaries of this physical self-discipline.

  Boswell describes how Johnson would rock back and forth in his chair, clucking and whistling and breathing out explosively like a whale. Tom Davies, the Covent Garden bookseller who introduced the two of them, said that Johnson laughed like a rhinoceros. The novelist Fanny Burney noticed his habit of twirling his fingers, twisting his hands, see-sawing up and down, and chewing at the air – ‘in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion’. He would touch every post he passed when out walking and squirm unnervingly before he swept through a doorway with a single giant stride. Another compulsion led him to collect scraps of orange peel, which he pocketed mysteriously. When the artist William Hogarth encountered him for the first time, he concluded that this odd figure, ‘shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner’, was ‘an idiot’, and when he heard him speak, the eloquence that poured from him was such that Hogarth imagined the idiot had for a moment been touched by divine inspiration.

  Johnson was aware of his many oddities. He was aware, too, that they caused others to regard him as a misfit, even an undesirable, and that many people thought he was therefore unqualified to write for a broad audience. His relationship with his oddities was ambivalent. Although he was often sociable, he stood a little removed from the routine and the regular, and as a result he was well placed to survey the contours of everyday experience. But while a sense of his own peculiarity deepened his perceptiveness about norms and patterns of behaviour, he also knew that his quirks could be distracting. What was more, the efforts he made to control his unruly body could heighten the impression of strangeness. Sir John Hawkins’s daughter, Laetitia-Matilda, described him walking with his left arm pinned across his chest, and recalled her brother Henry seeing him descend from a coach on Fleet Street and head off at high speed ‘in the zig-zag direction of a flash of lightning’. According to Frances Reynolds, he would often ‘with great earnestness place his feet in a particular position, sometimes making his heels to touch, sometimes his toes, as if he was endeavouring to form a triangle’.

  Some of Johnson’s peculiarities were endearing, or could be channelled to entertaining effect. Many observers left behind accounts of his relish for extreme physical feats. Attacked in the street by four robbers, he was able to hold them at bay until assistance came, and when a fellow theatregoer in his home town of Lichfield stole his seat and refused to surrender it he tossed both the man and the seat into the theatre’s pit. In the summer of 1762 he visited Devon, and in Plymouth met a young woman who claimed she could outrun anybody; he duly raced her across a spacious lawn and won, though at first he lagged behind because he had to kick off his slippers, which were much too small for him. Another time, having challenged the bookseller John Payne to a footrace, he picked him up halfway through the agreed distance and unceremoniously deposited him on a branch of a nearby tree, before hurtling off as if the race was not yet done. Even in the final year of his life, aged seventy-four, he was able, when he found a bone-weary prostitute lying in the street, to carry her on his back to his lodgings (where he nursed her back to health). On a lighter note, he amused his friend Bennet Langton by rolling all the way down the steep hill behind his Lincolnshire home, and had amused him more in the early days of their acquaintance, answering the door at three in the morning with a poker in his hand, an unexpected willingness to join in Langton’s carousing and the more than faintly alarming promise that ‘I’ll have a frisk with you.’

  One of Johnson’s most memorable performances occurred during his trip with Boswell to Scotland in 1773. Though not much given to mimicry, he astonished guests at a dinner in Inverness when the conversation turned to recent British discoveries in Australia: among these was Joseph Banks’s sighting of a creature that, according to the recently published official account, moved ‘by successive leaps or hops, of a great length, in an erect posture’ (and proved ‘most excellent meat’).1 At the mention of this marvel, Johnson rose from his chair and, gathering the tails of his massive brown coat into a pouch, put out his hands like feelers and bounded across the room. It was not enough to hear about the kangaroo; he needed to be the kangaroo.

  This is the behaviour of an armchair traveller, projecting himself into foreign experiences, and of someone sympathetic and inquisitive, keen to imagine what it might feel like to inhabit others’ worlds (including that of a large marsupial he’d never seen). His actions promised to induce mirth and amazement, but he also risked looking silly – and he was prepared to run that risk in order to make the moment dramatic and animate the otherwise rather vague image of the kangaroo.

  It was not unusual for him to shock his companions. Even his friend Edmund Burke, whose career in parliament and as a political theorist had accustomed him to boorish talk, thought him ‘a little rough in conversation’. Johnson’s roughness could simply be a haste to assert himself, but was sometimes offensive. He often drew pleasure from being contradictory, and admitted that he ‘talked for victory’, enjoying the contest more than was seemly. As a critic of literature, his defence of high standards could seem belligerent; he would delight in finding fault with writers who were usually revered, claiming that the task was important because such writers might otherwise be held up as perfect examples. He would promote a point of view he knew to be spurious, because supporting it would allow him to display his wit and ingenuity. Recalling an evening when Johnson took pride in his own ‘colloquial prowess’, Boswell commented that ‘you tossed and gored several persons’. Mostly he resembled not a mad ox, but a bear huffing and snorting: he was brusque more often than rude. Regret, even remorse, often followed these outbursts, and when he strained to seem remarkable – when others marvelled at him – the pleasures of audacity soon gave way to feelings of self-disgust. He was harder on himself than on anybody else.

  Johnson’s confrontational spirit reflected his suspiciousness about refinement. The routines of gentility, to which Lord Chesterfield in the 1750s applied the French term etiquette, were no more than a veneer. As far as Johnson was concerned, being a good friend or a good guest should have nothing to do with such cosmetic performances. Even in talking up politeness, he referred to it as ‘fictitious benevolence’. The phrase sounds like a whisper, full of gentle persuasion, and usefully conveys a sense of polite conduct as a ceremonial act of self-control. But while he could see the value of behaving agreeably and smoothly, social life was pointless if it consisted only of courtesies that propagated further courtesies. Candour should be at the core of one’s relationships, and he encouraged others to act on this principle.

  One of those he urged on
in this way was Fanny Burney. When she was daunted at the prospect of coming face to face with the Shakespeare scholar Elizabeth Montagu, their host Henry Thrale suggested she should warm up for their encounter by testing her conversational gifts on another of those present, the less formidable Dorothea Gregory. But Johnson told her that ‘when I was beginning in the world, and was nothing and nobody, the joy of my life was to fire at all the established wits’. Instead of behaving tricksily, by putting off the inevitable contact and needlessly ruffling another guest, she should not hesitate to face the woman she wanted to meet. ‘Always fly at the eagle,’ he counselled. Procrastination, he knew, was not the opposite of crude impulsiveness but its cousin, a failure of self-control. It results from incorrectly framing our understanding of the situation we are in. His instruction to Burney made her think of both herself and Mrs Montagu as birds, similar even if not equal, whereas her first instinct was to visualize the encounter as more like one between, say, a mouse and a lion. Being socially courageous, or just socially fluent, requires this kind of shift in perspective: it involves not only thinking and talking more affirmatively about oneself, but also reimagining one’s environment.

  Thanks chiefly to Boswell, we know a lot about Johnson’s own skirmishes and engagements, the tossing and the goring – and, thanks again to Boswell, we know their perpetrator as ‘Dr Johnson’. The doctorate was honorary; in fact, two were bestowed on him, by Trinity College Dublin in 1765 and by Oxford ten years later. He did not like to use the title, preferring to be ‘Mr Johnson’, partly because there were a lot of phoney doctors and bogus doctorates around, and partly because he hoped, as a ‘Mr’, to sound more like a gentleman and less like a person with something to peddle. But friends and critics made the name stick, and Boswell, though adept at capturing his subject’s complexity, doctored his image in other ways. Readers of his Life of Johnson get used to its subject’s utterances including a formal ‘Sir’ – ‘Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things’, ‘Sir, it is affectation to pretend to feel the distress of others, as much as they do themselves.’ Boswell portrays himself going in for a lot of this Sir-ing, too, as he asks a question or ventures an opinion, but when Johnson does it, while issuing an edict or correction, he sounds pompous and peremptory. A modern audience feels this keenly: when someone calls me ‘Sir’, I suspect that I am about to be told off (‘Sir, get in line’ at the airport) or patronized (‘I’m afraid, sir, that this is not a public area’). The image of Johnson as a bossy doctor, dishing out potent prescriptions, isn’t an easy one to shake.