This book offers an analysis of the life and thought of the writer Samuel Johnson from an historian's viewpoint, reversing the orthodoxy which has dominated the subject for over thirty years. Jonathan Clark, who has written extensively on English and American religion, ideology and politics in the eighteenth century, presents here a Johnson strikingly different from the apolitical, pragmatic and eccentric figure who emerges from the pages of most students of English literature. Johnson's commitments and conflicts in religion and politics, obscured since Macaulay, are reconstructed; his role in the literary dynamics of his age is revealed against a new context for English cultural politics between the Restoration and the age of Romanticism. This book will therefore be of interest not only to Johnsonians but to historians of ideas and students of English literature.
Johnson rose from obscure origins to become a major literary figure of the eighteenth century. Through a detailed survey of his major works and political journalism, Hudson constructs a complex picture of Johnson as a moralist forced to accept the realistic nature of politics during an era of revolutionary transition.
Dr Johnson said that he would walk to the ends of the earth to save Beauclerk. Other people who claimed to be his friends rejoiced at his early death. How did the beautiful youth of Francis Coates’ 1756 portrait become a man whose greatest claim to fame was causing an infestation of lice at Blenheim Palace through lack of personal hygiene? A great-grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwyn, he lived a privileged life thanks to fortuitously inherited wealth. He employed Robert Adam to build him a house at Muswell Hill which has almost completely disappeared from the records of Adam’s work due to a dispute about the bill. He was one of the leading book-collectors of the time, with a library of 30,000 volumes whose sale after his death was a major literary event. He also used his wealth to indulge interests in science and astronomy and a passion for gambling. As a result, he ran through his inheritance as quickly as he could sell it, falling into ever-increasing debt as his lawyer grew richer. Beauclerk knew all the leading figures of the British and French Enlightenments. He was a friend of Johnson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Horace Walpole, Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Wilkes and David Garrick. He met Rousseau and Voltaire, and immersed himself in French salon culture. He could charm people when he chose to, but did not always try. Recently he has been overshadowed by his wife, Lady Di (née Spencer), whose life by Carola Hicks (Improper Pursuits, 2001) has made her artistic talent and unconventional life well-known. The story of their adultery and marriage has not previously been told from Beauclerk’s point of view, and many other inaccuracies have crept into authoritative works such as the ODNB; he is regularly and unfairly dismissed as a bad husband. This biography shows that he was much more than the close associate of Johnson known from the pages of Boswell: a man of widely varied interests, from the Grand Tour to the contemporary theatre, who lived Enlightenment life to the full in a way which would not have been possible a generation earlier or later. Based on research in unpublished letters, legal documents and financial records, including some concerning the Adam house, as well as published diaries, letters and memoirs, it shows that he may have left no enduring legacy of his many talents, as even his friends admitted, but he made the most of all the opportunities available and lived a fascinating life which illuminates every aspect of Georgian elite society, from auctions to zoology, from care of one’s wig to building an observatory, and from mishaps in Venice to sea-therapy in Brighton.
No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson--essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.
No area of Johnsonian studies has been less appreciated and more misunderstood than Johnson's response to history. Popular notions to the effect that he was insensitive to history have discouraged scholars and critics from discovering the role history played in his thinking. In this first book-length investigation of the subject, John A. Vance concludes that few misconceptions about Samuel Johnson have been so glaring as his supposed dislike of history. More specifically, in separate chapters Vance examines the development of Johnson's historical sense--from his readings, heritage, and travels to historical sites; Johnson's recall and use of historical figures and events, most notably the seventeenth-century attitude toward the most maligned member of the historical family, antiquarianism. The author also devotes two chapters to Johnson's historical writings--that is, those works in which he either incorporates history into his critical, biographical, and political discussions or those in which he clearly assumes the role of historian himself. Vance furthermore considers Johnson's views on historical facts, educative and moral history, the broadening scope of historical investigation, the nature of historical truth and skepticism, historical research, historical causation, and the historian's style.
