The Age of Johnson

Those familiar with previous volumes will not be surprised by The Age of Johnson 11, edited by Paul Korshin and Jack Lynch. It offers thirteen articles, nine of which are about Johnson, and a brief memoir of Donald Greene; the volume concludes with an "index nominum" for this volume and for vols. 1-10. As has been one of the hallmarks of the series, the reviews, including Peter Briggs' review essay of eight symposium volumes, are of high quality. The essays are historicist in nature, generally attempting to demonstrate some element of Johnson's politics or psychology; there is a good deal of close reading of texts but more to elucidate some aspect of Johnson than of the text itself. The shared editorial policy is, if not hostility to postmodern literary theory, at least disdain for its methods, assumptions, and particularly its "jargon," which is attacked most forcefully in the reviews.

The volume begins with four papers from a 1999 ASECS symposium on Johnson and poverty, with Paul Korshin presenting an examination of Johnson's real experience with poverty as a corrective to the romanticized view fostered by Boswell and others of Johnson's "sacralized poverty"; Johnson never was forced to resort to a porter's knot, and Korshin warns us not to confuse temporary impecuniousness with real poverty. R. D. Stock follows with an exploration of Johnson's own debunking of myths about poverty: while he feared the snares of poverty, particularly its potential to lead to despair, he also criticizes the romanticizing of poverty or the poor. Stock offers us "the seasoned, compassionate, but no-nonsense Johnson most of us admire" (27). James Basker then seeks to establish as genuine Johnson's advocacy of slave rebellions and violent resistence to "imperial cruelty" by reading not only Johnson's pronouncements but also fifty-two articles from the Gentleman's Magazine 1737-73 about slave insurrections. Regrettably, no doubt because of the limits of symposia, he concludes before tackling some interesting questions he raises: how does this all connect to Johnson's psychology, his religion, and his treatment of Frank Barber? The final contribution to the panel is Mona Scheuerman's demonstration of Hannah More's attempt to combat the propaganda of Thomas Paine and others by using the press and its distribution methods to keep the poor in their God-ordained place.

In the remainder of the Johnson articles, J. A. Downie returns to a much bruited topic in The Age of Johnson series, Johnson's degree of Jacobitism, reasserting Donald Greene's "classic study" vs. recent claims by Howard Erskine-Hill and especially J. C. D. Clark that Johnson was a strong Tory, a nonjuror, and clearly a Jacobite. Downie argues that although some variety of Tory, Johnson was not the divine right of kings kind, nor was he a nonjuror, nor ever a Jacobite. He rejects those who interpret Johnson's early anti-Hanoverian writing as proof of Jacobitism, pointing out many writers criticize Hanover without being regarded as Jacobites. Daniel Gunn then looks at the literariness of the "Preface" to the Dictionary, arguing for a tension between a desire for ideal order and a recognition human language is "incommensurate" with this goal. Johnson vacillates between pride at what he has accomplished and sadness at his failure to attain the ideal. Paul Tankard next offers a thumbnail sketch of thirty books Johnson advised a soldier turned clergyman to read; he offers no analysis of what the list reveals about Johnson, intending solely to identify these now obscure books. Sarah Jordan collects Johnson's observations on idleness, noting a tension between the fear that idleness leads to too much indulgence in imagination and thus possibly madness opposed to the fear that to be busy in foolish tasks is a "criminal" waste of time one will never get back. The final two essays about Johnson are Michael Bundock's critique of Aaron Stavisky's essay in The Age of Johnson 9, which argues that the Life of Savage illustrates the presence of a kind of masochism in Johnson thirty years before the Johnson-Mrs. Thrale debacle, and Stavisky's response to Bundock. The debate revolves largely about a six step pattern in Savage's relationships with women that epitomizes Johnson's own association (and resentment) of love with female control. Bundock argues the six step pattern is erroneously formulated and applied; Stavisky replies, predictably enough, that there was no six step pattern but rather a four step pattern that does too apply. The battle is a draw or a split decision for Bundock at best, but while the essays will prompt us to reread Savage neither gets us closer to Johnson's mental states.

In the first non-Johnson essay Richard Sher convincingly attributes an anonymous item praising William Robertson in the Edinburgh Evening Courant to Boswell, but traces Boswell's general resentment of Robertson elsewhere: Boswell was proud of Robertson's success as a Scot but put off by his aggressiveness in literary economics. Daniel Ennis then explores the battle for poet laureateship between Stephen Duck, attractive to the government as untutored antithesis of the Opposition wits, and Colley Cibber, who had already demonstrated political correctness in writing The Non-Juror and in rejecting The Beggar's Opera. He concludes that Cibber, by virtue of his considerable talent and appetite for self-mockery, was chosen as better able to withstand the criticism that came with this political appointment. Following is Thomas Preston's essay, a significant and sophisticated contribution to the twentieth century ironic rereading of The Vicar of Wakefield. While many who wish to see the novel as not merely a sweet moral tale suitable for every child's bedside library-a sugar-coated Job-argue the Vicar is not a Christian hero but rather the target of Gay's satire, Preston argues the Vicar is himself the satirist. His targets are precisely those Christian apologetics among which the Vicar has been classed for two centuries. The novel seeks to destroy what Preston calls a "trendy but repugnant fish-mongering of virtue as a good investment in material happiness" (267), the notion of Tillotson among others that you can move towards Christian perfection and still enjoy material success. The pat ending of the novel recognizes not God's plan but the randomness of chance, and the Vicar, not just Gay, knows it.

Despite the editors' billing of Peter Briggs' work on eight recent symposium volumes as a review essay, it is rather a serial review of eight collections with no connection between the reviews. As has usually been the case with The Age of Johnson these and the rest of the reviews are sharp and forceful, but particularly receptive to historicist approaches. Curiously enough, one work, the ELH special issue Jacobitism and Eighteenth-Century English Literature, is also separately reviewed by Robert Folkenflik; the two reviews conflict, particularly with respect to the essay of Erskine-Hill. The intensity of tone in these reviews as in Downie's essay as well attest to how vigorously twentieth (twenty-first?) century students still fight the ferocious political battles of the eighteenth century.