Dr. Johnson

Dr. Samuel Johnson was blessed that particular alloy of irritability and genius which, though often imitated, remains extraordinarily rare. He began life as a poor man, so poor indeed that during his brief time as a student at Pembroke College, Oxford, he could not afford new shoes to replace the tattered and nearly useless ones he possessed. A kindly fellow, aware of this difficulty, quietly left a new pair by Johnson's door, but he refused to wear them. When his money ran out entirely, he left Pembroke rather than accept the charity of others. The rest of his storied life would scarce fit in these pages, but his success as a periodical writer, and his great work, the Dictionary, are too well-known to require rehearsal. Suffice it to say that he became in his lifetime -- and remains today -- a sort of icon of learning and its good effects upon the mass of humanity.

But what sort of man was Johnson? He was brusque, opinionated, and so rude on occasion that some latter-day diagnosticians believe he suffered from Tourette's Syndrome. He did not so much speak as blurt, and many of his exclamations have joined the list of immortal quotes: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a Scoundrel," "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," and "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of Life," to name but a few. 

In the Blackadder episode, "Ink and Incapability," the learned Doctor is portrayed by Robbie Coltrane, with every bit of bluster one might expect from such a man. Dr. Johnson's rising irritation as Blackadder peppers him with portmanteau words -- "interphrastrically," "pericombobulations," and "extramuralisation" -- is priceless. And yet it may surprise many to learn that Johnson's own accent was anything but the posh pretentiousness of Coltrane's memorable performance; he had, in fact, a very thick and distinctive Staffordshire accent; according to Jeffrey Meyers' Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, he said "shuperior" for superior, "woonse" for once, and "poonsh" for "punch."

I hadn't realized this myself, until on listening to the audiobook version of my novel PYG -- in which the learned Doctor meets the Learned Pig (this is based on contemporary accounts) -- that I heard Simon Callow's marvellous personation of Johnson's voice, which perfectly and richly evokes both the accent and the man.

So have a browse at his Dictionary, and some of his remarks on men and letters as transcribed by his longtime sidekick and eventual biographer, James Boswell, and leave a few words here in comment or reply. Feel free to blurt!

Journal of the Plague Year

Given that our class needs to cover at least three centuries of literary history, I was pleased to recall that one of the books I had in mind -- Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year -- was published almost exactly 300 years ago in 1722. It's a book that of course seems timely today, as we're still in the grip of our twenty-first century adversary, COVID-19 -- and, as you read it, you'll see all sorts of parallels, from daily "Bills of Mortality" (lists giving the number of those who'd died that week from the plague), to quack cures, charlatans, and the periodic percolations of panic that came and went with each new "wave." On its title page, the Journal is attributed to "a Citizen, who continued all the while in London," and its tone is that of an eyewitness to a slow-unfolding disaster.

Except that, in fact, it isn't -- it's a work of fiction. Defoe made use of actual journals (including possibly his own uncles), public records, and newspaper articles as his sources, mimicking the language, tone, and apparatus of his sources, tossing in their numbers and dates  to set the seal of truth upon his sly fiction. He'd done it before, of course -- writing Robinson Crusoe as though it were the actual tale of a man who survived thirty years on a desert island (though again, he borrowed freely from history, particularly the tale of one Alexander Selkirk, whose history was similar in some respects.

So what do we call this? If written today, we might say "creative nonfiction" but that category didn't exist in 1722. Back then, it might have fallen under the broad umbrella of historical chronicles, many of which were embellished with fictitious or semi-fictitious episodes (Holinshead, who was the source for many of Shakespeare's plays, wrote a famous one), though there was also the category of facetiæ -- deliberately and patently untrue narratives posing as true ones to a greater or lesser extent (Swift's Gulliver's Travels is perhaps the best example), which often verged on broad satire (assuming one recognized the purport of its barbs.

Today, we live in a universe of 'alternative facts' and truthiness -- and the printed page seems to be growing almost as unreliable as the conspiracy-theory laden internet. Defoe, though, did not aim to deceive, nor to undercut any accepted notions of what happened during the plague in London -- he stays well within the lines -- but rather to add a sense of verisimilitude by using a direct first-person narrator. Like the long-running radio and television series once hosted by Walter Cronkite, he took the known history and made it more immediate -- because, as Cronkite intoned "You are There."

Welcome to English 208

 

What does it mean to read? And, over the past few centuries, during which the ability to read passed from a small elite of priests and clerics to the professional classes generally, and finally became nearly universal, how has the meaning of the act of reading changed? In this section of British Literature, we’ll survey a variety of texts from 1722 to the present, looking both at the stories and characters they contain, but also at their changing relationship to society in a time of steadily increasing literacy. In the end, we’ll look back to see how, and why, some of these texts emerged as part of an evolving literary “canon,” while others came and went, or never reached that space at all. Our path must needs be a crooked one, and the scope of three centuries allows little time for gawking – but we’ll certainly give it a try.

Along the way, we’ll visit London during the pandemic – the one of 1665 -- ponder the pages of Dr. Johnson’s famous Dictionary, and curse the bloodless schoolmaster with Blake. Next we’ll visit the humble cottager with Wordsworth, and sail into silent seas with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.  Once back in port it will be time to put away such fancies, and enjoy the furtive fruits of widespread social repression; it will be time for the tightening of corsets as we wander the fountains and crystal palaces (built just on top of open sewers) known as the Victorian Age.  We will explore both the surface world of pre-Raphaelite pleasantries and patent processes, as well as the underworld of cheap lodging-houses, twelve-hour workdays for children, and a London in which more than 250 people a month died of typhus and water-borne diseases  (including Prince Albert!).  Among our guides here will be Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew, and George Eliot.  

Having indulged, by then, in one too many rich pastries (or perhaps expired from drinking a glass of Thames water), we’ll toss all we’ve studied once more into the rubbish bin of history, and try to shore a new modernism against these ruins. Lastly, having ridden the roller-coaster of modernism, we’ll watch it all crack up again, with the exploded generations of two world wars, the bitter reaction against Britain’s colonial exploitation, the emergence of postcolonial poetry and art as empire’s evening returns into sand, amidst which two vast and trunkless legs . . . and so it goes.