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SAMUEL JOHNSON AND DIARIES
This year marks the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth. Liza Picard examines his life and work, and considers the literary value of the diaries of Boswell and other writers.
Thus Boswell concluded his monumental Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). But if he could revisit the London literary scene now, he might be disappointed. Although the sheer volume of Johnson’s output must be admired, his style is more measured, his vocabulary more Latinate, than we are used to. Reverence, nowadays, is hard to come by.
He was certainly an extraordinary man. He had to contend with appalling disabilities. One of his eyes was blind, the other short-sighted. His neck was scarred by childhood scrofula. He was deaf. ‘When he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters’ – Boswell again. Hogarth saw him ‘shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner’ , and concluded that he was ‘an idiot’ . When he was not talking he made meaningless clucking noises. With our superior hindsight we can label his strange behaviour as probably a form of Tourette’s syndrome: his contemporaries just had to accept it. As he aged, he suffered from gout, oedema and breathing difficulties. In the Preface to his Dictionary (1755) he referred to the sickness and sorrow in which he wrote it. He may have meant the ‘melancholia’ , the black dog of depression that haunted him all his life.
He was largely self-taught. He read voraciously, but he was expelled from two grammar schools. Penury drove him from Oxford University after a year. If he had been able to stay the academic course he could have excelled in so many fields. Mathematics was a form of relaxation for him. He spoke both classical ‘dead’ languages fluently, and wrote them elegantly. He interested himself in medical and scientific questions. If all else had failed he might have been a persuasive auctioneer; it was while trying to sell the Thrale brewery after his friend’s death that he coined his most quoted phrase, ‘we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice’ . But after an unsuccessful venture into schoolmastering, he set out for London in 1737, aged twenty-seven, determined to earn a living by his pen.
Boswell, conscious of his status as the Laird of Auchinleck, wrote of Johnson that ‘No man of humble birth, who lived entirely by literature, … ever rose into that personal notice which he did’ . Perhaps it was true at the time, but humble birth has long ceased to be relevant to literary fame. Certainly Johnson achieved ‘personal notice’; no gentleman’s library could be complete without bound volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine, to which he was a regular contributor, as well as to other periodicals. He covered the political scene with his ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ , a satire on the debates in the House of Commons that cleverly bypassed the Commons’ dislike of reporters. His name was becoming known in publishing circles. By 1747 there was a growing feeling in those circles that a new dictionary might be a paying proposition, and that Johnson would be the man to undertake it. He set to work, but only spasmodically, so that deadlines came and went. He had to jettison many of his early pages because he found, too late, that his amanuenses couldn’t make his system work. It was not until 1755 that his magnum opus was published.
His private life does not seem to have been happy. ‘It was well known that his amorous inclinations were uncommonly strong and impetuous, ’ wrote Boswell, cautiously. Johnson ‘was sometimes hurried into indulgences which [Johnson] thought criminal’ . At least he avoided any sexually transmitted diseases, unlike his faithful biographer. Before Johnson left Lichfield for London he had married Elizabeth Porter, a widow twenty years older than he. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps Johnson saw her with his blind eye. Her enemies unkindly described her as having a red face – the more so as she took to drink and rouge – and a large bust. She also had £800. Johnson expressed undying love for her, but they often lived apart, and when success began to come to him he parked her in lodgings in Hampstead, well away from the jolly gatherings of his friends. When she died, in 1752, he was seemingly inconsolable. Perhaps he had been in love with a fictional portrait of the perfect wife, far removed from actuality.
Hester Thrale, from a drawing by George Dance in the National Portrait Gallery, London
The other woman famously connected with him, from 1756, was Hester Thrale, the wife – later widow – of a close friend, Henry Thrale. He became a regular guest at their house, Streatham Place. According to Hester, Johnson entrusted to her, three years after they met, fetters and a padlock. If he did, the probable explanation was that he was terrified of going mad, and needed the reassurance that if he descended into mania she would be able to restrain him. But it is a weird story. For one thing, in her words, ‘his stature was remarkably high, and his limbs exceedingly large’ . How could she have managed to chain him up, if he was raving mad? After Johnson’s death Hester alleged that his friendship had imposed on her a constraint that had been ‘terrifying in the first years of our friendship [culminating in the fetters?], and irksome in the last’ . After Henry Thrale’s death in 1781, relations between Johnson and Mrs Thrale continued on a superficially friendly basis, until Johnson was bitterly hurt by her attraction to her children’s music master Gabriel Piozzi, whom she married in 1784. ‘If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness. ’ Not surprisingly, he found himself no longer welcome in her house.
Men posed no such problems. They could meet in clubs, where everyone could enjoy convivial company and conversation and no one minded keeping the servants up late. Johnson could be a bore. His table manners were appalling – he ate fish with his fingers because he couldn’t see the bones – but once he had finished his meal, he insisted on holding the floor, and he sulked when people wouldn’t listen to him. Yet he was much loved by the male friends he gathered round him. James Boswell met Johnson in 1763. Over the years he progressed from Johnson’s admiring disciple to his ‘dear Bozzy’ . He carefully recorded the great man’s sayings and reminiscences, surely with a view to publication in due course.
As defined in Johnson’s Dictionary, a diary is ‘an account of the transactions, accidents and observations of every day, a journal’ . Of all Johnson’s writings, his diary of the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), with Boswell, is the most beguiling, especially read in conjunction with Boswell’s own Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). The two men set off from Edinburgh in August 1773, Johnson aged sixty-three and Boswell about half his age. Their overnight stays varied from the homes of Boswell’s connections in the aristocracy and gentry, down to a sordid local inn where there was not even straw to lie on. Every evening Boswell had to write up his diary of the day’s events, and show it to his mentor. Johnson did not reciprocate.
The journal that Johnson kept, and used when he got home to produce the formal Journey, has been lost. It is amusing to compare the two accounts, each edited by the writer. Boswell relates how, when they got back to his home in Edinburgh, his father and Johnson had a furious row over politics and religion: ‘they became exceedingly warm and violent. ’ Johnson discreetly ignores it. His style is disarmingly simple, except just twice. He described the taste of Hebridean whisky as ‘empyreumatick’ , where you and I might have said ‘smoky’ . And a ‘song by which the rowers of gallies [sic] were animated’ was ‘an ancient proceleusmatick song’ . I suspect that he did it on purpose, compelling his readers to reach for a reliable dictionary.
According to Johnson, ‘It is a very good custom to keep a journal for a man’s own use’ – but he added that the writer should entrust to a close friend the task of burning it at his death. He kept various diaries, from aide-memoires of names and places, and cash spent, including his laundry bills, to the kind of intimate diary that he was anxious to destroy in the bonfire he lit a few days before his death.
Fortunately, no one burned Samuel Pepys’s diaries, which he wrote for ‘his own use’ and for posterity. Open the diary that he kept from 1660 to 1669 at any page and there he is, a virile young man with few morals, a gifted pen and an excellent grasp of Shelton’s shorthand. For eighteenthcentury London, read Boswell’s own diaries, as he catches gonorrhoea yet again from un-‘armoured’ sexual intercourse with a prostitute, and haunts the salons of the rich and powerful in the unrealistic hope of landing a commission in the Guards, which he would never have been able to sustain.
In the Victorian age, you have that incomparable pair Arthur Munby and his slave/mistress/wife Hannah Cullwick (see The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley, 1984). No matter what obscure motive made Munby, a civil servant and diarist, insist that Hannah keep a diary as she drudged in Victorian basements and toiled up and down Victorian stairs, the social historian can thank her posthumously for a unique picture of domestic service. At the other end of the social scale, Queen Victoria famously wrote diaries, and even had some of them published. Her style, if you overlook the underlinings and exclamation marks, was delightful. She excelled herself in describing the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851: ‘This day is one of the greatest and most glorious of our lives … the tremendous cheering … and my beloved Husband the creator of the great “peace Festival” … was [sic] indeed moving. ’
A diary of the same event, this time unpublished (Museum of London archives), was kept meticulously by W.S. Bell, a Newcastle businessman. Not only did he record the sights he saw, the meals he ate and the transport he used, in a handsome volume designed to last for posterity, but he also carefully gummed in prints he bought and flyers he picked up and bills he paid. He was clearly looking to enthral his descendants. Poignantly, but fortunately for the social historian, his beautiful book turned up in a sale, where the Museum of London bought it. Another unpublished diary (manuscript in the Wellcome Institute) still wrings the heart. It was kept by a devout young medical student, Henry Vandyke Carter, who was seduced into marrying a harpy, who battened on him. They eventually parted, she to live in comfort in England, and he to earn a hard livelihood as a doctor in India, remitting most of his salary to her. He was glad to be rid of her, but they had had a daughter, whom he loved, and he never saw again. He recorded his prayers to God, but finally despaired of divine help. His manuscript diary just ends, leaving blank space. Did he lose it? Or give it up? Or die? The survival of manuscript diaries is so often a matter of chance.
Samuel Pepys took great care that his many volumes should be preserved by Magdalene College, Cambridge, in the cases he had designed for them. Boswell planned for all his papers to be housed in his family archives; it was due to the persistence of the American collector Lt. Col. Ralph H. Isham that cache after cache was discovered elsewhere.
Diaries can be invaluable aids to understanding the writer. We miss Samuel Johnson’s personal diaries. They would have been, without doubt, a keen commentary on current literature and thought, in the London that he knew and loved. They would also have helped us to understand his complex character. Perhaps the truest index of the interior life of a diarist emerges from diaries that were never intended for publication. Diaries written for publication need a cynical eye. Politicians busily scribbling their way through cabinet meetings can hardly be trusted to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
