In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Johnson, Jacobitism, and Swedish Charles: The Vanity of Human Wishes and Scholarly Method
  • Howard D. Weinbrot

Renewed interest in Jacobitism is among the many fruits of contemporary eighteenth-century studies. We have seen a laudable awareness of the complexity of the years from, say, 1688 to 1760. The Whig interpreters of history long had buried the abdicated, Tory, tyrannical, Catholic Stuart regime under its own rubble and the great edifice of Protestant parliamentary government gloriously begun by the Glorious Revolution. Nothing could have been clearer.

Within the last two decades or so, however, some energetic revisionist scholars have rejected the notion of an increasingly democratized Lockean eighteenth century. For them the Tory Jacobites always were a party to be reckoned with; the nation largely preferred the constitutional legitimate native Stuarts to the unconstitutional illegitimate Hanoverians; divine right theory permeated the ancien regime wed to its cultural elite and to the powerful Anglican church that in turn permeated all areas of English life; even after 1760 and diminished Jacobitism George III was effectively the Patriot King of Tory-Jacobite political philosophy. Winner’s history had hidden such truths and the veils now are lifted from our eyes. 1

Such conclusions so easily passed from historical to literary studies that Jacobite authors have been ritualistically flushed from the covert. Those once thought either grudgingly loyal to the Hanoverians, going through a phase, part of the opposition, or respectably Tory, now are regarded as admirably Jacobite in thought, word, and even deed. No political cross-dressers they. As men of integrity they variously resisted “Hanoverian repression.” Scholars advocating such views often regard themselves as fighting the good fight against the imprisoning view and “grip” of advocates of the Glorious Revolution and Protestant imperialism. 2

Samuel Johnson has been given pride of place in this movement. He left Oxford, the argument goes, because he refused to swear the required oaths—of Allegiance to the hated Hanoverians and Abjuration of the beloved Stuarts. We do not know his whereabouts in 1745 and so “it is a realistic possibility rather than a romantic speculation that for a [End Page 945] time in 1745–46 he held himself in readiness for dramatic events in circumstances which may have arisen” should the Jacobite rebellion succeed. Johnson owned a musket, sword, and belt but did not serve in London’s Trained Bands because he again refused such oaths. He was part of the classical tradition that was high Anglican, high Tory, and Jacobite. On this hypothesis, Johnson’s “political character” is resolutely Jacobite from youthful political opposition in the late 1730s to aged political revelation in the early 1780s. 3

As I have argued elsewhere, most of this scholarship regarding Johnson is demonstrably wrong. 4 Much of it also has attached itself to The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and has produced this interpretation of a key part of that poem: Charles of Sweden was a Tory and a Jacobite hero because he threatened to invade Britain, overthrow George I, and crown the Pretender; Johnson was a Jacobite; therefore when Johnson discusses Charles of Sweden in the Vanity he actually alludes to and encodes the ‘45 and Charles Edward Stuart, whom he sympathetically regards as a sadly failed hero, indeed as “a valiant invader and deliverer.” 5

Here is an example of how such argument typically proceeds. Johnson shows his Jacobitism because in 1739 he was “no stranger to the locality of that centre of High Church and Nonjuring Anglicanism,” the Strand, which also “was a centre for sympathetic publishers and booksellers.” As Johnson walked the area and browsed in the bookshops, he would have come across Andrew Millar’s shop in which he could find Millar’s publications supporting Jacobitism. Since Johnson “no doubt” was among Millar’s customers he would have found Millar “appealing to a Jacobite hero by selling the three volumes of [Gustav Adlerfeld’s] The Military History of Charles XII. King of Sweden.” 6

Unfortunately, however, there is no evidence that Johnson was Millar’s customer in 1740, or that he either owned or read the supposedly Jacobite volumes that supposedly demonstrate his supposed Jacobite allegiance. Adlerfeld’s Military History was an expensive, eighteen...

Share