Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (review)

In Idler 20, Samuel Johnson asserts that "there is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth," and Thomas M. Curley's recent study invokes this assertion with respect to James Macpherson's Ossian poetry (229). Curley adopts a thoroughly Johnsonian attitude, subjecting both contemporary and current criticism to a more comprehensive scrutiny than has been attempted in twenty years.

The first third of Curley's book provides an extensive survey of Macpherson scholarship, with particular attention paid to that produced in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Although he carefully delineates the various positions taken by current scholars on the status of Macpherson's works, he unequivocally labels any scholarship "sympathetic to Macpherson"—that is, any scholarship that attempts nuance or expresses doubt about the origins of the poetry—as "revisionist" (3). Curley considers it a necessity that all scholars acknowledge Macpherson's poems as originating from him with only very slight links to authentic Gaelic sources, a point he emphasizes often by reducing it to numbers. Curley concludes, based on Derick S. Thomson's work (1952), that "twenty-eight of his thirty-nine titles—almost three-quarters of his individual works—have no identifiable counterparts in Gaelic tradition. The rest of his titles do make occasional use of sixteen or so Gaelic sources but in so freewheeling and subordinate a way as to secure him the title of an original author" (27).

Curley objects quite strongly to any scholarship that questions truth as a fundamental condition of literature. He particularly focuses on Nick Groom's book The Forger's Shadow (2002), saying that "its insightful manipulation of a kind of postmodernist Romanticism seems to render truth itself a questionable hypothesis preferably to be eschewed in discussions of forgery" (15). Curley fears that in even contemplating truth as subjective, "everyday life and one's perception of everyday life [threaten] to become meaningless" (20). Such a sentiment echoes Johnson's own fears, and Curley underwrites these sentiments with a religious conviction that confession and contrition must be publicly proffered when truth is violated (55). Curley's unequivocal alignment with Johnsonian morality constitutes a limitation of his book, since he never provides any basis for choosing Johnsonian truth over Groomian, or Macphersonian, other than allegiance to Johnson as a moral authority.

Despite this limitation, Curley's study offers an extremely useful and thorough look at the controversy over its first forty years. Few studies of Macpherson or Johnson have put the two men in direct conversation in the sustained way that Curley does here. He is able to do so because of his inclusion of a number of rare or previously unpublished letters and pamphlets that paint a fuller portrait of their dealings. One such letter is to Macpherson from their mutual publisher, William Strahan, in which Strahan acts as an intermediary between the two men, aiming to soothe Macpherson's perception of a public insult offered him by Johnson (110). Curley also provides evidence of Johnson's involvement in William Shaw's and John Clark's pamphlet war over the authenticity of the poems, which he reconstructs through a letter from Shaw's publisher, John Murray, to Shaw (218). By introducing materials like these into the scholarship, Curley expands the personal side of the debate.

In fact, this book reads in many places like a critical biography of Johnson, one arranged by intellectual projects rather than chronology. Curley focuses narrowly on Johnson's scholarly endeavors and his involvement in others' work, largely ignoring the friendships and events of Johnson's life so visible in other biographies. Curley, for instance, spends much time debunking the reductive, but oft-repeated, claim that Johnson was a Scottophobe. While he acknowledges all the standard slights Johnson made against the Scots, he counters them with examples including Johnson's objection to the Society for the Propagation of...