Samuel Johnson: The Lives of the Poets, A Selection (review)

Mr. Lonsdale’s complete and definitive 2006 Oxford edition of Johnson’s Lives provides the text for the ten biographies Mr. Mullan includes in this student edition, which replaces that of J. P. Hardy (Oxford, 1971). Since Johnson was partially responsible for selecting the poets in his original work and since the formation of the canon of English poets is one of the most obvious issues brought up by such an edition, it is interesting to note that Cowley, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Gray are included by both Hardy and Mr. Mullan. Instead of Hardy’s more “Romantic” Thomson and Collins, however, Mr. Mullan opts for Rochester, Congreve, Gay, Savage, and Swift, tilting toward Scriblerian interests. He justifies these latter selections largely on the assumption that these writers “continue to engage readers in the twenty-first century.” We hope he is right.

For the forty-nine pages of explanatory notes at the back of the book, Mr. Mullan has “relied extensively” on Mr. Lonsdale’s edition once again, but he has conveniently and appropriately reduced the voluminous notes of the scholarly edition. In addition to the selection, Mr. Mullan’s main contribution is twenty-seven pages of introductory material, the focus of this review.

Quite good, his Introduction touches on most if not all the important topics raised by reading all Johnson’s Lives, including the replacement of private patrons by booksellers in the newly developing literary marketplace: “to annotate Johnson’s Lives is to realize how important patrons had been over the previous century. Any reader can still see that the work is thronged [sic] with the names of lords and ladies.” Mr. Mullan recognizes and attempts to mitigate here the distortion that can arise in an incomplete edition: “by omitting some of Johnson’s less significant lives in this selection, we perhaps sacrifice the accumulated sense of how the life of writing is shaped by the struggle for money, and how often the achievement of financial security is provisional or belated.” Subsequent quotations from the lives of Hughes, Thomson, and Collins fill this gap. Mr. Mullan covers the usual ground with brief mention of the “tripartite pattern” of the substantial lives—that is, biography, brief “character,” and “examination” of the major works—and with traditional explanations of Johnson’s attitude toward devotional poetry and the Metaphysicals. Concerning the latter it is good to be reminded that Johnson “was not coining a phrase but confirming a category. Dryden and Pope had both recognized this type of poetry. But Johnson sought to make ‘metaphysical’ a pejorative term.” (I would have noted that he tries to do the same with the related term “wit.”) The final two paragraphs contain a solid analysis of particularly excellent examples of Johnson’s prose style in the Lives.

Mr. Mullan’s style, however, disappoints. He obviously does not have a tin ear, but occasionally he can write as though he does. Things begin inauspiciously when his first paragraph ends, “No one could have done more than him [sic] to honour his country’s literature.” The next paragraph begins, “Yet Johnson’s Lives of the Poets is intrigued [sic] by everything inglorious about the life of writing.” We are told that the “indignities that accompanied the quest for patronage . . . feature in [sic] many of Johnson’s accounts.” There is a dangler: “As the greatest author of the age, it was natural that Pope’s vanities be the most powerful.” Mr. Mullan first writes “his life of Savage” and later “his Life of Savage.” His two-page Select Bibliography seems haphazard. Joseph Epes Brown’s Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson, 1926, is cited in a 1961 reprint, which is not identified as such; that another Joseph Epes Brown, the famous Native American scholar, was six years old in 1926 is one reason why it is always important to provide the original date of a reprint edition. But names are not Mr. Mullan’s strength, it seems...