The Rewards of Age

Roger Lonsdale's edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets is an astonishing achievement. Prepared late in his career, in a tradition of humane individual scholarship that is now under challenge, it invites comparison with the 70-year-old Johnson's own expression of learning and wisdom. It gives us for the first time a thoroughly analysed and faithful version of the text, details the composition of the lives, explains and illustrates Johnson's approaches to biography and criticism, and provides an unrivalled level of information about Johnson and about the eminent poets themselves. The last scholarly edition of the Lives was George Birkbeck Hill's in 1905, itself a triumph of Victorian editing, but Lonsdale has surpassed that achievement partly through a vastly increased store of information, but also through a more profound understanding of Johnson's thinking about biography and literature and a more straightforward attitude to his difficulties in going about the task of compiling the Lives. The combination of Lonsdale's introduction and commentary, always modest and lucid, but with an art that hides art, provides an edition that will last for the foreseeable future and a powerful insight into Johnson's personality and thinking.

The edition begins with a 185-page introduction, nearly twice as long as any of the lives, and capable of standing independently as a critical account of the Lives of the Poets. Although Lonsdale acknowledges that for many readers the Lives were and are the most attractive and accessible of Johnson's works, what fascinates him is the way in which a relatively simple task grew until it engaged Johnson in a major exercise in literary history. As they progressed, the Lives became an attempt to synthesise positions Johnson had taken up earlier in his career, positions that now came in for elaboration and, more surprisingly, revision. Lonsdale is clear from the start that this was a booksellers' project. Forty-eight members of the London book trade invited Johnson to write individual prefaces, biographical and critical, for each of the poets in their 58-volume edition of the Works of the English Poets. Such an undertaking ran with the currents of late-century nationalism, but it was also an attempt to retain copyright in response to the 1774 Donaldson case, which had denied the booksellers perpetual copyright. More specifically, the booksellers aimed to rival John Bell's Edinburgh-printed The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, which finally amounted to 109 volumes published between 1776 and 1782. I think Lonsdale, who tells this story very well, may still underestimate the importance of creating new copyright by making a new edition (something that preoccupied the Joyce estate quite recently). Pope was already on to this trick when he revised the Dunciad and, when he left Warburton the property in the poems he would write notes on, it was with the sense that the notes would create a new property. When Dilly wrote to Boswell about copies protected under the Queen Anne Act that were to go into the new multi-volume edition, I suspect that he was thinking of properties that were secured by their apparatus. It follows, as Lonsdale recognises, that Johnson did not need to write much in these prefaces, indeed, hardly anything at all, but that he probably needed to write something for each poet. His name alone would signify the seriousness of the copyright renewal, as well as adding to the dignity of the series. That explains why Johnson accepted the 200 guineas for the task that later so bothered commentators; it was an honorarium, equivalent to payment for the first edition of Rasselas, but requiring very little work in return. That subsequently the volumes of poems were labelled 'Johnson's Poets' on the spines of bound volumes and on the original blue paper wrappers is not surprising, but Lonsdale confirms that Johnson's role in selecting the poets was confined to...