Samuel Johnson's "Love of Truth" and Literary Fraud

I

In James Boswell's Life of Johnson, for May 1776, the following exchange appears, important for the light it sheds on Johnson's attitude toward literary deception: "We spoke of Chatterton. Boswell. 'Has not, Sir, his poetry a claim on our esteem for its poetical spark?' Johnson. 'No, Sir; such claim as he had on our esteem he has forfeited through his imposture, and his poetical spark is extinguished by his disregard for truth. Chatterton's poetry can no more be beautiful than Ossian's; both are calculated to deceive credulity. There is no pleasing deception, for no man will willingly be deceived. No, Sir; his productions merit no commendation.'" This passage is illuminating for several reasons: first, it suggests that Johnson thought of Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson as engaged in the same fraudulent enterprise; second, it shows the degree to which Johnson's aesthetics are bound up in his epistemology. But the most noteworthy thing about the passage is that Johnson never said it, nor did Boswell ever record it—I created it out of whole cloth for this essay.

Mine is, I think, a reasonable counterfeit. The diction and the syntax are not a bad approximation of Johnsonese, or at least Boswell's version of it. Its success, however, depends not on any intrinsic merits it may have, but on the presumption of honesty and integrity that readers of scholarly essays implicitly extend to their authors. Readers appreciate the chance to verify the authenticity of quotations with accurate citations, but in practice few are so meticulous as to question the truth of such claims: when critics tell us these sentences appear in this book, we rarely doubt them. The ease with which this trust can be abused is a small but pointed illustration of the dangers of literary disingenuousness.

Though such mischief can provide an opportunity for smug self-satisfaction at having pulled one over on my audience, at least one person would not approve—Johnson himself. That much of my invented speech is accurate: he was thoroughly unwilling to be deceived. And in an age crowded with remarkable literary hoaxes, few people had contact with more of them than Johnson. He was involved in nearly all the noteworthy fakes of his day, and in a multitude of roles: to the bullying antiquarian Macpherson, he played debunker; to the suicidal prodigy Chatterton, a skeptical inquirer; to the convicted forger William Dodd, a consoler; to the penitent faux-Formosan George Psalmanazar, a friend. And though he is best known for being on the side of righteousness, he strayed to the dark side several times—both unwillingly, when William Lauder convinced him publicly to defend his lies about Milton's plagiarism, and willingly, when as a young hack he passed off his own debates in Parliament as the actual words of Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Elder.

Perhaps as a result of this experience, few things were more urgent than distinguishing the real from the spurious. Deception colored the way Johnson looked at the world, and is among the keys to his intellectual character. Hester Thrale Piozzi, in recounting his unwitting involvement in the Lauder controversy, notes that his "ruling passion may be said to be the love of truth," an assessment echoed by many of his acquaintances. ¹ Sir John Hawkins observed that "His notions of morality were so strict, that he would scarcely allow the violation of truth in the most trivial instances." ² Boswell elaborates: "The importance of strict and scrupulous veracity cannot be too often inculcated. Johnson was known to be so rigidly attentive to it, that even in his common conversation the slightest circumstance was mentioned with exact precision." Arthur Murphy concurs: "Johnson always talked as if he was talking upon oath." ³

These early commentators were right: indignation at misrepresentation of any sort fills Johnson's writings and conversation...