Johnson’s Play Box

A cartoon from an 1865 issue of Punch shows the magazine’s eponymous big-nosed jokester, sporting a vest emblazoned with the Union Jack, as he cracks open the Palace of Westminster by the roof and rifles through an overflowing assortment of limp, doll-like MPs and Lords. Entitled Our Play Box, the illustration impishly conveys how much access the Victorian press, and by extension its reading public and the nation at large, demanded to the Houses of Parliament and the business conducted there by its members. It was not always thus; only in the 1770s, thanks in part to the agitation of the rabble-rouser John Wilkes, did Parliament begin routinely to tolerate the transcribing and publishing of its debates and divisions. The new transparency of the transactions at Westminster came to encourage not only heightened levels of popular scrutiny and editorializing, but also, eventually, canonical works of parliamentary history, fiction, and theory, like Lord Macaulay’s History of England (1848–61), Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels (1864–79), and Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867), of which a modern paperback edition fittingly features Our Play Box on its cover.¹

Yet enterprising journalists from before the Wilkesite revolution in parliamentary access could still find ways to wrest drama and incendiary copy from the closed walls of Westminster. Take Edward Cave and his hungry stable of writers at The Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s and ’40s, including a certain scrofula-ridden young polymath from Lichfield. Should a paperback anthology of Samuel Johnson’s political writing for Cave ever be mooted (one can always dream), this same cartoon from Punch would serve surprisingly well as cover art, Johnson’s squinting profile replacing Punch’s leering mask, and Pitt, Chesterfield, and Walpole standing in for Disraeli, Palmerston, and Lord Derby. The nursery-room scale of Westminster could remain unchanged, though, since Cave and his team eluded the censor by saucily pretending that their debates came not from the British Parliament but rather from the senate of Swift’s diminutive dominion of Lilliput. The names of speakers and places were accordingly jumbled into various states of ludicrousness (Walpole is Walelop; Pitt is the petite-sounding Ptit) and inscrutability (Jamaica for some reason becomes Zamenghol). Clearly, this was not parliamentary coverage of the C-SPAN variety. Aside from their Lilliputian trappings, Cave’s reports were several degrees removed from what was actually uttered at Westminster—both in time, as they were usually published months or even years after the original debates took place, and in texture, as Johnson and his fellow hacks worked only from surreptitiously gathered outlines of the speeches, largely spinning the verbal content of the published debates out of their own brains. Indeed, Johnson himself may never have seen the inside of Parliament, and it is telling that Boswell, when choosing a word to describe Johnson’s work on the debates, vacillated between “framed” and “fabricated” (he eventually settled on the former).² The “Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia,” to give them their full title, were not simple works of reportage or transcription, but partly ludic, even Punch-like flights of ventriloquism, conjecture, creativity, and daring. The same might be said of Gay’s or Fielding’s theatrical satires on Walpole’s regime from the 1720s and ’30s, but neither of these authors had much interest in the arena where Walpole wielded his authority most decisively, Parliament itself, with its antique protocols, oratorical battles, petty spats, and occasional moments of across-the-aisle clubbiness. Johnson’s Debates, in other words, represents a unique example of a major eighteenth-century author crafting dramatic literature out of the day-to-day business of representative government, and his account of the fall of Walpole, among the most vivid we have, is in this way a step closer to the parliamentary realism of Trollope (or...