A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson by Nicholas Hudson, and: Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century ed. by Howard D. Weinbrot (review)

Anyone who writes about the eighteenth-century man of letters Samuel Johnson is never very far from the subject of biography. This is obviously true of Nicholas Hudson’s contribution to Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies—the tenth in the series—but also of the seventeen essays in the collection edited by Howard Weinbrot, based on papers read at a Huntington Library Conference (2011), with six added essays. Hudson’s book is solid and workmanlike. The essays in the collection are all above-average efforts—some actually sparkle—and the physical book itself is quite handsome. Its reasonable price, rare these days, must be the result of the acknowledged subventions. My survey of the collection’s essays will necessarily be brief, but there is something to be learned from each.

Biography is one of several literary genres at which Johnson excelled throughout his professional life, beginning with a few short lives written anonymously for periodicals in the 1740s, moving though the longer, but still anonymous, Life of Richard Savage (1744), and culminating with the Lives of the English Poets (1779–1781). In one of four essays concerned with “Johnson After Johnson,” James Engell (“Johnson and Scott, England and Scotland, Boswell, Lockhart, and Croker”) goes beyond Johnson the biographer to Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, as well as to John Gibson Lockhart, whose life of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott “may safely be described as, next to Boswell’s ‘Johnson,’ the best in the language” (314, Engell quoting Leslie Stephen). Both younger biographers’ reliance on establishing their subjects as epitomes of “national character” (English and Scots, respectively) is the primary parallel Engell establishes in this sometimes rambling essay. Freya Johnston seeks parallels between two writers in a narrower way in “Byron’s Johnson,” and concludes, “Despite his love of biography, Byron instinctively thought about Johnson’s writings before he considered Johnson the human being. . . . While it is clear that Byron knew whole passages of Boswell by heart, for him the Life coexists with the works. It has not superseded them” (311). This is hardly surprising. It took time for Johnson’s works to recede in influence, displaced by the Great Cham of Literature created in part by Boswell’s work (although the phrase itself is Smollett’s). Moreover, I have some doubts about the importance of a few of the connections outlined by Johnston, and to a lesser extent by Engell.

The issue is how to determine the pertinence or probative value of some facts in scholarly writing. In Frances Stoner Saunders’s The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (2010) we learn that the middle-aged Anglo-Irish aristocrat and failed assassin Violet Gibson was incarcerated for three decades until her death in 1956 in the same British lunatic asylum that had held the eighteenth-century poet John Clare and, much later, James Joyce’s daughter Lucia. This is fascinating, albeit trivial, and certainly not out of place in popular biography. But it is far from essential to a better understanding of Gibson’s plight: she hardly chose the place of her forced confinement. Similarly, one should not at all be surprised that occasionally we find Johnson echoed by Scott or Byron. Johnston writes, “It might come as a surprise that such a writer [Byron], whose ‘whole life,’ was, as he put it, ‘at variance with propriety, not to say decency,’ should have so admired Johnson. . . . Byron owned editions of the Dictionary . . . the Lives of the Poets . . . and Boswell’s Life” (298). But is it really not to be expected that Johnson’s literary influence survived him for a short generation? And among the English Romantic poets, is not Byron the one we would surmise to be most congenially inclined toward Johnson?

The other two essays in...