The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters by Henry Hitchings, MacMillan, 320pp, £16.99
There have been many biographies of Dr Johnson. Indeed, immediately after his death, it was reported that 11 writers were assiduously at work on them. The most famous, Boswell’s Life, has justly become the standard for its breadth, sympathy and detail – though, as Hitchings rightly points out, Boswell did not spend quite as much time in the company of his mentor and friend as he would like his readers to believe.
Wanting to give his own account an original angle, the author has hit upon the modern fashion for seeking gurus everywhere – even among unlikely long dead writers. As an artificial device, such an approach fails, as it is bound to do. Whoever modelled his own life on that of a writer?
That said, Hitchings does not spend much time on Johnson as “guide” (and one can be sure the great Doctor himself would have had a trenchant comment to make on the matter). He concentrates instead on reminding the reader, through his own familiarity with Johnson’s literary output as well as the details of his life, why he lives so vigorously in the minds of modern readers who have happily alighted on him.
Once discovered, as Hitchings found out on reading Boswell aged 19 at university, Johnson can never be forgotten.Hitchings includes an account of Johnson’s own life, in all its heroic and occasionally tragi-comic dimensions, weaving the biographical story in and out of the prodigious literary achievement. Essentially, he does what a good biographer should do: he communicates his passion for his chosen subject to those who might not have had the pleasure of meeting Johnson themselves.
Even if we do not take Johnson for a guide, we cannot fail to appreciate his moral stature, his magnanimity and his greatness of heart, alongside his exceptional intellectual ability. Hitchings records so many moving anecdotes alongside the more well-known remarks, such as that in the last year of his life, when he was aged 74 and suffering from several painful, chronic physical ailments, Johnson “carried a prostitute lying in the street back to his lodgings where he nursed her back to health”. I cannot think of any great writer, with the exception of Dostoyevsky, of whom such a story could be told.
Again, Johnson’s friendship with the poet Richard Savage, whose life he wrote, tells us, in Hitchings’s commentary, that “the story of a failure and an outcast … a marginal figure can be interesting [and] worth treating with compassion and psychological acuity”. Johnson’s famous friends, such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Burney and Edmund Burke, were bemused by his 36-year loyalty and friendship with Robert Levet, “an unlicensed and unmannerly doctor who would briefly leave Sam[uel] to take up with a prostitute who operated out of a nearby coal shed”.
Hitchings does not want to seem over-familiar by referring to Johnson throughout as “Sam” rather than by his surname, yet it does strike a discordant note. Johnson commands our respect as well as our affection, not so much because he was a man to stand on his dignity but because he is worthy of awe as well as love. Hitchings’s chapter headings, taken from the 18th-century mode – such as Chapter 20: “Containing much to exercise the reader’s thoughts upon the questions of Fear and Sanity” – are amusing rather than strained.
He alludes to his subject’s dread of insanity, which was easily as significant a feature of Johnson’s personality as his public impression of common sense, lucidity and mental equilibrium. I have read that this fear was the reason for the “padlock” found among Mrs Thrale’s effects when she died. Rather than the far-fetched possibility of sadomasochistic tendencies, briefly touched on by Hitchings, it is much more likely that Johnson wanted his greatest woman friend to restrain him under lock and key if he should ever go mad.
From his early days, Johnson’s life was characterised by four dominant features: his physical ungainliness, even ugliness; his material poverty (only relieved when he was finally allowed a state pension); his genius (a word he once defined as shown by a man’s having “large and general powers”); and his deeply held Christian faith, coloured by an abiding sense of sinfulness which is evidenced in his heartfelt prayers and sermons.
I wonder how much Hitchings, who has written an otherwise robust and warm portrait of his mentor, understands the extent to which these four features made Johnson feel himself at some level to be an outcast from society, and led him, even after he became famous in the clubs and coffee houses of London, to take pity on others and offer them refuge and hospitality in his homes in Gough Square and Bolt Court. These figures included the blind poet Anna Williams, the disreputable physician Levet and Francis Barber, the former West Indian slave boy. But there were a procession of other odd tenants, hapless hangers-on and social misfits to
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