A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson by Nicholas Hudson

Author:Nicholas Hudson [Hudson, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781317323433
Google: FOs5CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06T16:11:00+00:00

5 DEFENDER OF KING AND STATE, 1763–70

The Political Point of View of Boswell’s Life of Johnson

By the early 1760s, Johnson was an established writer and a famous man whose conversation and letters were being preserved and passed down to us as never before. From this point on, we can consider an unprecedented wealth of biographical detail.

Our reading of Johnson’s development over his last twenty years is nonetheless complicated by his retreat from the political journalism that had for so long been his main vehicle of expression. With the exception of four substantial pamphlets published between 1770 and 1775, our perception of his politics during these later years is heavily mediated by others. Above all, he became known to later generations through the biography of the twenty-two-year-old Scot who met him in May 1763. Amongst the most controversial questions in Johnson studies is the degree to which James Boswell may have coloured or even distorted our vision of this middle-aged veteran of a previous era in English politics.

Donald Greene’s attempt to rescue Johnson from his traditional image as an intolerant Tory or even Jacobite was inevitably linked with his assault on Boswell as a reliable biographer, for it was indeed the Life that most influenced the perception of his politics from the nineteenth well into the twentieth century. According to Greene, Boswell was simply not equipped by background, education and temperament to understand Johnson’s politics. Coming from a Scottish nation polarized since the Civil War between Presbyterianism and loyalty to the Stuarts, prone to a sentimental version of Toryism, Boswell repeatedly ‘nudges’ the reader towards thinking that his much older subject was far more royalist and Tory than he really was.1 According to historians who have wished to recover the older vision of Johnson as an unwavering Tory, on the contrary, Boswell may even have underrated the depth of his non-juring hostility to the Hanoverians, repeatedly qualifying or softening evidence of his Jacobitism.2 Recently there was much anticipation that the publication of Boswell’s manuscript version of the Life would help to clarify the extent to which the biographer may have slanted the evidence one way or another.3 Yet as observed by Bruce Redford, one of the editors of this publication, the manuscript is in fact unlikely to resolve this question unambiguously. Except for showing how Boswell often mollifies or suppresses Johnson’s more intemperate outbursts, the manuscript does not show that the biographer made his subject more Tory or more Whig according to Boswell’s own definitions.4

The manuscript version of the Life, though of great value in assessing Boswell’s methods as a biographer, remains less revealing than the extensive journals that supplied the raw materials for the famous conversations in the final work. A comparison between these journals, widely accessible for decades, and the Life does not yield unambiguous conclusions or suggest that Boswell massively transformed his material to mould Johnson according to a particular political agenda. This comparison does, however, substantiate Greene’s rather inflamed warnings that the Life cannot be relied on as a transparent historical document, as has been too often the case.

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