Bate's Samuel Johnson

W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson. London: Hogarth, 1977.

The oddity of Samuel Johnson's reputation is that the minutest particularities of the life and casual conversation of this shambling, scruffy and scrofulous moralist with his coal-heaver's physique have charmed two centuries of readers far more than his highly original work has done. We forget Johnson, the founder of lexicography, but remember how he once felled an offensive publisher with a folio Bible. More people know about his habit of slipping coins into the hands of sleeping beggars ('to allow them to beg on' as he said); about his strange obsessive habits; about his domestic menagerie made up at one time of a blind poetess, a sick prostitute, a black child and a poor apothecary, than have ever read Rasselas or consulted the famous Dictionary. For every reader who has found the stoical pessimism of 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' repellent, a hundred have smiled at his definition of earthly felicity as being driven at speed in an open carriage by a pretty woman.

For this emphasis, Boswell's incomparable biography is responsible, with its seductive technique of building layers of unforgettable anecdote and epigrammatic conversation into the image of the 'Dr Johnson' of legend, the Life preserved its subject as in amber but also apparently fixed it immovably.

Attempting another massive critical biography with the constant shadow of Boswell in the corner of one's eye would seem a transcendant act of scholarly pride or folly. Yet it is Bate's achievement that he has smashed open the cast, reconstructed another version of Johnson and miraculously allowed us to see him through non-Boswellian eyes.

The rewards of doing so are great. While not trying for a moment to upstage Boswell, Bate probes gently at his inadequacies. There is the often overlooked fact that fully half of the Life is devoted to its subject's last eight years; and here Bate admirably corrects the balance with a wealth of detail about the Lichfield and Stourbridge days. Boswell's gross underplaying, out of jealousy, of Johnson's friendship with the Thrales, the brewing family who virtually adopted the Great Cham of letters and almost certainly saved his sanity is here brought into proper proportion. And Boswell's own romantic view of his hero as 'the infant Hercules of Toryism' is carefully adjusted in a chapter on the knotty intricacies of Augustan politics which (though admittedly derived from Donald Greene's specialist study) is perhaps the best of the book.

Bate certainly does not deny the fascination of Johnson's life, nor its didactic value. Like his great predecessor, he is even ready to deodorise Johnson to fit him better for the contemporary nose. He never mentions Johnson's pig-headed defence of the sexual double standard and his dreadful dismissal of a hapless divorcee as 'a whore, and there's an end on't.' He concentrates on eliciting our ready sympathy for the maimed giant who alternated long periods of almost catatonic sloth with frantic industry; who at least twice in his life was driven to the edge of sanity by his own sense of worthlessness and a nihilism so self-lacerating that he could even regard literature itself as 'a footling conspiracy for the destruction of paper'.

But Bate goes further than this, by showing how Johnson's luminous common sense, his 'essentialism' which examines and justifies grand moral abstractions always by concrete personal reference, is echoed in the literary works. He knits together the endless talker in the taverns with the moralist and critic much better than Boswell did, and thereby pushes the 'life and works' into better balance.

A contemporary said of Boswell that his dedication to the biographical fact was so acute that he would run half across London to verify a reference. One can readily believe the same of his successor. Bate's scholarly digestion is immense; his judgements firm and lucid; his powers of psychological analysis formidable. The microscopic focus is perhaps a little overwhelming at times. That the father Michael Johnson delayed marriage for many years after a love-disappointment is interesting, but the exact name of the man for whom he was jilted seems a little superfluous. However, this is a trifling objection. Bate's Johnson will not be superseded this century.