Complete Works of Samuel Johnson, page 652
Note. — Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has recently published a ‘Critical Examination’ of Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s Johnsonian editions. Mr. Fitzgerald refers more than once to the fact that I have been ‘beguiled’ into speaking of the edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson as the best known to me. Indeed, it seems that the edition has been very generally welcomed; and Mr. Fitzgerald’s severe criticism comes as a rather surprising discord in a general chorus of praise. In any case, I feel it right to say a few words in defence of an opinion to which I confess that I still adhere without hesitation. My reason is simple. I have for years made constant use of the Life of Johnson, and have found Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s notes exceedingly useful. Whenever I am in want of information about any of the Johnson circle, I regularly turn for help to this edition, and I very seldom open it without gaining some light upon the matter in hand. I think that I should have been ungrateful if I had not acknowledged so much; and I will briefly state why I cannot retract my acknowledgment. Mr. Fitzgerald criticises Dr. Birkbeck Hill for giving a great deal of irrelevant information, for frequently misunderstanding his author, and for frequent inaccuracy. The first count depends more or less upon what seems to me to be a matter for fair difference of opinion.
I quite admit that Dr. Birkbeck Hill has given a quantity of information in his notes which has little or no direct bearing upon Johnson himself, or upon Boswell’s discharge of his biographical duties. But I also confess that I have found such notes very pleasant reading, and been grateful for them. I like an occasional excursion into matters suggested by the text and illustrative of the period. If Mr. Fitzgerald does not like them, he has after all the simple remedy of not reading them. To give an example: Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules a note (Hill’s Boswell, iii. 241) in which Dr. Birkbeck Hill illustrates by several quotations the curious change in the meaning of the word ‘respectable.’ Chesterfield speaks, for example, of the hour of death as ‘at least a very respectable one,’ and Hannah More thinks a roomful of portraits of admirals a ‘respectable sight.’ The note is certainly superfluous, but I am grateful for the knowledge conveyed in a few lines as to a really curious instance of the shifting of meaning in a familiar word. Dr. Birkbeck Hill, again, defends Johnson against Macaulay’s statement that he knew nothing of the country, and despised travelling. In the course of his remarks he gives the populations of Lichfield, Oxford, and Birmingham, where Johnson spent most of his early life, to show that they were then small country towns, and points out that a boyish perusal of Martin’s account of the Hebrides had stimulated the curiosity long afterwards satisfied by the journey with Boswell. Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules these statements, which occur in a disquisition in Appendix B to the third volume. No doubt they are not strictly necessary, but to me they really illustrate some of Johnson’s characteristic prejudices, and qualify one of Macaulay’s slashing assaults. I was again innocent enough to be grateful for them.
This suggests another point. Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s enormous and self-made index. Undoubtedly it errs, if anything, by excess. That is a very rare fault, and a fault on the right side. I have found the index exceedingly useful on very many occasions, and been grateful for the labour bestowed, which has often saved me a great deal of trouble. The present occasion is an instance. Mr. Fitzgerald has given hardly any references to the passages which he criticises; and I have had to find them by the help of Dr. Birkbeck Hill himself. In some cases, I have been unable to verify Mr. Fitzgerald’s references even with that help, and I am forced to suspend my judgment of his criticisms. Thus (p. 13) he accuses Dr. Birkbeck Hill of giving ‘sixteen passages’ to illustrate the meaning of ‘Hockley in the Hole.’ In the only passage which I can find about ‘Hockley in the Hole’ (vol. Hi. 134), Dr. Birkbeck Hill illustrates the meaning by quotations from the Spectator, Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, and the Beggars’ Opera. That is, there are only three passages cited, and, as it seems to me, not one too many. But the absence of a reference leaves a bare possibility that Dr. Birkbeck Hill has quoted other passages elsewhere. Considering, however, the completeness of the index, I believe that Mr. Fitzgerald has somehow made an odd mistake in counting.
This is the more probable because I find other singular mistakes, which show that Mr. Fitzgerald, in accusing his author of inaccuracy — doubtless the worst of faults in an editor — has himself been inaccurate with the passages before his eyes, and his attention, one supposes, fully awake. At page 4 he says that Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s index proves that the editor had never seen Boswell’s first production— ‘certainly never read it.’ The ‘proof is that in the index it is mentioned in italics as ‘The Club’ at Newmarket. In the text, he adds, it is again written ‘the Club.’ Now the real title was the Cub, as any one must perceive who has read the book. I turn to the index (vol. vi. p. 25), and there find Cub at Newmarket correctly entered between ‘critics’ and ‘curiosity.’ I look back to the text (vol. i. 383, n. 3), and there, it is true, the word is written ‘Club.’ But as Dr. Birkbeck Hill quotes a phrase from the preface, in which the Jockey Club at Newmarket is mentioned, I am charitable enough to believe that he had really seen the book, and that ‘Club’ in the text is probably a correction introduced by the excessive zeal of a reader misled by the reference to the Club. At page 11, Mr. Fitzgerald comments upon a note in which Dr. Birkbeck Hill explains a passage in Johnson’s letter on receiving the M.A. degree at Oxford by referring to a seditious placard published during the period of excitement over the famous Oxfordshire election of 1754. The letter, says Mr. Fitzgerald, was written in February 175 5, and the placard appeared in ‘July, five or six months later. So the whole speculation topples over!’ It would, were it not that the placard appeared in July 1754 (not 1755), as is indeed obvious from Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s reference to the Gentleman’s Magazine of that year (vol. i. 282). At p. 16, Mr. Fitzgerald attacks Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s dates. Dr. Birkbeck Hill (vol. i. 146) says that Johnson had his first interview with Hogarth ‘sixteen years’ after coming to London. ‘This cannot be accurate,’ says Mr. Fitzgerald. Why? The date of the interview is fixed by its happening soon after the execution of Dr. Cameron for his share in the ‘45. Therefore, Mr. Fitzgerald assumes, it took place in 1745-6. If he had not been aware of Cameron’s well-known story, he might have found it in the note before his eyes, where the date of the execution is stated, namely, 7th June 1753. As Johnson came to London in 1737, Dr. Birkbeck Hill is again quite right. I will give one other strange proof of Mr. Fitzgerald’s carelessness. In the collection of Johnson’s letters, Dr. Birkbeck Hill speaks of Reynolds’s prosperity in 1758. He gives, says Mr. Fitzgerald, an ‘odd proof’ of it, namely, that in 1758 Reynolds had ‘150 letters’: certainly this would be an odd proof of prosperity; but in Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s notes (vol. i. 76 n.) the words are ‘150 sitters’ — a fact which most portrait-painters would regard as a pretty good proof of prosperity.
I do not say that all Mr. Fitzgerald’s criticisms are of this kind. He has discovered some real mistakes. The man who should publish ten volumes, elaborately annotated, without a mistake would be a wonder, and Mr. Fitzgerald is well qualified to find them. But I confess that to my mind the number discovered is so small as to confirm my belief in Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s general accuracy; and, in any case, Mr. Fitzgerald has made too many slips to allow us to accept his opinion without careful examination. On some other points, I admit that Mr. Fitzgerald has a stronger case. I could not in any short space give my reasons for disputing many even of his more plausible remarks; but he has, no doubt, pointed to a weakness in the edition. The simple truth is, I take it, that Dr. Birkbeck Hill has ridden his hobby rather too hard. He has sometimes indulged in real irrelevance; remarks have occurred to him which he has inserted too hastily, and which he might have expunged on a more careful consideration of the text; he has made some wrong identifications; and has been led by associations, not shared by most of his readers, to expatiate here and there on needless topics. All this is the weakness of an enthusiast, and of a commentator who sometimes is over eager to say something when there is nothing to be said; or to discover difficulties which do not really exist. But, to my mind, the enthusiasm has also had invaluable results; it has given us an edition in which almost everything is to be found, though mixed with some superfluities. I wish that Mr. Fitzgerald had recognised this more warmly, and that all true lovers of Johnson and Boswell, to which class he undoubtedly belongs, could take advantage of what is good in each other’s labours without being too anxious to dwell upon immaterial shortcomings.
A POETICAL REVIEW OF THE LITERARY AND MORAL CHARACTER OF JOHNSON by John Courtenay
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A POETICAL REVIEW &c.
INTRODUCTION
The eighteenth century was an age addicted to gossiping about its literary figures. This addiction was nowhere better demonstrated than by the countless reflections, sermons, poems, pamphlets, biographical sketches, and biographies about Samuel Johnson. The most productive phase of this activity commenced almost immediately after Johnson’s death in December, 1784, and continued into the next century.
One item of Johnsoniana which seems to have been neglected, perhaps because Birkbeck Hill did not include it in his Johnsonian Miscellanies, is A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the Late Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., with Notes. This poem of three hundred and four lines was written by John Courtenay (1741-1816). First published in the spring of 1786 by Charles Dilly, the poem went through three editions in the same year. Its popularity was determined less by Courtenay’s poetic talent than by public interest in the Johnsoniana that flooded the market. Courtenay’s literary output, though scanty, was diverse; he wrote light verse, character sketches, and essays, including two controversial pieces in support of the French Revolution.1 It is apparent, however, that for him writing was hardly more than an avocation.
Despite his notoriety as a controversial member of Parliament, as a first-rate wit, and as an intimate friend of Boswell, Courtenay remains a shadowy figure. References to him occur often in the last volumes of Boswell’s journal, but few of them are particularly revealing. Courtenay evidently never met Johnson; indeed, the anonymous author of A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson to His Four Friends: The Rev. Mr. Strahan. James Boswell, Esq. Mrs. Piozzi. J. Courtenay, Esq. M.P. (1786) censures Courtenay for writing about a man whom he did not know. Although a member of the Literary Club, Courtenay did not join this group until four years after Johnson died. He was proposed on 9 December 1788, by Sir Joshua Reynolds (Boswell seconded), and elected two weeks later, on 23 December, during the same meeting at which it was decided to erect a monument to Dr. Johnson in Westminster Abbey.2
If, then, Courtenay did not belong to the Johnson circle, he became, shortly after Johnson’s death, a valued member of the Boswell circle. Courtenay must have met Boswell in the spring or early summer of 1785, about thirteen years after arriving in England from his native Ireland in the service of Viscount Townshend. Boswell’s first reference to Courtenay occurs in his journal under 7 July 1785.3 It is clear from this entry that he had met Courtenay earlier, but subsequent references indicate that the acquaintance was a fresh one.
From the start Boswell enjoyed Courtenay’s company. In the first place, Boswell appreciated Courtenay’s talent in conversation. Although he seldom recorded specimens of Courtenay’s talk, Boswell was generous in his praise of his wit. “Courtenay’s wit,” he wrote, “sparkles more than almost any man’s.”4 On 26 March 1788, Boswell described him as a “valuable addition” to a meeting of the Essex Head Club which he attended as Boswell’s guest. “Indeed,” Boswell continued, “his conversation is excellent; it has so much literature, wit, and at the same time manly sense, in it.”5 An example of his “manly sense” that “struck home” to Boswell was Courtenay’s remark that had Johnson been born to three thousand pounds a year his melancholy would have been at greater leisure to torment him.6
But there was a greater reason for Courtenay’s intimacy with Boswell. The period following Johnson’s death was for Boswell a time of intense anxiety. By 1786 Courtenay and Edmond Malone had become Boswell’s closest confidants. Boswell relished the long walks and the dinners he took with Courtenay. Throughout his journal he confessed to the therapeutic value of Courtenay’s company; “I am,” he admitted, “quite another Man with M. C., Malone, Courtenay.”7
Moreover, Boswell often solicited Courtenay’s advice in various crises. Courtenay, together with Malone, helped him out of scrapes with Alexander Tytler and Lord Macdonald, induced him to lighten his published attacks on Mrs. Piozzi and helped make him aware of the merit of her edition of Johnson’s correspondence, and advised him to cancel some questionable passages in the Life on William Gerard Hamilton. From time to time he also cautioned Boswell not to expect political preferment when he did not deserve it. It appears, too, that he took part in the prolonged deliberations over Johnson’s monument in Westminster Abbey. Concerned that Boswell’s drinking might impede his work on the Life, Courtenay made him promise to quit drinking from December 1790, to the following March, a promise which, as far as he was able, Boswell kept.8
Courtenay’s high spirits and his ability to relieve Boswell’s melancholy were all the more remarkable because Courtenay, with a wife and seven children to support, was poverty-stricken during most of this period. Boswell, lamenting the failure of the Whigs to provide financial assistance to one of the party’s most active members, found Courtenay’s “firmness of mind ... amazing” under such difficulties.9 No doubt Courtenay’s resolve endeared him to Boswell, whose own financial and psychological problems were, of course, a great burden.
