SAMUEL JOHNSON AND HIS ’CLUBBABLE’ FRIENDS
By Charles Ebeling
An essay presented to The Chicago
Literary Club
At The Cliff
Dwellers
January
21, 2008
© Charles
Ebeling - 2008
Preface:
Tonight, as we settle into a
comfortable and digestive listening mode, after our convivial cocktail hour, a
delectable dinner and a traditionally indulgent dessert of Burnham pie, high
above Chicago here at the Cliff Dweller’s, I’m reminded of one of Samuel
Johnson’s less pedantic aphorisms, on cuisine, when he said, “A cucumber should
be well-sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.” He
soberly concluded, “A man seldom thinks of anything with more earnestness than
he does of his dinner.”
When I first was intrigued by
some similarities between Johnson’s times and the present day, I resolved to
attempt this little essay related to the famed lexicographer and wit, along
with his rakish friend and biographer, James Boswell, and some of Johnson’s
other brilliant and quirky friends – all prime characters upon the intellectual
stage of London in the mid to late 1700’s.
Some further etymology of
tonight’s essay on “Samuel Johnson and His ‘Clubbable’ Friends” may be of
interest to you, although I should remain mindful from the outset of Dr.
Johnson’s maxim: “Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little
matters.” To that point, the definition of an essay, from his dictionary of
1755, is illustrative: he characterized an essay as “a loose sally of the
mind.”
Thus, the genesis of
tonight’s “sally” occurred when I picked up a dog-eared, three-volume, boxed
set of Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson,” at a curio shop in Lake Geneva some
five years ago. Over a few winter’s reading, I have acquired a shelf of books
by and about Johnson and Boswell. During this period I also was first
introduced to our Chicago Literary Club by John Notz, and, presto, I made the
connection between the primordial Literary Club in London, and ours. Thanks
also to our own scholar of Johnson and Boswell, Paul Ruxin, for his early
encouragement in this endeavor.
_____________________________________________________________
By 1750, in Samuel Johnson’s
era, the population of London had reached 650,000, more or less. It had been
growing at a steady rate since 1500, and by 1650 had outstripped Paris and
Naples, and by 1750 had overtaken Constantinople, Peking and Cairo. One in six
of the population of England had been drawn to London at some time in their
lives. As Johnson wrote, “It is not the showy evolutions of buildings, but in
the multiplicity of human inhabitations which are crowded together, that the
wonderful immensity of London exists.” On another occasion, he uttered the
enigmatic line, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there
is in London all that life can afford.”
For the privileged of mid-18th
century London, those steeped in the professions and arts, “clubbing together” had
become a way of life. Johnson enjoyed the club life as a way to take his mind
off his dictionary-in-the-making and “enjoy literary conversation, and amuse
his evening hours.” His biographer Boswell went to a club that Benjamin
Franklin belonged to, at St. Paul’s coffee-house, every other Thursday. “Wine
and punch upon the table, some of us smoke a pipe…at nine there is a side-board
with Welch rabbits and apple-puffs, porter and beer. Our reckoning is about
eighteen pence a head.”
The most famous of the
periodic gatherings favored by Johnson, Boswell and their friends came to be
known as the Literary Club, and here a few similarities with our own club of
the 21st century begin. For many years they met to talk over dinner
and drinks at an agreeable inn, on Monday evenings at 7pm, much as we do today.
While there were many
differences between the membership and activities of London’s original club and
today’s Chicago Literary Club, there is also a lineage that seems to me
comprehensible, and almost tactile, if not exactly direct. So, I’d like to take
you back nearly 250 years to meet Dr. Johnson and some of the “clubbable”
personages of his cozy assembly, early on simply called The Club. We’ll look in
on their backgrounds, their foibles, their personalities and relationships.
We’ll even sit in on a meeting of their club.
Our silent interlocutor
tonight is probably today the best-known of Johnson’s fellow club members, and
that is James Boswell, among the most candid and prolific diarists and
biographers of all time.
While Boswell, a brash social
climber and sometime lawyer with a pedigree among Scotland’s minor peerage, was
at first a bit player among London’s intellectual elite, he became the author
of what is generally considered the greatest biography in the English language.
His brilliant life of Samuel Johnson, as well as his own candid and insightful
personal journals, which he diligently kept over a lifetime, are monumental
achievements, especially in a pre-digital age. Boswell loved to stage-manage
Johnson’s conversations with his peers, to produce the liveliest exchanges for
him to record.
These, collectively with
Boswell’s other writings, bring back to life with vividness, vitality and
immediacy, his insider’s view of London literary society.
More later on Boswell
himself, but know that much of what I relate tonight is as seen through his
intelligent and perceptive eyes, plus his remarkable memory for detail,
including his quotations and first-hand notes on conversations. Though Johnson
is one of the most-quoted persons in the English language, I want to include
the disclaimer that many of Boswell’s quotations of Johnson and others were
transcribed by him from memory, so it’s more than likely some are
well-embroidered for effect.
Before we enter the Literary
Club and meet some early members, let’s first re-acquaint ourselves with the
good doctor – because I know that you’ve known of “Dictionary Johnson” since
you were a student. Johnson was that great rough physical bear and lion of an
intellect, who made so many major contributions to making London the thinking
man’s capital of the world.
Johnson lived a long
accomplished life, from 1709 to 1784, in a time when few in London could hope
to survive beyond 40. To this day he is not fully appreciated for his genius,
in part because, while his wide-ranging body of writings are evidence enough of
a great and fluid mind, perhaps his true genius was in his voluble and volatile
interactions with his “clubbable” friends.
But Johnson’s life did not
begin among the elite. He had a tough row to hoe. He was later to say,
“Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily
becomes acquainted with himself.”
Johnson was born in a house,
now a museum, in the cathedral city of Lichfield, Staffordshire. The
Tercentenary of his birth will be celebrated by the Johnson Society of London
in 2009. He was the son of a struggling bookseller. The older Johnson was
prone, as was his son, to bouts of melancholy. From his earliest days,
Johnson’s health was blighted by illness. As a child, he was scarred from
scrofula, a tubercular infection of the neck glands, and suffered a loss of
hearing and sight in one eye, thanks largely to care from a nursemaid with
tuberculosis. Yet, by age 3, according to his father, he had already produced
his first poem, on “good master duck.”
The availability of books in
his father’s shop and his inherent proclivity for learning, contributed to the
wide range of his knowledge at an early age.
He attended a local grammar school in 1716, and then Pembroke College in
Oxford, but was forced by poverty to leave Oxford without a degree. Years
later, reflecting on the informality of most of his education, he was to say,
“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task
will do him little good.”
He returned to Lichfield and
worked in his father’s shop for awhile, and also somewhat unsuccessfully as a
tutor. At 26, he married Elizabeth “Tetty” Porter, a widow some 21 years his
senior. He was devoted to his wife until her death in 1752. He is believed to
have later considered and decided against remarrying, describing second
marriages as “The triumph of hope over experience.”
Back in Lichfield, he tried
his hand as a schoolmaster, and was again unsuccessful, perhaps because of his
lack of formal education. To some extent, his ungainly appearance, twitches and
mannerisms made it a challenge to gain respect from his students. His
awkwardness and odd behavior, which continued through his long life, are today
considered to be possible symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome.
Eventually, in 1737, he
traveled to London to seek his fortune, sharing a single horse with one of his
former pupils and now a close friend, David Garrick, later considered the
greatest actor of the 18th century.
Johnson tried unsuccessfully to earn a living selling his writing, which
included poetry, biography and essays. He found some work, as a journalist,
writing articles for the Gentleman’s Magazine, including foreign and domestic news
and book reviews.
His only source of income for
the next 25 years was his writing, and while he lived largely hand to mouth, he
was prolific. He demonstrated an extraordinary range, from his account of the life
of poet Richard Savage, still considered a classic on corruption in London and
the miserable life of writers, to his reports on the debates of Parliament, in
which the actual identities of the speakers were thinly disguised, like a
modern television docu-drama. He obtained literary notice for his great poem,
“London,” an imitation of Juvenal’s satire on the decadence of Rome, in 1738,
and his long sonorous poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” in 1749. That same
year, Garrick produced Johnson’s tragedy, “Irene,” at his famous Drury Lane
Theatre. While Johnson made a rare profit, the play flopped.
Never experiencing great
wealth himself, Johnson showed generosity and kindness to beggars, prostitutes,
children and animals. One example is given in Boswell’s Life, where Johnson
found a poor tired woman lying in the street, carried her home and “at
considerable expense” had her taken care of. Johnson later wrote, “A decent
provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.” He had a soft spot
for cats, including one named Hodge, for whom he personally shopped for
oysters, and described as, “a very fine cat indeed.”
Despite his ailments, the
six-foot Johnson was physically strong, and participated in a variety of
sports, including swimming, rowing and riding. He was also known to walk great
distances, which it was said he did to shrug off feelings of melancholy.
Sounding almost like a modern fitness consultant, he said: “Consider how much
happiness is gained, and how much misery is escaped, by frequent and violent
agitation of the body.”
Johnson gradually obtained a
wider reputation in the literary world, and thus in 1746 he was commissioned by
a consortium of printers to write a dictionary of the English language. This
and his other literary efforts in the 1750s made him into an intellectual titan
of his age, even though his own definition for lexicographer was “a writer of
dictionaries, a harmless drudge.”
His dictionary was not, as is
often thought, the first English dictionary. But the quality of its 40,000
definitions, its numerous senses of a term and the 114,000 quotations to
illustrate usage made it the standard until the publication of the Oxford
English Dictionary more than a century and a half later.
Johnson’s dictionary was
intended to be the English equivalent of volumes produced on the continent
decades earlier by vast Italian and French academies. He contracted to produce
it in three years. When reminded that it had taken 40 French academics 40 years
to produce theirs, Johnson apparently replied, “Forty times forty is sixteen
hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to
a Frenchman.”
In 1748, with a handful of
assistants, Johnson moved into a large house to begin work upon his dictionary.
Some of his definitions blatantly revealed his own prejudices. In one entry he
defined “patron” as “Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and pays
with flattery.” His bitterness was the product of a row with the Fourth Earl of
Chesterfield, who had agreed to be the patron of the dictionary, but then
failed to produce financial backing, giving Johnson a measly 10 pounds. He
wrote Chesterfield, saying, “Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with
unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached
the ground, encumbers him with help?”
Another notorious Johnsonian
definition was for “oats”, which he defined as “a grain, which in England is
generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the People.” He later
apologized to his Scottish friend Boswell for that comment.
Johnson worked and lived from
1748 to 1759 at 17 Gough Square in Fleet Street, a house which, though badly
damaged by bombs three times in World War II, has been fully restored and can
be visited today.
Johnson at last completed his
dictionary in 9 years, six after the original deadline. One of the phrases
Johnson employs in it to illustrate usage of the word “dull” reads: “To make
dictionaries is dull work.”
But Johnson was anything but
dull. Between 1750 and 52, he produced more than two hundred of the legendary
Rambler essays, writing two a week. But in 1752, his beloved Tetty died. He
later returned to Oxford, where he became acquainted with Thomas Wharton, the
future Poet Laureate. Through Warton’s help, Johnson received an MA degree from
Oxford the following year. In 1756 he produced his “Proposals for a New Edition
of Shakespeare” and continued his work as a journalist, editing, writing
prefaces and contributing articles to journals. From 1758 to 1760, he wrote
another series of essays called The Idler, for a weekly periodical. When his
mother Sarah died in 1759, he wrote the classic and somber moral fable,
“Rasselas,” to help pay the expenses of her funeral.
Johnson’s fortunes were to
change in 1762, upon the succession to the throne of George III. Through the
King, he was provided with a lifetime pension of 300 pounds a year, some 20
times the salary of a coachman. He was thrilled with the freedom from debt he
now enjoyed, and was somewhat embarrassed by his dictionary’s unrepentant Tory
definition for “pension” as “pay given to a state hireling for treason to his
country.”
He became one of the most
prominent literary lions among polite society, despite his continuing uncouth
manners, scarred face and neck, and typically tattered dress of a brown coat,
black worsted stockings and a grey wig with a scorched foretop. When several
young ladies, encountering him at a literary soiree, surrounded him “with more
wonder than politeness,” and contemplated his odd figure “as if he had been
some monster from the desserts of Africa,“ Johnson is said to have remarked
“Ladies, I am tame; you may stroke me.”
In later life, Johnson became a great former of clubs:
The Ivy Lane Club, the
legendary Literary Club and the Essex Club of his
declining years, which
met at a tavern still
flourishing today, the Essex Head. When in 1783 Boswell was proposed by Johnson
for membership in his later club, which Boswell called “Sam’s,” Johnson coined a
new word, when he said, “Boswell is a very ‘clubbable’ man.”
Johnson loved the idea of a
circle of friends meeting regularly for talk; and a simple procedure of
election or blackballing could control the membership and screen out the
inevitable bores and hangers-on who would sniff out these gatherings. Through
the artistry of Boswell, we also know the friends of Johnson’s heyday and old
age. He met the 22-year-old Boswell for the first time in 1763, and the two got
on very well, despite more than a third of a century in age difference, though
Boswell would not be invited into the
Literary Club until a decade later.
Out of the casual but frequent meetings of men of
talent at the home in
Leicester Square of famed painter, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, rose in 1764, that
association of wits, authors, scholars and statesmen,
first called
simply the Club, and later renowned as the Literary
Club. Reynolds was the
first to propose it, as he recognized that Johnson was
at his best engaging in
combats of wits among his literary minded friends.
Johnson, whose life
swirled around a constant round of sociable dinners
with friends, lived by
the motto: “If you are idle, be not solitary; and if
you are solitary, be not
idle.” Johnson also said, “If a man does not make new
acquaintances as he
advances through life, he will soon find himself
alone. A man, Sir, should
keep his friendship in constant repair.”
Johnson eagerly seconded the
creation of The Club, and he suggested it be modeled on a club he had formed
some fourteen years earlier. The Ivy Lane Club had served as recreation for the
hard-working Johnson, who was then “tugging at the oar” on his dictionary
project. Boswell described him as “engaged in a steady, continued course of
occupation. But his enlarged and lively mind could not be satisfied without
more diversity of employment, and the pleasure of animated relaxation.”
That club met every Tuesday
evening at the King’s Head, a beef-steak house in Ivy Lane. One of the members,
Sir John Hawkins, a lawyer, has given posterity a lively picture of a
celebration by this club. Sir John tells us, “One evening, at the Club, Dr.
Johnson proposed to us the celebrating the birth of Mrs. Lennox’s first literary child, as he called her book,
by a whole night spent in festivity.
“The place appointed was the
Devil Tavern in Fleet Street, and there, about the hour of eight, Mrs. Lennox,
and her husband, and the Club members and friends to the number of near twenty,
assembled. Our supper was elegant, and Johnson had directed that a magnificent
hot apple-pye (does this sound familiar?) should make a part of it, and this
would have stuck with bay-leaves, because, forsooth, Mrs. Lennox was an
authoress, and had written verses; and further, he had prepared for her a crown
of laurel, with which, but not until he had evoked the Muses by some ceremonies
of his own invention, he circled her brows. The night passed, as might be
imagined, in pleasant conversation and harmless mirth, intermingled, at
different periods, with refreshments.
“About five, Johnson’s face
shown with meridian splendor, though his drink had been only lemonade; but the
far greater of us had deserved the colors of Bacchus, and were with difficulty
rallied to partake of a second refreshment of coffee, which was scarcely ended
when the day began to dawn.”
By 1764, the deaths and
dispersion of the members had for seven years interrupted the meetings of the
Ivy Lane Club. As they formed the new Literary Club, Reynolds and Johnson,
decided to limit the membership, as in the earlier club, to nine, drawing about
them those from several walks of life that they considered intellectual equals.
Mr. Hawkins, an original member of the Ivy lane, was invited to join. Topham
Beauclerk, a young gentleman of fashion, and Bennet Langton, a pious man and
captain of Militia were asked and welcomed earnestly; as well as Mr. Edmund
Burke, the parliamentary orator and defender of America, who became private
secretary to the prime minister. The notion of the club delighted Burke, and he
asked admission for his father-in-law, Dr. Nugent, an accomplished Roman
Catholic physician, who lived with him. Beauclerk, in like manner, suggested
his friend Chamier, a retired businessman who was then Undersecretary of War
and later Undersecretary of State. Oliver Goldsmith, the poet and novelist,
completed the number.
Though it was resolved to
make election to The Club difficult, and only for special reasons permit
addition to their numbers, the limitation at first proposed was soon expanded.
Twenty was the highest number reached over 10 years, although ultimately, by
the 1780s, thirty-five members were allowed.
While the Club met for some
years on Mondays at seven, in 1772, the day of meeting was changed to Fridays, and
about that time, they decided to dine together once every fortnight during the
sitting of Parliament. The Club at first met in a house in Soho’s Ivy Lane,
which had long been a chop-house called the Turk’s Head.
Johnson was the oracle of the
Literary Club. His many witty remarks are remembered to this day. He was master
not only of the aphorism – eg: his definition of angling as “a stick and a
string, with a worm on one end and a fool on the other” – but also of the quick
unexpected retort, as when, while listening with displeasure to a violinist, he
was told that the feat performed was very difficult. “Difficult, “replied
Johnson, “I wish it had been impossible!”
Johnson long continued to
bask in the fame which he had already won. He was honored by the University of
Oxford in 1764 with a doctor’s degree, and became thence known as Dr. Johnson;
he was honored by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by the King with
an interview, in which his majesty expressed a hope that so excellent a writer
would not cease to write. Yet in the interval between 1765 and 1775, Johnson
published little.
But though his pen was now
less spirited, his tongue was often in motion. The influence exercised by his
lively conversation upon the whole literary world, was altogether without
parallel. His colloquial talents were indeed of the highest order. He had
strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge of literature
and of life, and an infinite store of curious anecdotes. As respected style,
some said he spoke better than he wrote.
He loved, as he said, to fold
his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his
animated mind on any topic to any person: be it a fellow passenger in a stage
coach or a person accidentally sitting at table with him in an eating house.
But his conversation was said to be nowhere so brilliant and striking as when
he was surrounded by a few friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled them,
as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball he threw.
Some of these were members of
his new club, which became an awesome influence in the society of letters. The
verdicts announced by this conclave on new books were swiftly known all over
London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or “to
condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk maker and the pastry cook.”
The Literary Club became,
according to Hawkins, “the great delight of Samuel Johnson’s life, a center of
conversation and mental intercourse.”
A later member, Charles Burney,
wrote, “It was Johnson’s wish that our Club should be composed of the heads of
every literal and literary profession, that we might not talk nonsense on any
subject that might be started, but have somebody to refer to in our doubts and
discussions, by whose science we might be enlightened.”
Burney echoed Johnson’s and
Boswell’s idea that the Club, in 1773, when it numbered sixteen, could provide
a complete and competent faculty for an imaginary college at St. Andrews, which
at that time had fallen into the doldrums. In John Wain’s biography of Johnson,
he states, “the Club was fortunately placed by history. The mid-eighteenth
century was the last moment in which a man of intelligence and energy could
hope to be fairly abreast of the whole range of human knowledge. It was the
tremendous intellectual thrust of this generation that changed that, and in a
sense it could be said that the Club were sawing away the branch they were
sitting on.”
Let’s take a closer look at
that potential St Andrews “faculty,” that comprised some of Johnson’s early
“clubbable” friends. Johnson himself defined a club as “an assembly of good
fellows, meeting under certain conditions.” Clubs were sometimes the topic in
the popular London publication of the early 18th century, The
Spectator. “Man,” writes Spectator Editor Joseph Addison, “is said to be a
sociable animal; when a set of men find themselves agree in any particular,
they establish themselves into a fraternity, and meet once or twice a week,
upon the account of such a fantastic resemblance.”
Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose
idea it had been to form the Literary Club, was a fashionable portrait painter
and President of the newly formed Royal Academy. A versatile artist, who
painted the great and the common folk, his admiring adversary Thomas
Gainsborough said, “Damn him, how various he is!” Reynolds was to paint many of
the Literary Club members through the years. Yet, Reynolds had deep
intellectual interests as well, and Boswell considered Sir Joshua’s table, as a
literary meeting place, superior to even that of the famous printers, the Dilly
brothers, and his establishment of the Literary Club, under Johnson’s aegis,
confirmed his position among the literati. He had a profound respect for
Johnson, but being an amiable man himself, he was apt to criticize Johnson’s
aggressiveness. For example he noted of the sage’s social roughness, how he
could turn the most light and airy dispute into a gladiatorial duel. “He fought
upon every occasion as if his whole reputation depended upon the victory of the
minute.”
One of the first members,
Oliver Goldsmith, originally from Ireland, who lived from 1728 to 1774, was the
Club’s famous representative of poetry and light literature. “Goldy,” as he was
known, was the author of the famed novel, “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and the
comedy play, “She Stoops to Conquer.” Anthony Chamier, a fellow Club member,
said of Goldsmith, “he is a man, who, whatever he wrote, did it better than any
man could do.” Boswell said of him, “he was one of the brightest ornaments in
Johnson’s school.” Goldsmith had joined the club somewhat unwillingly, saying
“One must make sacrifices to obtain good society.” Despite his literary
excellence, he was known for his simplicity of character and hurried
expression. One night, for example, he amused the members singing his song of
“An Old Woman Tossed in a Blanket.” While some said his simple manners were
affected to offset his powerful literary reputation, others described his
social manners as that of “a man who seemed never to have grown up.”
Of the original members,
Hawkins, the lawyer and magistrate, was the most unpopular. Hawkins had been
one of the founders, with Johnson, of the previous literary discussion club,
the Ivy Lane. He was too cheap to pay for the suppers at the club, and refused
to pay the dues. Even Johnson, his old friend, admitted him to be out of place
among the membership. Hawkins had objected to Goldsmith, at the Club, as a mere
literary drudge. Hawkins was described by one of the wits of the time as, “a
pompous, parsimonious, insignificant drawl,” and given the living epitaph:
“Here lies Sir John Hawkins, without his shoes and staukins.” He was out of the
club in less than three years, after verbally attacking Edmund Burke one
evening. Johnson passed the matter off, by remarking that Hawkins “was
‘unclubbable’ – curmudgeonly, tight-fisted and Pecksniffian.”
Nonetheless, Hawkins would
ultimately be designated by Johnson as executor of his estate and after
Johnson’s death in 1784 would have access to his remaining papers and write a
biography of him, though it was considered to be vastly inferior to
Boswell’s.
Edmund Burke, the Whig
parliamentarian and orator, was known for his overpowering deportment and his
monopoly of conversation, which made all the other members, except Johnson,
merely listeners. Said Johnson, “Most of what I envy Burke for is that he is
never what we call humdrum, never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to
leave off. So desirous is he to talk, that if one is speaking at this end of
the table, he’ll speak to somebody at the other end.”
Burke and Johnson were often
on opposite sides of political issues, yet they remained fast friends. Burke
was a champion of the rights of the American colonists, while Johnson was the author
of the notorious pamphlet, critical of the colonists and slavery, titled:
“Taxation Not Tyranny.” Johnson wrote. “No man is by nature the property of
another.”
The Club posed an opportunity
for both Johnson and Burke, and for the most part their wit-combats seem not
only to have instructed the rest, but to have improved their tempers, and to
have made them more generous to each other. “How very great Johnson has been
tonight,” said Burke to Bennet Langton, as they left the club together. Langton
assented, but could have wished to hear more from Burke. “Oh no!” replied
Burke, “It is enough for me to have rung the bell for him.” One evening Burke
observed that a hogshead of claret, which had been sent as a present to the
Club, was almost empty, and proposed that Johnson might use his pen and
influence to request another as a gift. One of the company said, “Dr. Johnson
shall be our dictator.” “Were I,” said Johnson, “your dictator, you should have
no wine, and he continued, in Latin, “Wine is dangerous. Rome was ruined by
luxury.” In his later life Johnson had largely given up drinking, saying, “He
who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
Bennet Langton and Topham
Beauclerk were attracted to join the Club through their devotion to Johnson.
Both were very young – Langton was twenty-two and Beauclerk about twenty-four
when elected, yet both were already well-launched into London’s social life.
Johnson liked to associate with young people. He hated to think of himself as
growing old, saying, “I love the young dogs of this age. They have more wit and
humor and knowledge of life than we had.”
Langton was a six-footer, so,
like Johnson, considered a giant for his era. He was steeped in Greek
literature, and, came from an ancient family which held their ancestral estate
of the same name in Lincolnshire. Johnson liked to tell that Langton traced his
roots to Henry the Second. He succeeded Johnson as professor of ancient
literature in the Royal Academy.
When Langton had been
eighteen, he was so taken with reading Johnson’s Rambler that he came to London
to meet the author. When Langton went on to Trinity College in Oxford, Johnson
saw him frequently during his own visits, and also met Topham Beauclerk,
Langton’s good friend, who Johnson perceived as having an ardent love of
literature, a polished wit and aristocratic breeding. He was the grandson of
the Duke of St. Albans and was said to have a family resemblance to Charles the
Second. His wife, a beauty and accomplished artist, was the “Lady Di” of the
era. She was Lady Diana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire. Already a man about
town at 24, Langton was an associate of Horace Walpole and other aristocratic
wits of London, a man of fashion at court and the gaming tables. He proclaimed
an ardent and profound admiration for Johnson’s talents, and quickly gained the
confidence of the sage.
So those were the founding
members of the Literary Club, which would attract so many lions of London over
the twenty years through Johnson’s death in 1784, and beyond.
But what of Boswell, you ask?
It was Boswell, though he participated in no more than eight meetings of the
Club with Johnson in attendance, who would make the Club and its
orator-in-chief famous in his writings.
Boswell’s first encounter
with Johnson took place in May, 1763, in the back parlor of Thomas Davies
bookshop near Covent Garden. Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop about
seven in the evening. Davies, in a waggish mood, struck a stage posture and
announced Johnson’s coming as if he was Horatio in Hamlet and was announcing
the ghost. Knowing Johnson had a prejudice against the Scots, he mischievously
introduced Boswell as “the Gentleman from Scotland” despite Boswell’s plea not
to say where he was from. “I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help
it,” Boswell protested. “That Sir,” replied Johnson disdainfully, “I find, is
what a very many of your countrymen cannot help.”
Despite this shaky beginning
and their long separations when Boswell returned to his native Scotland, the old
sage, then 54, and the young Scottish upstart, grew to become close friends.
When Boswell was returning to
London in 1772, from his home in Scotland, where he had married and remained
for three years, he had written to Johnson, “I require a renewal of that spirit
which your presence always gives me.” On the day of his arrival, Boswell
hurried round to call on his friend. Johnson greeted him with an affectionate
embrace – so unlike the greeting Boswell experienced from his own cold,
undemonstrative father, a prominent Scottish judge. Their friendship was
reestablished, and Boswell saw Johnson almost every other day during his eight
week stay. Through Johnson, Boswell gradually gained access to the heart of
literary London.
Boswell’s experience of the night
of his admission to the Literary Club in 1773 is recorded by him in his Life of
Johnson. To the general astonishment of the Club, Johnson proposed Boswell’s
membership, though he was anything but a literary light recognized by the
establishment. The ballot was to be taken at the next weekly meeting, so there
could be discussion of the candidate.
Someone asked, “Who is this
Scottish cur at Johnson’s heels?” “He’s not a cur,” replied Goldsmith, “he is
only a bur. Tom Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he has a faculty of
sticking.”
Johnson had let it be known
among the hesitant membership that if Boswell, or “Bozzy” as he called him,
should be blackballed, that no other Club member would get a new candidate
through. Their strong friendship, built largely around Johnson’s love of
talking and Boswell’s overarching interest in prompting and recording memorable
conversations, was characterized later as “one of the most glorious feasts in
the whole banquet of letters.” On one occasion, Johnson was eloquent on the
subject of wines, and Boswell could not resist reminding him of how “jollily”
they used to drink wine together and how he would get headaches afterwards from
the late nights. Johnson retaliated; “Nay, Sir; it was not the wine that made
your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.”
Boswell had actively sought
membership in the Literary Club, writing in his journal, “I assiduously and
earnestly recommended myself to some of the members, as in a canvas for an
election.” He was duly elected, then triumphantly rushed to the Turk’s Head to
be greeted by Johnson and be formally introduced to the company of what he
characterized in his journal later that night as, “such a society as can seldom
be found.” He had been elected over the objections of several members that the
privacy of their conversations at the Literary Club were being noted and
memorized by the uniquely talented Boswell.
The atmosphere of the club
was one of frank and free competition of ideas. Devoid of throat-cutting, it
remained a group of men who liked and trusted one other. The range of subjects
covered in a typical evening by the Club is recorded by Boswell, whom Johnson
called the “most unscottified” of his countrymen, from a Club meeting of April
3, 1778. “The conversation begins with sculpture. Of a marble statue of a dog,
valued at a thousand guineas, Johnson remarks that what we chiefly prize is not
the object itself, but the skill needed to produce it. One of the company
mentions the marble boar of the Uffizi in Florence, and Johnson declares that
the first boar accurately fashioned in marble should be preserved as a landmark
in human progress, as a step forward for the species.
“The subject is dropped for emigration,
introduced by Burke, kicking about the proposition that emigration actually
increases the population of a country, as exports increase the volume of
manufacture produced by encouraging an expanding market. Fordyce, the chemist
then puts in that it is remarkable that the unhealthiest countries with the
most destructive diseases, such as Egypt and Bengal, are the most populous.
Johnson corrects the logic, indicating that their population density is the
reason they have the most destructive diseases. The discussion then jumps to
parliamentary oratory, then to philology, with Burke volunteering that the
Irish language is not “primitive” but “Teutonic.” As the rest of the company
recharge their glasses with claret, Johnson then moves from philology to
travel, recounting a book on Travels Through France and Italy, where the author
finds fault with everything. This leads on to the whole topic of judging men’s
actions and forming an estimate of human nature generally. They go on to
discuss virtue and temptations.”
Though Boswell’s account goes
on for nearly five pages, it is unlikely to have covered anything like the full
range of thoughts expressed that one evening. And thus, substantially thanks to
Boswell’s writings, the Literary Club lives on in history.
Subsequent membership of the
London club included many of those described as the “wisest, wittiest and
noblest” Englishmen of the 18th century. Adam Smith, the greatest
economist of the age was a member, as was Edward Gibbon, the historian who
wrote the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Sir William Jones, the first great
British scholar of Sanskrit, David Garrick, the greatest actor of the era and
manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, which popularized Shakespeare’s plays in the
18th century, Charles Burney, the music historian, Edmond Malone,
the Irish Shakespearean scholar, Thomas Wharton, the historian of English
poetry and Poet Laureate, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, dramatist who wrote,
“The School for Scoundrels” and was a pro-American politician who became a
member of Parliament and Secretary of the Navy. Being elected to Johnson’s
Literary Club came to be compared by contemporaries with election to parliament
or the highest offices of the Church of England. Of the forty-four members of
the Club over Johnson’s lifetime, nineteen, by the end of their lives, were the
bearers of some kind of title: seven by inheritance and 12 by merit.
According to a 19th
century commentator on London clubs, the original Literary Club had, “made
itself a name in literary history…Its meetings were noised abroad; the fame of
its conversations received eager addition, from the difficulty of obtaining
admission to it; and it came to be generally understood that Literature had
fixed her headquarters here.”
After “the great cham of
literature” as he came to be known by contemporaries, died in 1784, at 76 years
of age, it was the membership of the Literary Club which launched the
subscription to erect his brooding, larger-than-life statue, in Roman garb,
which stands today at the entrance to the North Quire Aisle in St. Paul’s
Cathedral. Johnson himself was laid to rest among many of his storied peers in
Westminster Abbey, just in front of Shakespeare’s memorial. Boswell’s biography
of Johnson was published in 1791.
And thus, my friends, this
essay draws near an end, while Literary Clubs, such as ours, inspired by
Johnson’s example, live on here and there around the globe, and they look to a
hopeful future. The London Club’s motto, “Esta Perpetua,” which means “let it
be forever,” no doubt reflected a bit of wishful thinking, as I find no
evidence of a direct London Literary Club descendant surviving into the 21st
century, though the Johnson Society of London preserves his history.
Johnson never lost his zest
for human connectedness. Johnson kept a clear vision of things that would make
him happy. He said to Boswell, “If I had no duties and no reference to
futurity, I would spend my life driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty
woman, but she would be one who could understand me, and would add something to
the conversation.”
Of course, Johnson, the great
and needy proponent of the “clubbable” life, who relied for his sanity on his
support network of friends throughout London society, also observed: “There is
nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is
produced, as by a good tavern or inn.”
To Johnson, lively
conversation and debate among friends was his nirvana, “an interchange of
discourse with those whom I most love.”
Just over a century after the
founding of Johnson’s Literary Club, according to Arthur Baer, a long-time
member of the Chicago Literary Club in the 20th century, seven men
met at Chicago’s Sherman House, on March 13, 1874, to consider forming, “A Club
composed of men congenial and acceptable to each other, and distinguished to
some degree by a love of letters.”
To this day, at the dawn of a
new Millennium, that tradition, and Johnson’s, continues apace.
Johnson, who has been
described as the most human of English writers, looked to the future, when he
said, “Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness
which the world affords.”