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.

 

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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.”