Dr.

Johnson: Man of Letters, Christian Moralist, Clubbable Man, and Noble Hero

Dr Johnson

James Boswells biography The Life of Johnson portrays a distinguished man of letters after
whom a whole literary period was named: The Age of Johnson. To read of Johnsons life (1709-
1784) is to learn of an eminent man of learning whose love of literature, passion for truth, and
genius for writing achieved extraordinary works of excellence and Herculean feats of labor. His
works include the journalism of Parliamentary reports; translations of Horace; collections of
essays known as The Rambler, The Idler, and The Adventurer; poetry (The Vanity of Human
Wishes, London); sermons; biography and literary criticism in The Lives of the Poets
(Milton, Cowley, Pope, Gray); a play by the name of Irene; a scholarly edition of Shakespeares
plays; a short novel entitled Rasselas; and Dictionary of the English Language. As Boswell notes,
even if Johnson had written nothing else besides the Dictionary, a work he singlehandedly
composed in the course of ten years, he would have achieved undying literary fame.

Johnsons breadth and depth of learning were exceptional. Boswell cites the comment of Dr.
Adam Smith, than whom few were better judges on this subject, who remarked that Johnson
knew books more than any man alive. Johnson related to Boswell a compliment he received
from a tutor at Pembroke College in Oxford: I was the best qualified for the University that he
had ever known come there. The son a bookseller, Johnson acquired a love of reading from the
variety of works that surrounded him in his fathers business, and his reading was broad, varied,
and inclusiveclassics and great books from all the many fields of learning from literature to
theology. Sir, all ancient writers, all manly, as Johnson remarked to Boswell. Boswell writes,
Yet he read a great deal in a desultory manner, without any scheme of study, as chance threw
books in his way, and inclination directed him through them. Johnsons extensive reading of
older classics and the unmethodical, desultory habit of reading provided a bona fide education
that prepared him well for his literary life.

Though it appears that Johnson specialized in lexicography by virtue of the Dictionary he

labored for ten years to complete, Johnson never limited his love of knowledge and literature to
any one author, historical period, or subject. The enlarged, lively mind that Boswell
appreciated in Johnson and the wisdom in Johnsons intelligent, witty conversation prized by all
his friends testified to Johnsons liberally educated mind and broad human interests that extended
far beyond lexicography and literature. In fact, Johnson tendered his highest praise for great
writers and good literature to those who transcended their particular age or a narrow topic of
interest to encompass human nature and the human condition in the most universal sense. In
Preface to Shakespeare Johnson explained that the plays passed the test of time and proved
their universal appeal: Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of
general nature. For Johnson the test of literatures greatness depends on its honest, authentic
depiction of the nature of things, for the mind can only repose on the stability of the truth. The
best books, Johnson argued, offer usefulness and pleasure: The only end of writing is to enable
the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. For all his scholarship and erudition
Johnson was no pedant.

Johnson distinguished himself in other areas of life besides his achievements as a writer. His
personal life and moral character earned the same respect as his published works. The essays that
appeared in The Rambler on topics like the follies and vices of mankind all defended traditional
Christian morality and perennial wisdom, earning Johnson the reputation of great moralist. He
frequently satirized thinkers (Projectors) who fantasized about utopian schemes and imaginary
ideas of happiness like the cult of the noble savage. Johnsons impeccable love of truth never
wavered in precision or exactness of detail, to such a degree that The knowledge of his having
such a principle and habit made his friends have a perfect reliance on the truth of everything that
he told, however it might have been doubted by many others.

This virtue of strictness to truth made Johnson quick to expose exaggeration and cant in all its
forms. When Johnson heard anything far-fetched or utterly improbable, he reacted instantly: It
is not so. Do not tell this again. Johnson not only exemplified integrity but instilled it in others
so much so that, as Boswell reports, Sir Joshua Reynolds observed to me . . . that all who
were of his school are distinguished for a love of truth and accuracy, which would not have been
possessed in the same degree, if they had not been acquainted with Johnson. Johnson always
made clear his dislike of cant, pretension, and high-sounding nonsense. Boswell had informed
Johnson of David Humes boast of fearlessness before death: he was no more uneasy to think he
should not be after this life, than that he had not been before he began to exist. Johnson replies
that Hume is mad, disturbed, or lying: He may tell you, he holds his finger in the flame of a
handle, without feeling pain; would you believe him? Johnson frequently advises Boswell to
measure his words: Dont cant, sir.

Johnson the literary giant and the earnest moralist was also a clubbable man by virtue of his
relish for conversation and of his many friendships with people from all professions and social
classes who remained faithful and loyal throughout the course of a lifetime. Luminaries like
Adam Smith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, and David Garrick were not the only
members of the Johnson circle. Robert Levet, an eccentric, taciturn physician (of a strange
grotesque appearance) who tended to the poor of London and collected small fees, formed a
close friendship. Johnson also showed special affection for the poet Christopher Smart who was
confined to an asylum and questioned for praying in the streets. Johnson found his eccentricities
harmless, observing that his infirmities were not noxious to society. Johnson also formed a
close relationship with the Mr. Thrales family, a prosperous brewer with exceptional business
sense. Johnson famously said, If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances
through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant
repaira habit that Johnson practiced in his cultivation of old friendships by regular visits on
Monday (clean shirt day) and his embrace of new friendships like his association with James
Boswell when Johnson was 54.

Johnson also lived a heroic life that conquered many obstacles that discouraged a literary career.
Inheriting a melancholic temperament that often made him prey, in Boswells words, to a
dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery, Johnson struggled throughout his
life with loneliness as he lived the life of a bachelor after the loss of his wife, the widow Mrs.
Porter (Tetty) in a marriage of approximately sixteen years. Suffering scrofula that affected his
optical nerves, he lacked vision in one of his eyes. After two years of study at Oxford, he
withdrew and never completed a degree because a benefactor withdrew his financial assistance.
Destitute, Johnson withdrew from college, embarrassed when his worn shoes showed his feet
and, too proud to accept new ones left by his door, he threw them away with indignation. In his
first venture to London to seek a literary career, he often walked the streets at night out of dire
poverty that could not afford lodgings. Boswell frequently notes Johnsons native fortitude,
which amidst all his bodily distress and mental sufferings, never forsook himneither in his
struggle for survival in London, in his Herculean literary labors, or in the final hours of his life
when he refused all opiates to alleviate the pain.

For one person without a degree (the title Dr. was an honorary title received from Oxford) to
produce some of the greatest works of literature and criticism during his age, to inspire the
affection and loyalty of hundreds of beloved friends, to earn a reputation for moral excellence
both in his personal life and in his writing, and to be renowned for the most sparkling and lively
conversation on all occasions explains the praise he received at his death from William
Hamilton: He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill, but which nothing has a
tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next bestthere is nobody; no man can be
said to put you in mind of Johnson.

The Importance of Daniel Defoe to the development of English Fiction

Experimental, well crafted, energetic novels

Daniel Defoe's prose fiction, produced in his late middle age, sprang says Andrew Sanders in the
Oxford History of English Literature from his "experimental involvement in other literary forms,
most notably the polemic pamphlet, the biography, the history and, latterly the travel-books. His
novels included elements of all of these forms." Indeed, John Richetti, in the Cambridge
Companion to Daniel Defoe writes that we should not look at Defoe as writing from any
hysterical compulsion with the "past fictional forms" and that there is in him a constant urge to
produce "well crafted, energetic novels". As proof of this argument, Richetti draws attention to
Defoe's description of the battle such as Blenheim with a sense of action and movement lacking
in accounts in other journals, and his Review was filled with illustrative stories and short
allegories."

Close to Bakhtin's Menippean Satire

Also, Defoe seems to have been attracted to the devices identified by Mikhail Bakhtin as typical
of Menippean satire, especially dialogues with characters identified as "Madman" or with
"Truth" whose wry views of the world were allowed to contrast with the "accepted" attitudes of
his questioner. This attitude of detachment and irony is evident in his work The Consolidator
where a voyage to the moon is described in the manner of Lucian and Cyrano to comment on
contemporary England.

Anticipates Richardson's in his use of editor's notes to comment upon dialogues: Moral Idea

Defoe understood that his novels would only suceed if it catered to a need of an "assimilated, but
morally serious, realist literature, which emphasized private experience". For example in the
Family Instructor produced between 1715 and 1718, Defoe uses autobiography and masquerade
to comment on the dialogues. In the process, he anticipates Samuel Richardson, who in his
Clarissa used editor's notes to guide his readers.

Realism

But, Defoe's greratest achievement lay in the domain of realistic portrayal of events and
characters, which is especially evident in his work Robinson Crusoe. Here the author draws fom
his experience as a "Presbyterian tradesman in London, through an active espousal of a doomed
rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth and the more propitious cause of William of Orange, to his
employment as a government spy. Simultaneously, the work is important for its use of allegory
and the marvellous, while mapping real life situations. So, when Crusoe discovers footprints on
his island, he looks at it both as a scientist and then as a detective-first measuring his own foot
and looking for evidence in the present and after looking for clues to detect a criminal, if any
around him. So, in his Continuation of Letters of a Turkish Spy, speaks disparagingly of
Christianity, because his character and situation demands it. In this Defoe presents the ugly and
the beautiful simultaneously, without looking out for idealized representations.

Multilayered Analysis

Defoe's fiction, says Richetti, lends itself to a multilayered analysis. This is something that
Ronald Barthes had in mind in her book S/Z:

The variety of structures -spiritual autobiography, traveler's narrative, do-

it-yourself utopia, political and economic allegory - fuse into a unity
under the realist surface of the narrative but provide a text that opens itself
to a myriad of possible readings.

The Adventure Novel

But, when dealing with real situations, Defoe was conscious of providing aesthetic pleasure,
mixing the hypnotic and exotic with the mundane. In Captain Singleton, he devised the contours
of an "adventure novel" where he took the real life story of the pirate Avery and put the
characters in an imaginary Africa, peopled by a variety of savage human beings and savage
beasts in a convincing manner. In the Captain, Defoe projected an example of a colonial
Englishman who is ruthless in his singleminded love for gold, much like Kurtz in Conrad's Heart
of Darkness. When writing Moll Flanders, Defoe was influenced by the works of earlier
picaresque narratives like as La Picara Justina or various chapbook heroines such as Moll
Cutpurse, in Moll Defoe showed his unique gift of transforming earlier forms into the convincing
example of a new kind.

Anticipates modern day Feminists

In the female heroine, Defoe seems to indicate how language can mask hard realities and so to
question conventions and social norms. Moll repeatedly uses the phrase " as they call it" and
affects the readers in multiple ways. The events of Moll's life come across to the reader as
vividly lived experience partly because she struggles through a great amount of misfortune with
courage and astuteness and partly because her responses to the occurrences of her life seem so
natural, so believable. Nonetheless, there is a possibility that Defoe may have believed like the
feminists of today that women are as capable as men in most things; it is society that deprives
them of an education that may make them more capable of dealing with such situations.

Created the first Historical Novel

In the Journal of the Plague Year, he created the first historical novel, where Defoe depends upon
readers recognizing that the narrative is a warning about the threat from plague in 1722. The
novel functions much like the modern documentary novels of Truman Capote and Norman
Mailer. It is atvtimes grimly realistic in its details and its exact information about the number of
deaths, the ordinances passed to keep order and supply the poor with food. At other times, at
other times the horror of the pits in which the bodies of the dead are hurled evokes the ineffable
and the sublime. At times, the stories of families who suddenly find themselves faced with
inevitable death evoke the literature of sensibility in their images of overwhelming love between
family members. Then Defoe will switch to the comic story of the drunken piper who fell in the
pits only to survive, or evoke the grotesque in the scene of the man who kisses an unwilling lady
on the street only to reveal that he has the plague. In some parts, the work reads like a medical
treatise, and of all the narrative forms that provide some resemblance to Defoe's vivid picture of
the plague and its effect upon society, probably the medical case studies and dissections of
plague come closest to providing that sense of individual character that Defoe gives us.