Preface

Summary

On publishing his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in 1787, Boswell's rival biographer Sir John Hawkins was widely attacked for the rancorous tenor of his work. Boswell himself alluded sourly to ‘the ponderous labours of solemn inaccuracy and dark uncharitable conjecture’; ‘Philo Johnson’ sneered that ‘Sir John Hawkins, with all the humanity and very little of the dexterity of a Clare-Market butcher, has raised his blunt axe to deface the image of his friend.’ But Hawkins could at least claim to have been consistent in his iconoclasm, as his remarks on the novelists of the period, and Richardson in particular, show. ‘Those who were unacquainted with Richardson, and had red his books, were led to believe, that they exhibited a picture of his own mind, and that his temper and domestic behaviour could not but correspond with that refined morality which they inculcate’, he reports; ’but in this they were deceived.‘ The sorry truth was that Richardson's conduct bespoke a sullenness wholly at odds with ‘that philanthropy which he laboured to inculcate’. ‘He was austere in the government of his family, and issued his orders to some of his servants in writing only’; his wife and daughters ‘appeared to have been taught to converse with him by signs’ (which he reciprocated, in the main, with ‘frowns and gesticulations, importing that they should leave his presence’); he refused (or was unable) to converse himself. Hawkins could speak from experience:

I once travelled with him in the Fulham stage-coach, in which, at my getting in, I found him seated. I learned, by somewhat he said to the coachman, who he was, and made some essays towards conversation, but he seemed disinclined to any.