2 - Johnson and the arts of conversation

Summary

It is observed by Bacon, that “reading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, and writing an exact man.” (Adventurer 85)

Conversation is so central to and representative of Samuel Johnson's work and life that by assembling and examining his writings on conversation, dialogue written for his fictional and factual characters, accounts of Johnson talking, and the meanings and performance of conversation in Johnson's England, a metonymic biography of this man could be written, one which Johnson, I suspect, might not be sorry to see undertaken or even, perhaps, to have written himself. An essay cannot, of course, be a full-fledged biography. But my aim in the pages that follow is to provide biographical insight by taking something like a core sample of Johnson through the strata of his ideas about and practice of conversation. Johnson experienced personally and wrote about the values of conversation as one of the greatest pleasures and improving exercises of human life. He was alert to risks endemic to conversation, directly proportional to its entertaining and instructive possibilities.