No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The standard authorities on the bibliography of Samuel Johnson1 fail to mention one minor but interesting piece of journalism that has been ascribed, with some probability, to Johnson. This is the “Observations” appended to “A Letter from a French Refugee in America to his Friend a Gentleman in England”, in The Literary Magazine, or Universal Review, of June, 1756.
1 Hawkins, Life of Johnson (1787); Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill-Powell (1934); W. P. Courtney and D. Nichol Smith, A Johnson Bibliography (1915); A. T. Hazen, Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications (1937); R. W. Chapman and A. T. Hazen, Supplement to the Courtney-Nichol Smith Bibliography, in Proc. & Papers of the Oxford Bibliog. Soc. (1938); D. Nichol Smith, in CBEL (1940).
2 Vols, xii and XIII, containing the Parliamentary Debates, were issued, in 1787, by Stock-dale, and Vol. xv, edited by George Gleig and containing the translation of Lobo's Abyssinia and other pieces, in 1789, by Elliot and Kay. Cf. Courtney and Nichol Smith, pp. 3, 162; Chapman and Hazen, p. 165.
3 Curiously, Gallo-Anglus's letter, but not the “Observations”, was reprinted in Vol. III of that muddled compilation, Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces, published by Tom Davies in 1774. As Davies seems to have started out, in his fumbling way, to try to produce a collected edition of Johnson's journalistic writings, the inclusion of the “Letter”, which has no very obvious literary merit of its own, might be taken as evidence that Davies had somewhere heard Johnson's name connected with it.
4 The B. M. catalogue does not list “Volume xIv”, and Courtney was apparently unaware of its existence. I have been informed that the B. M. file of the Literary Magazine was destroyed during the war. Hazen, Prefaces and Dedications (1937), p. 125, gives the locations of other files of it.430
5 I am indebted to the Yale Univ. Library for a photographic transcript. The variants in “Volume xiv” are unimportant.
6 I do not think that the identity of the editor of “Volume xIv” has been discussed. It was not Hawkins, whose name is mentioned (without enthusiasm) a number of times in the editor's notes. It was not Gleig, the editor of “Volume xv”, who criticizes the editor of “Volume xIv” for some wrong attributions. It was perhaps not Nichols, whose initials, “N.” or “J. N.”, follow his notes to various of Johnson's letters given in “Volume xIv”, whereas the editor's notes are signed simply “E.” The name of John Stockdale, the publisher, has been mentioned in connection with the volume as though he were responsible for the actual editing (cf., e.g., the Monthly Review, N.S., I [March 1790], 281); but that Stockdale, apparently a man of few pretensions to literature, could have turned out the well-written and judicious preface to “Volume xIv” I am not convinced. Perhaps it is significant that whereas Volumes XII and xIII were published by Stockdale alone, “Volume xIv” bears also the imprint of the Robinsons. I should like to suggest that the editor of “Volume xIv” was Alexander Chalmers, who, according to DNB, worked at this time for George Robinson and was intimately associated with Nichols. One objection to this identifi‐tion would be that in 1806 and 1823, when Chalmers revised the Murphy edition of Johnson's works, the “Observations” in question were not included; but this objection may not carry much weight. (Professor A. T. Hazen, who has done me the kindness of reading this note, doubts that Chalmers was concerned and suggests Isaac Reed. Others may be able to prove or disprove these attributions.)
7 These figures are based on a reconciliation of the two discrepant lists given by Boswell in the “Chronological Catalogue” of Johnson's works prefaced to the Life (Hill-Powell, i, 20) and in the body of the Life itself (i, 309).
8 And perhaps editor-in-chief, if that is what Boswell's “engaged … to superintend” means (Hill-Powell, i, 307).
9 The picture of Johnson setting himself up as an 18th-century Walter Lippmann is unexpected, but not implausible. It should not be necessary to point out that Johnson who regarded himself as a Lord Chancellor manqué, was a vigorous arm-chair general in politics all his life. He risked prosecution by Walpole in 1739 for Marmor Norfolciense; in the 1740's, as the country's leading parliamentary reporter, he put Pitt's most famous retort into his lips; some of his political writing in the 1750's I have just mentioned; in 1766 he “engaged in politicks with Hamilton”; and even in the 1780's, in his old age, his opinions of North and Shelburne and the younger Fox and the younger Pitt flowed as freely in his conversation as his earlier ones of Walpole and Pulteney must have done. It is difficult, then, to see why his critics have spent so much time searching for his “motives” in writing his political pamphlets of the 1770's. He wrote them because he loved writing on politics as much as he loved writing anything. Their tumultuous vigor, their haste, their logic-chopping—the very qualities that make them bad writing, as much as any writing of Johnson's could be bad—mark them as labors of love. It may be, as Boswell says of Taxation No Tyranny, that they were written “at the desire of those who were then in power”; but it appears that those who were then in power were not a little alarmed at the genie they had raised. Joseph Wood Krutch's deduction (Samuel Johnson [1944], p. 449), from Baretti's statement that “none of Johnson's political pamphlets [of the 1770's] would have been written ‘had it not been for Mrs. Thrale and Baretti, who stirred him up by laying wagers, etc.‘”, that Johnson's “principal motive was a desire to help Mr. Thrale” in his political career seems to me a non sequitur.
10 “Johnsonian Bibliography”, Colophon, pt. 12 (1932).432
11 Cf. Chalmer's editorial note in his first revision of the Murphy edition of the Works (London, 1806), II,418: “In all the papers and criticisms Dr. Johnson wrote for the Literary Magazine, he frequently departs from the customary we of anonymous writers. This, with his inimitable style, soon pointed him out, as the principal person concerned in that publication.”