Nicholas Hudson - A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson

A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF SAMUEL JOHNSON

BY
Nicholas Hudson

First published 2013 by Pickering & Chatto ( Publishers) Limited

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Taylor & Francis 2013
Nicholas Hudson 2013

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BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Hudson, Nicholas author.
A political biography of Samuel Johnson. (Eighteenth-century political biographies; 10)
1. Johnson, Samuel, 17091784. 2. Johnson, Samuel, 17091784 Political and social views. 3. Authors, English 18th century Biography. 4. Politics and literature Great Britain History 18th century. 5. Politics in literature.
I. Title II. Series
828.609-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-1-84893-082-7 (hbk)

Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

My thanks to Professor Alan Downie of Goldsmiths College, University of London, for inviting me to write this political biography of Samuel Johnson. I am grateful to the University of British Columbia for funding that facilitated research for this book in the United Kingdom. Thanks to Matthew Bennett for his careful reading of the manuscript, and to my colleague Professor Alex Dick for his helpful information and advice. I am grateful as well to Professor Bob De Maria, the general editor of The Yale Edition of Samuel Johnson, and to Professor Tom Kaminski, for allowing me to consult the proofs of Johnsons Debates in Parliament before their publication. Over the past few years I have benefitted greatly from the support and the learning of Professor Howard Weinbrot, who remains an energetic force behind Johnson studies in North America. During a recent conference at Kings College, Cambridge, where I was invited by Dr Rowan Boyson and Dr Tom Jones, it was a great pleasure speaking again with Professor Howard Erskine-Hill. My greatest debt, however, is to my partner Pamela Newton, whose love and patience made this book possible.

All parenthetical references in the text to YE derive from The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, gen. eds A. T. Hazen, J. H. Middendorf and R. De Maria, Jr., 23 vols (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1958-). All citations from Johnsons dictionary derive from A Dictionary of the English Language on CD Rom, ed. A. McDermott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Samuel Johnson never held political office and cannot be said to have exerted influence as an insider in eighteenth-century government. From his own lifetime to the present, however, his writings and conversation on political topics have raised enormous controversy. In the decades after his death in 1784, hostility or allegiance to his memory could virtually define a persons position as either a Whig or a Tory, a radical or a conservative. From William Hazlitt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle to Leslie Stephen, Johnsons reputation often varied according to the writers disposition towards his supposed Toryism, particularly as portrayed in Boswells Life.

The controversy has continued to our own time. In The Politics of Samuel Johnson (1960, second edition 1990), Donald J. Greene assailed the whole assumption, epitomized by Macaulay but assumed by most everybody, that Johnson was a convinced Tory and royalist. Influenced by Sir Lewis Namiers thesis that a Tory party did not exist in that age of Whig hegemony, Greene portrayed Johnson as a rationalist and a skeptic, a rebel by instinct who distrusted all monarchs, spurned authority, and regarded government as a merely secular institution. While conceding that Johnson could be classified among skeptical conservatives like Hobbes, Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire, Greene also compared him to Victorian liberals like John Stuart Mill.

Between these sides, there were attempts to position Johnson in a middle ground, as in my previous work and in John Cannons Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (1994). According to Cannon, Johnson was a moderate or, given his penchant for belligerent debate, a ferocious moderate.

The details of this debate are impossible to summarize briefly, and will emerge in the pages that follow. It is nonetheless useful to remark that the controversy has turned not just on the content of Johnsons opinions but on questions of historical methodology. Clarks books and essays on Johnson form part of his larger project to revise our understanding of eighteenth-century politics. Evidence shows, Clark argues, that loyalty to the Stuart dynasty after the Hanoverian Succession was not confined to a small group of fanatics but constituted a fairly large segment of the population. The contractual thesis of government advanced in John Lockes Two Treatises of Civil Government (1689) was by no means widely accepted, for even most Whigs continued to hold that monarchy passed down through hereditary succession, as assured by the divine origin of government articulated most coherently by Tories. Political divisions in the eighteenth century were generated not by class conflict or secular ideologies but by differences of religion, primarily traditional Anglicanism versus Dissent.

Clarks opponents have nonetheless quite reasonably objected that his attempt to enfold Johnson in this vision has exposed the difficulties of relating an overarching historical thesis to the complexities of an individual personality. The damaging resistance created by this move from the general to the particular seems repeatedly illustrated by Clarks Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism