As part of the effort to write this biography of Sam Johnson, I’ve used Twitter as a way to connect with people who have a wide variety knowledge of the 18th century. Not just people who study Johnson — in fact I think few of them are active Johnson scholars in the sense that they teach him at a university — but also people who know about aspects of life in the 18th century (what daily life was like) or who know about other writers and other figures in 18th-century England. It’s a very interesting and vocal group and I enjoy being part of this little community.

I’ve found it interesting, though I guess it shouldn’t be really surprising, that many of them talk about much more than the 18th century in their tweets and replies. I would say that the topics most frequently brought up are Donald Trump, COVID-19, political issues (lately, for example, Black Lives Matter and the initiative to remove statues in the US which depict historical figures who were part of the Confederacy), and personal issues (e.g., the difficulty concentrating and writing in the midst of a pandemic). Some of the people I follow on Twitter are language specialists, either directly, or indirectly in the sense that they are people who study literature and so they know something about language and its uses. I’ve occasionally made an effort to keep my political and other views off Twitter, but I’ve found that it’s hard to make those stark demarcations (“Twitter is only to help me with my Johnson book”). Some of the most interesting people I follow are very vocal about non-18th-century things, and I can’t help replying and commenting myself. Still, I try to keep it to some semblance of a minimum: for example, I might just “like” something from the Lincoln Project or from Sarah Cooper, but won’t go any further than that.

Twitter aside, I am making progress on my book. I’ve outlined the entire sequence of chapters and have both written parts of those chapters, as well as piled notes into some other chapters that I will at some point transmogrify into writing. I’m an organized person, so I can’t feel comfortable just writing a bit here, not documenting it, and then saving all that for a scramble at the end when I search out sources. I’m writing the book in a similar way as I make a dish from a recipe: the focus is on getting the dish to be successfully made, edible, and delicious, but all along I am cleaning up as I go, putting things in the dishwasher, discarding other things.

I also feel that in the last month or so I’ve found my focus better — that is, I have a clearer idea of what I want this book to be and how I want to carry it out. It’s not just making an excuse for not actually writing when I say that I’ve thought a lot about the book, how I can carry it out, and how I want it to be different from any other biography of Johnson. I’ve gone on road trips with my friend Oscar in the past where we just knew where we were headed — once it was to an exhibit in Kansas, I think it was, that featured art made from insects — but had no plan beyond that. We’d find accommodation where we could, we’d find somewhere to eat when we were hungry. I’m not writing this book like that!

To speak more specifically about what exactly I am doing the last few days … part of the research for the book has involved interviewing scholars and others about a variety of topics related to Johnson and the 18th century. I had all those interviews transcribed over the last couple of months and I’ve also already gone through the transcripts to hilite the parts that I consider particularly germane to my writing. So now I’m reviewing all those hilited parts and organizing them by topic. Once that’s done, I’ll have an overall look at my plan for the chapters and insert the quoted hilites in the appropriate spot for now, so that when I’m actually writing that chapter the topic and the quote will be right there, and I won’t have to wonder along the lines of “didn’t Interviewee X say something about this?” and then scrabble through my email or transcripts or other notes in an effort to track it down.

I’ve discovered a few things as I’ve gone along. One has been that I’ve gathered more than enough information about pornography and prostitution in 18th-century England. I do certainly plan to include that topic in my book, but with the combination of interviews I’ve done and books I’ve read, I really think I’ve got enough. Another thing is that I’ve had to remind myself that I’m not writing a book about life in 18th-century England or London. It’s not a full social history. I don’t need to cover that topic comprehensively, but given my aimed-for readership — the general educated reader — I do want to provide context, and I’ve figured out a way to do that. And finally I’ve learned not to be hard on myself and worry about not getting the book done exactly according to the schedule I had planned/hoped for. I’m on track. I am making progress. I won’t be done in 2020, I don’t think, but neither will it be 2030 nor will I be abandoning it. My interest in it, my feeling of it as a challenge, are both still very strong.

One final note. I’ve taken a break along the way to develop a line of greeting cards which include quotations from Johnson. The idea was, similar to that for the book: not to aim at people who already know a lot about Johnson but rather to design cards that are of interest to anyone who is looking for a greeting card. My tagline is Cards for most occasions or for no occasion at all. Funny and accidentally educational. The latter part refers to the fact that the person who selects a card because they needed one to say thank you to a friend, will only discover afterwards that those words that drew them to the card were in fact written a couple of centuries ago. If you’re interested in checking out what I’ve done, see here.

I had an epiphany this week, and definitely a secular one in which neither Jesus nor the Magi played any role. Or at least as far as I know.

As I’ve said over and over again here in these blog postings, I continue to write this bio of Johnson, continue to do research, continue to interview scholars to glean detailed knowledge, and also continue to mull over (or, more accurately, re-mull) just exactly how to put the whole thing together. I had already worked out a structure, but it suddenly came to me how I should make a couple of major changes in the whole of the book that would make it a better thing in the end (I’m not going to reveal those here!). My own experience with writing is often like this. I get a substantial portion done, but then I go through a period where I seem to be languishing, can’t sit down to write because something is gnawing at me telling me that there’s something wrong — and then, well, you know.

It’s a good thing. It certainly doesn’t mean that I have to start over (Jesus and the Magi forbid!), but that some rearrangements have to be made and some rewriting needs to be done.¹

I’ve done some reading in the past couple of weeks as well. A little bit was in W. Jackson Bate’s seminal biography of Johnson published in 1975. The other half dozen or so biographies of Johnson that I have at hand are all on my Kindle, but for this one I have to rely on the print copy I bought (gulp) 34 years ago. The other thing which I didn’t really read in-depth, but which I glanced through the pages of as I scanned it

and ultimately posted it online, was the MA thesis I did on Johnson’s Rambler back in 1982 (re-gulp). I of course remembered the two main things I studied in that thesis — the watermarks and countermarks of the first edition issues, which I was able to get luxurious access to at the University of Toronto; and the rhetoric and organization of the essays — but I’d forgotten about other things I’d included, such as a detailed categorization of the Rambler essays, as well as an analysis of the textual differences among the original folio issues, the edition published in 1752, the revised edition published in 1756, and the Yale edition. BTW if you are interested in reading the thesis in all its glory, you can now find it here.

On a smaller scale, as regards the people and the intensity, my unsettled mind as I wanted to write but couldn’t, and then felt bad that I wasn’t writing — it reminds me of the hell that Johnson put himself through as he looked back on a productive year and instead of recalling the accomplishments, focused on all the time he had “wasted.” Ah, Sam — you produced some great work, and I just wish that you had been able to realize that a bit more and been kinder to yourself.

1. The vagueness and generality here have the tone of how organized crime members communicate their intentions: “I know some people who know some people.”

On December 13 last year I interviewed Kathleen Lubey by phone as part of the research I am doing for this book about Samuel Johnson. The book will include a background chapter about various aspects of social life in London and England in the 18th century, and I was (and am) interested to include information about pornography and prostitution as well.

The audio link below (it’s about 7 minutes long) is a segment of the longer interview, in which Prof. Lubey discusses those topics and provides information about other works, both primary and secondary, as well.

Kathleen Lubey is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Centre at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is the author of Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760, published in 2012, and one of her current projects is a book in progress called Pornography’s Discontents: Sex and Social Protest. The excerpt from my interview is used with her permission.

I’m referring of course to his writing style. His sartorial style was rarely a priority for him, though one of my favourite slices of an anecdote about Johnson involves an elaborate scheme his friends concocted to bring him together at a dinner with John Wilkes, who had been critical of Johnson’s dictionary but who also, as a Member of Parliament, held views with which Johnson strongly disagreed. Johnson ended up being seated next to Wilkes at a dinner, but what I like and remember is his quick decision to attend in the first place, saying to his servant: “Frank, a clean shirt!”

I am working on the section of my book dealing with Johnson’s writing style (or styles), and so supplementing my own thoughts with some secondary research. The classic, and now nearly 80-year-old text on the subject, is W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.’s The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (Yale University Press, 1941). Still, it sets down some of the basics of Johnson’s style which readers can readily recognize, many of them reflected in his chapter titles: parallelism, antithesis, personal style of diction, sentence length, and so on. It’s a good basic start to anyone interested in the topic. A few years later, Wimsatt published another book about Johnson’s style, but this time concentrating on two works: Philosophic Words: A Study of
Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson (Yale, 1948).

A book which I am finding more interesting and insightful on the topic, though, is William Vesterman’s The Stylistic Life of Samuel Johnson (Rutgers University Press, 1977). This book feels more nuanced to me, and also is based on an important premise that has been ignored by some critics: the cross-over that is often made between Johnson’s style — which, yes, often tends to generalization in some of his works — and his life. Vesterman’s idea is that since a lot of Johnson’s writing already deals in abstractions, readers and critics are forced to deal with his life (“the concrete”) in any analysis of his style. He uses this example:

Faced with Johnson’s habit of writing in the largest abstractions, his commentators are left no way to connect his terms save to use them. To oversimplify: if a usual critical tendency of explication is to move to greater abstraction, to say Moby-Dick is not about a whale hunt but about Life and Truth, what then is there to say about a writer whose acknowledged subject is “the choice of Life” and who constantly uses the term, “Truth”? Having preempted the highest level of abstraction, Johnson’s writing tends to seem explainable only by reference to the concrete. (p. 11)

Vesterman’s first chapter after his introduction deals with Johnson’s Life of Savage, so I am re-reading that work before I read Vesterman’s comments. (For those who haven’t read Johnson — or anyone — on Savage, it’s quite a story, and so always fun and instructive to read again.) There is of course other critical literature on Johnson’s style — some of it in the many scholarly biographies — and I will get to that in due course.

Vesterman also makes the good case that Johnson’s style changed over time. The Johnson who wrote the dense essays in The Rambler, for example, is not the same Johnson who was, to a certain extent, more direct and clear in his conversation and in his later works.

En passant, whenever I think of writers and style, I always think of the great Vladimir Nabokov. In apologizing for his editing of the transcript of an interview, Nabokov, often cited as one of the best English prose stylists of the 20th (or any) century, said in a letter to Robert Hughes, an interviewer for National Educational Television: “I am terribly sorry if my extensive cuts are causing you any disappointment, but I am sure you will understand that after all I am almost exclusively a writer, and my style is all I have.” (letter to Hughes, Nov. 9, 1965, in Selected Letters 1940-1977 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 381)