The Early Career of Samuel Johnson is a book that should be right up my alley. It deals with Samuel Johnson, what’s more, it deals with him from the time he ran off to London at the age of twenty-seven to his commission for the Dictionary - Samuel Johnson: The Grub Street Years. Yet, I found this book curiously flat.
The research is great, it really gets a grip on what Johnson was working on and when, who he was working for and the probable income he was getting for it. The writing was also blessedly free of academese, straight-forward and understandable at all times, just… curiously bloodless.
Johnson arrives into London with a letter of recommendation and some of the play Irene. He shares theatrical contacts with his pupil David Garrick and, presumably thinks his ascent into the tragedian’s sphere would be as easy as Garrick’s as an actor. This doesn’t happen, and Kaminski reckons this is when he sells the silver cup bought for him when he came to London as a child. Perhaps he lived off what was left of Tetty’s money after the Edial School misadventure.
Eventually he approaches Cave, a man he had written to quite haughtily under an assumed name. Cave employs him on his Gentleman’s Magazine, initially providing a few epigrams - little zingers to spice up the content and fill space. The magazine at the time wasn’t really a place for new writing, it was more a place where other information was compiled, collated and summarised. The idea it was a publication for the busy gentleman on the go who didn’t have time to search and collect all the things causing a stir and so read an editorialised version in The Gentleman’s Magazine.
I suppose a part of the ‘flatness’ of this book is the pretty comprehensive take-down of the idea that St John’s Gate was a seething meeting place of writers, poets and journalists all hanging out and having exciting ideas. The magazine employed very few people, most of the writing could be done in the author’s own houses or in coffee shops and other bits of original material could come by letter. Though Johnson may have met Savage or Carter in the little room above the gatehouse, it’s more likely he met them in taverns and coffeehouses. The demystifying is part of the purpose of the book but sometimes it’s no fun to be demystified.
Johnson didn’t have much work to do on the magazine. He may have written the odd longer piece, selected some of the poetry (he very pointedly did not choose the poetry prize winner). It’s likely Cave had him on the books for his longer project, the translation of The History of the Council of Trent, a work Kaminski reckons he must have almost finished before claims of a rival translation stopped the project.
He did publish London about this time and it had moderate commercial success and quite a lot of critical. It was the second time Pope noted a person who could be his successor (following the publication of Johnson’s translation of Pope’s Messiah). He also tried his hand at political satire with Marmor Norfolciense. It’s pointed out how Johnson had tried three routes to literary success; a play, a popular poem and political satire, but with no success.
Johnson then went back to the Midlands for a while and tried to get other teaching jobs, there was even a desperate attempt to get him an AM from Trinity College in Dublin via a very tenuous link to Swift. Then he came back and, seemingly reluctantly, settled down to being a Grub Street Hack.
Then Johnson’s hand is seen more throughout The Gentleman’s Magazine. There is more editorialising, better poetry and the inclusion of Johnson’s own proto-biographies. Kaminski notes how there was an “improvement of the magazine’s intellectual character whenever such things were handed over to Johnson”. Two years of doing this and he then took over the parliamentary reports - works he may have had a hand in buffing up but now became his to write. This sort of work not really suiting Johnson’s working practises, he was more a person who worked very hard for a week and then coasted for a month, rather than steady drudgery.
The book really emphasises how it was possible to lead a moderately successful middle class life as a Grub Street Hack, earning equal to a good craftsman as long as you weren’t silly with the money. Even Samuel Boyse, the poster child of Grub St extremes (he’d spend a week in bed writing because he had no clothes, get them out of a pawn shop on Sunday to walk about, repawn them and then go back to bed and write for the week) was portrayed as a simple, diligent writer - with the other stories being merely hearsay and tales. It’s probably a truer picture, but the image of Johnson as a professional, reliable writer living a moderately comfortable life doesn’t have the oomph that his suggestions of extreme poverty.
Johnson and Cave came together for another big project that was stopped, a version of Shakespeare. He published his thoughts on Macbeth, Kaminski reckons the book was probably quite far along though, as an advertisement for a project wasn’t released until the book was close to print and it was the advertisement that brought those who claimed copyright to Shakespeare on their heads. It does ask the question of why Johnson’s version of Shakespeare took so long when he did work on it though.
Johnson’s next project was the Harleian Catalogue, produced with that little shit, Thomas Osbourne. He bought the huge library of Lord Harley and wanted to flog it off, but he also wanted to earn money on the auctioneer’s catalogue so got Johnson and Harley’s librarian to create a catalogue that was a work of academia in itself. Yet he didn’t give them time to do the job he had promised and Johnson even beat him up with a Greek Old Testament.
This means when Dodsley suggested Johnson to a consortium of booksellers who wanted to create an English Dictionary, Johnson had already had a number of big projects come to nothing. It’s no wonder he initially declined the job, and I imagine he worried the whole time about this latest project would come to nothing, especially as the years and money wore on. We know this one was a success though and Johnson’s Grub Street years were over, though he never forgot where he had started and often tried to give a leg up to writers in similar positions.
This book left me torn. I want to know all about Samuel Johnson and I’d like that information to be reliable and trustworthy and I reckon this book is all those things. Yet, i also want a glimpse of Johnson as a larger-than-life figure and his successes to be after huge hardship, and this book cast him and his hardships in a smaller, realer and more human life. Thus I appreciated the book for the knowledge I gained from it but was left cold by its lack of personality. When you read Johnson books and meet Johnsonians, there is always a lot of personality, and here there simply wasn’t.
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