Was Christopher Smart mad?

Whether Christopher Smart was and is a question that frequently occurs when talking about him and his work. Moira Dearnley, in her analysis of his poetry, can’t help but opine that he was clearly mad and it oozes all over his poetry. Clement Hawes argues that there is a specific manic rhetoric style that Smart adopts that is not necessarily an indiction of mania itself. Chris Mounsey is convinced that Smart’s reputation and incarceration for madness was a concerted scheme by Newbery.

In many ways, it’s a useless question because the definition of madness is so nebulous. The fact that what passed as professionals at the time assessed Smart, treated him and then kicked him out as incurable means that under the wibbly standards of the time, he was mad - madness being a display of beliefs and behaviours deemed irrational by the society at the time. 

Yet, did Christopher Smart suffer from what we would call a mental illness today?

Again, it’s something of a fool’s question, Smart didn’t have the cultural or mental apparatus to understand the mind the way we do. Even if he suffered the same experiences or chemical imbalances of a modern mental health patient, his conception of the mind’s workings would have been so different that a modern diagnosis would have been pointless to him. That’s beside the fact that we only have glimpses of Smart, both in other people’s record and his own. He’s simply not around to answer the kinds of questions that would lead to a certain answer.

This doesn’t stop his contemporaries being analysed and diagnosed though. Samuel Johnson has long been a poster boy for depression, it’s generally accepted as having a form of Tourette’s Disease and OCD UK have adopted him also. To be fair, Samuel Johnson was one of the most written about people of his era and so there is a greater wealth of evidence - but there’s still an element of hurling a small light down a deep well.

All those caveats aside, I’m quite convinced that Christopher Smart did suffer from a mental illness which we recognise and classify today, Bipolar Disorder.

The first indication of this is a point he makes in Jubilate Agno, “For I have a greater compass both of mirth and melancholy than another.”

But there are a number of other hints that point in that direction.

Smart was a known drunkard in an age of drunkenness. Johnson quips about him walking to the pub but being carried back. In his years as student, and even as fellow, he was known for carousing in the pubs. His actual admittance to St Luke’s Madhouse was for alcoholism and it was generally said that his later ‘attacks’ of prayer were often after drinking sessions. Substance abuse is often a sign of various mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, with the person going on excessive binges whilst manic and self-medicating with alcohol when depressed.

There’s also the claim (that I still can’t find the source of) that Smart was addicted to hartshorn, an ammonia-like substance. I’ve written before how this was a treatment for asthma, which Smart did have and that his suddenly stopping to pray may have been a response to the feelings of doom an incoming asthma attack can cause. However, I don’t think these negate possible symptoms of bipolar, only that they are a different problem that run alongside it.

Smart engaged in many behaviours that constitute a manic state. Gray mock’s Smart’s giddiness when producing the student play, The Grateful Fair, or, A Trip to Cambridge, and the young fellow later needed a subscription to bail him out of financial problems after excessive spending. This habit of excessive spending followed him his whole life, with him as debtor, giving away the last of the money which had been given to him charitably. 

He exhibits burst of manic energy at new projects, like The Midwife which floundered after the burst of a new project, The Old Woman’s Oratory. He signed a 99 year contract for the Universal Visiter. Samuel Johnson said, "I wrote for some months in 'The Universal Visitor for poor Smart, while he was mad, not then knowing the terms on which he was engaged to write, and thinking I was doing him good. I hoped his wits would soon return to him. Mine returned to me, and I wrote in 'The Universal Visitor' no longer.”

A person in a manic episode often sleeps little, talks lots and engages in risky behaviours. It was around the time of The Old Woman’s Oratory that rumours started to circulate that Smart was going into Molly Houses and there were snide insinuations that he should be referred to as ‘Kitty’ rather than ‘Kit’. His companion on this journeys was supported to be Samuel Foote, who was later accused of forcibly buggering a man, something he denied because he literally only had one leg to stand on. Yet, Foote’s modern biography does point out that his accuser did have some very specific details, and Foote’s own behaviours had been growing more reckless after the near death experience that lost him his foot.

Examples of the depressive phase are harder to find, which makes sense as they tend to be quieter. There are times throughout his writing career where the words just stop, or where he is reported being out of action due to some illness. These illnesses may have been asthmatic flare-ups, the colds and fevers that regularly put city dwellers out of commission or the ghostly apparition of a depressive period.

Certainly, the poem he wrote at the conclusion of one of these illnesses, Hymn to the Supreme Being does include a very recognisable and gripping account of depression - even as his father-in-law tried to use it to sell fever powders. In the poem, Smart talks about sending his thoughts back through his life to find at least element of goodness. He compares it to Noah, sending birds to look for dry land but says that, for him, there’s no dove with an olive branch, his life is wholly and completely wicked and useless. If this is not a vivid description of depression, I don’t know what is.

I think it would be very interesting to read/analyse Jubilate Agno with the idea of bipolar disorder in mind, to see if highs and lows in his emotional state can be traced in it. As far as we know, he wrote a couple of lines of it a day, so it could provide the closest to a daily ‘check in’ we have. That said, it’s not the perfect document to show his mental state, it’s not a diary but a poem, with aesthetic and literary rules and limitations - but it could be worth a whack.

I need Samuel Johnson to conclude this post, he had a knack for balancing different views in one sentence. On one hand, I feel that ‘knowing’ whether Smart had a mental illness like bipolar disorder would make him more understandable but on the other, it makes no difference at all. That he suffered in life is true, but that he experienced a lot of joy is also. All that’s left of him are a few anecdotes and a body of work, a body of work that gives me a lot of joy. I come, as I often do, back to the his line in On a Bed of Guernsey Lillies, “we never are deserted… quite.”

Review: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

 Somehow the phrase ‘how Proust can change your life’ was in my head.Turns out it’s the title of an Alain de Botton book. My Alain de Botton phase was short lived and a long time ago and the French author he introduced to me was Michel de Montaigne. I’ve now read all of In Search of Lost Time (though it was the Scott Moncrieff translation, In Remembrance of Things Past) and I have to admit myself unchanged. 

Towards the end of the last volume, Proust says that he “should not ask them (the reader) to praise or to censure me, but simply tell me whether it is really like that.” He then says that his book is a tool, a lens for the reader to look inwards and if it doesn’t work it’s because “the reader has eyes for which my book is not a suitable instrument.” I guess mine are the wrong eyes because ‘it’ whether that be external or internal life doesn’t seem the same to Proust as it does to me.

That’s not to say we never converged. The immediate opening of Swann’s Way has Proust describing a sensation I have often felt but never properly shaped, that feeling of a room becoming all the rooms you have slept in as you wake up. Proust is great, in general, at describing all the woozy feelings; sleepiness, being half-asleep, falling asleep, being drunk. A great deal of the book is about the vividness of internal experience with the mediated flatness of communal and he’s really good at these moments when one slips into another.

Yet I was never as needy as the narrator. If my parents were laughing with friends downstairs when I was supposed to be falling asleep, my emotional response wasn’t a crippling panic attack at my mum not kissing me goodnight, but outrage that my parents could have fun when I wasn’t around. The narrator’s peculiar clinginess stretches into his young adult life, where going to sleep in a hotel room is some huge ordeal that can only be healed by his grandmother’s knocking on the wall to remind him that she’s there. Then it goes into his romantic life, an area where Proust certainly didn’t describe ‘it’, and I felt like I was reading something strange, alien and psychotic.

He makes the astute observation that we fall more in love with our own imagined picture of a person than the reality of them. He describes wonderfully that time as a young man when you fall in love with every woman you pass on the street, something I remember (though he calls them ‘young girls’ and gives hints that they really are young girls, not women). However the stalkerish elements of his love are not anything I’ve ever experienced. His love is one that feels nothing about following someone, breaking into their things and using people to arrange meetings.

What’s more, once he does obtain one of the objects of his affection, Albertine, he goes off her and feels that she’s little more than a pet cat. Then the only thing that incenses his ‘love’ is the jealousy that she might be sleeping with other women. This belief in the importance of jealousy must be an important one for Proust, because it was the key for Swann’s love of Odette. What is even more strange, sickening and peculiar is the way the narrator envisions Albertine as the great love of his life, it’s the core of the story and a subject repeatedly pawed over and regurgitated. At the end, when he meets Gilbertine’s daughter, who merges the Swann and Guermantes ways, it’s supposed to be an apotheosis to the story - but my only reaction was to beg him not to lock this one up.

A lot of the book deals with the narrator’s social climbing and (I suppose) acerbic takes on high society. He’s shocked that the rarefied world of the Guermantes is not the magic lantern he imagined as a child, but some pretty stupid people wasting time in pretty stupid ways. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up in an era where the doings of the rich and powerful is splashed everywhere, but it seems pretty obvious that’s what high society is - and I question why someone who is so dismissive of that world remains so attached to it. Presumably because he’s even more dismissive of the middle-class culture vultures like the Verdurins, and completely disdains the inner lives of working people like Francoise. I also wonder why high society bothers with him, he doesn’t seem to be offering anything.

Yes, the narrator has a great openness to beauty, especially architectural and natural beauty. The description of the trees and cliffs around Balbec, or the steeple at Combray are spot on depictions of those ordinary things that catch the breath sometimes. Proust is also great at writing how the writing, painting and music we hear then shape our experience of the world. It feels very real that a church in Balbec that was talked up by Swann, proved a disappointment until rephrased by Elstir. 

There are many moments and locations in the book that shine off the page. Whether that’s the village of Combray, the shining underwater hotel at Balbec, the slow-motion of the ‘little gang’ walking along the beach - and there are many more. There are also some very engaging characters. I loved his grandmother in her contrariness and love, the way her death was dealt with and the way his mother slowly became her. I like Francoise, even through his condescension. I liked Aunt Leonie, she made me laugh. I also didn’t mind St Loup, as far as posh boys go. I thought the narrator treated him terribly - does the narrator even have any actual friends? He shits on St Loup, Bloch, the little gang, the Guermantes, the Verdurins… does he actually have any affection, warmth or kindness? He’s a conceited, insufferable little shit - and he’s the author’s proxy.

Towards the end of the last volume, Proust has a 70 page explanation of what the book was trying to do, prefaced by a comment that only bad books have mission statements. In light of that, I would have to say that Proust very admirably succeeded in the things he set out to achieve, that he took on a huge project and did it well. I also have to say that I disagree with a number of those fundamentals.

That a book should focus on the physical tangible details, I agree with. I also agree that these moments can be universal and beyond time and it’s a great thing to have a book celebrating them and encouraging its readers to find them. His definition of the artistic sense as a faculty of submitting to the reality within themselves is also both interesting and important. Every painting, novel, work of art is an expression of the internal reality of it’s creator and, hopefully, universal enough to catch a reader. (I would argue that a novel is as much a craft as it is an art and that it needs to stand on it’s own legs as a chair does.. but that’s a different discussion).

I enjoyed his note that, “the working class are as bored by novels of popular life as children are by the books that are written specially for them.” It’s very much like Johnson’s comments about children’s fiction. However, I do think Proust mainly uses this as an excuse to have been writing about all the useless posh people he has. Especially because he then says that the engine that drives all self knowledge and artistic discovery is suffering. What suffering has the narrator really had? The play wasn’t as good as he hoped, the dinner party was boring and the woman he arbitrarily chose didn’t like being a prisoner. If suffering gives birth to art, then surely the working classes, who suffer far more, are the best subjects of it.

What’s more this notion that suffering is the key and that “the happy years are the lost, the wasted years” seems puerile tosh. Many great artists have suffered, it’s a precarious life. Viewed in the right way, most lives could be painted as lives as suffering, art and genius don’t really come into it. I’m not convinced that it was Van Gogh’s suffering that made him a great painter and the notion of tortured genius feels like a fallacy. 

While I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’d like to recapture the lost time I spent reading Proust’s masterwork, there were many moments, characters and descriptions I very much enjoyed, I wouldn’t say I’d rush to repeat the experience. I certainly wouldn’t say it changed my life. 

On Idleness

 On the day I write this (a couple of days before I post) I find myself reflecting on yesterday. Yesterday was a Saturday, I was not at work, I had no rehearsals (for I’m in a play) and I had no plans or particular desires. It was a lazy day and I spent it doing things that had no real purpose yet it was a day that was very satisfying and very productive.

I did some chores, doing my laundry and hoovering the house. I made a weird little playlist, inspired by some weird little playlists I made years before. I painted a silly and slightly wonky mural in the back garden of a punk seagull singing karaoke into a pink swirly lollypop. I also finally finished Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

I need to let the book digest a little before I can talk about it much, but in that final volume the narrator, Marcel, realises that the wasted years of his life haven’t been wasted but were actually the accumulation of all the experiences that he needed to start on his life’s work. I can’t say I fully vibed with Proust (and will explain all that in another post) but he does share this sense of laziness and missed opportunities with two authors I do love, Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne. 

Samuel Johnson saw himself as a great slave to idleness, frequently berating himself for his laziness and beseeching God to forgive him for the times he has been idle and praying for strength and resilience to resist its bewitching allure. He saw laziness as a swamp that would suck him into greater vices - particularly those of masturbation and sexual fantasy. He found nothing productive in laziness, as Proust did and instead saw it as an insidious sucker of resolve and confidence, always undermining the best efforts of mankind in general and himself in particular.

Yet, despite this private disgust at his own laziness, Johnson called one of his projects The Idler and speaks of it in less fearful terms. He jokes about how easy it is to feel good about achieving some small successes as so many people are too lazy to do anything and says that those same people label anything that is merely impossible. As much as he hated it in himself, he did admit that laziness is one of the less vicious sins, as a truly lazy person is too lazy to do anything really heinous.

Montaigne also talks a lot about laziness. It’s clear that as a child, he was frequently castigated for his idle temper and says how the risk was not that he would do something bad, only that he would do nothing at all. The worry of his family was not that he would be an evil person, only a useless one.

Even as an older man he admits his soul is so lazy that he doesn’t measure his “fortune by its height but by its pleasantness.” However, Montaigne, being the self-accepting person that he is, has no problem with these priorities. By the end of his essays, having struggled through the forbidding notion that philosophy is about learning to die well, then as a way to live well, understands that it’s good enough to have lived at all.

I come back to one of my favourite quotes, from the last essay;

“What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done much today.’ - ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’"

How much happier Samuel Johnson would have been had he came to this conclusion. Even Proust has to justify his lazy, wasted years as grist for his mill and fodder for his book. We should all take those words of Montaigne to heart, accept that our lazy days are still days we have lived and that’s all that’s required of us in this life. And sometimes .. sometimes those lazy days are the ones where we produce the things that really last.

Like this terrible painting that could live on this wall for decades to come.

Review: Journey Back to Freedom by Catherine Johnson

I’ve had Olaudah Equiano’s An Interesting Narrative for a long time and it’s probably the book that has most often been at the top of my reading pile that has fallen back down it. This is because I’m ‘not in the mood for it’ or that it seems ‘heavy’. I’m not sure I want to face something as depressing and soul-crushingly sad as the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps it’s some buried racism in me. 

I’m working in a number of classes in my new school, classes that have a corridor with all the levelled reading books in it. These books are not only scheme books but some proper books as well and I saw that one was about Olaudah Equiano, called Journey Back to Freedom. I also saw it was by Catherine Johnson and that name tugged my memory somewhere.

Sadly, that memory was The Curious Case of the Lady Caraboo, a book I’d found cheap and exploitative, making up faux rape backstories for a character who was far more peculiar and interesting to have that fictional slop put on her. At least Olaudah Equiano was African so Johnson couldn’t artificially blacken him up in ways that act counter to the main narrative.

Alas, because I haven’t yet read his Interesting Narrative (and because it’s deep in some box, some-where) I can’t really assess this book for egregious changes in history to serve her story. From the notes at the back it seems that Johnson didn’t fully get on with Equiano. There’s the big stuff, that he worked on slave ships and as an overseer even as a free man. She also describes him as sounding smug. He wheeled and dealed his way out of chattel slavery, I think he has something to be smug about. 

However much as I was willing to rag on Johnson, Journey Back to Freedom is a decently told story to children that puts across what slavery and the slave trade actually were and the horrors of that while still connecting it with things they understand and can somewhat relate to.

It also emphasises how slavery was experienced differently in different places. Being indulged in England, working hard but as a team with free people on the ships, and the worst kind in the plantations of Jamaica. There’s a really good point that the slave owners of Jamaica went beyond the evil of owning people for the sake of free labour but actually developed a desire to hurt the slaves for no reason - even if it was counterintuitive to their productivity. I doubt there are any stories for primary-aged children that include the word ‘sadism’ but this came close.

There are exciting moments told in simple language, when a stupid captain ignores Equiano and the rest of his crew and steers his ship into rocks, or the battle at sea where a musket ball passed through his officer’s cheek. There’s also a good representation of the rough-and-tumble camaraderie of the ship.

Despite my animus against Catherine Johnson, I think this is a very good and readable account and a good introduction to Oluadah Equiano, which adds a little more nuance and detail about the slave trade. 

There is another children’s book about Equiano by Dr Robert Hume called Oluadah Equiano, The Slave with the Loud Voice but I should probably stop reading children’s versions of his story and get on with reading the real thing. 

Review: The Fraud by Zadie Smith

I've previously talked on this blog about the writings of William Harrison Ainsworth and some writings about him. He features prominently in Zadie Smith's newest novel, The Fraud. 

 I love Zadie Smith in concept, she often sets her books in places I know intimately. The school I used to work at was mentioned in her novel NW, and I met her and she was lovely. But I’ve never got on with her work, I reckon it’s because one of her biggest influences is Henry James and I’ve never got on with him either. Yet The Fraud is almost designed to appeal to me, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The Fraud is partially about the Tichbourne claimant, a man who said he was the lost heir to a large inheritance, despite being obviously (and I mean ludicrously obviously) not. This was a story that took the Victorian era by storm and it’s one of those little stories I’ve long been interested in, I love a bold con-artist and have read and written about Psalmanazar, Princess Caraboo and Martin Guerre. The claimant, Arthur Orton, was buried in St Pancras Cemetery, one of my lockdown haunts.

The story of the Tichbourne claimant is told through its impact on the Ainsworth family. This consists of fading writer, William Harrison Ainsworth, his two grown daughters, his new wife (previously his maid) their daughter and housekeeper Mrs Touchet, who is the point-of-view character. I’m a big fan of William Harrison Ainsworth and have enjoyed all of his books I have read. I also find him an interesting person and loved Shark Alley, a novel written by his modern biographer, Stephen Carver. (Who is mentioned in the acknowledgements).

Through the experience of Mr Bogle, a key witness in the Tichbourne case, the reader is taken to Jamaica in the era of slavery, a section of the book that is striking in its offhand brutality. People are mutilated, boiled alive and subject to a terrifying disease called yaws but these horrors are everyday events and more powerful for the lack of drama attributed to them. It’s also interesting how confused Bogle is when the English complain about being ‘made slaves’ when arguing over the finer details of representation.

While the title of The Fraud seems to put the Tichbourne claimant story at the centre of the book, it’s easily the weakest element. Mrs Touchet, our viewpoint character, is dragged along to the trial by William Harrison Ainsworth’s second wife but becomes deeply engaged and invested in the witness, Andrew Bogle. The absolute strangeness of the case is touched upon, the fact that Arthur Orton is nothing like the missing claimant in body or education. That he speaks no French, when the person he’s claiming to be grew up with it as a first language, that he’s missing a tattoo, that he’s of a completely different build. The book also goes into the delusional nature of his supporters, people like Ainsworth’s second wife Sarah, believe in Orton as a bizarre statement of class consciousness. She’d probably be an anti-vaxxer these days.

If anyone in the book is designated the fraud (though most of the characters are conning themselves or others about something) it’s probably William Harrison Ainsworth. He’s depicted as a man who had initial success as an author because he was so liked and likeable, with a gift for joy, but not one for writing. Touchet often talks about how she pretends to read his books, groans at the historical details in them and finds his books terribly dull. She says that he’s easy to like, his books are not. I happen to disagree. I find him to be an author who is very good at creating vivid images and set-pieces, but not so good at dialogue. He’d have been a killer silent film director. There is a sense that he and Arthur Orton have both managed to fail up, where any failure would be disastrous for Bogle or Touchet.

Mrs Touchet is a really interesting figure. Seemingly puritanical and frosty, she is also the lesbian lover of Ainsworth’s first wife, Frances and a BDSM mistress to Ainsworth himself. She’s tetchy, irritable and I loved her line about living in the countryside, “the lamb didst bore her.” She’s an abolitionist because she’s drawn into it to impress Frances but is then horrified at the real stories she hears from Bogle. In some ways she is the real fraud of the book, as the real Mrs Touchet died before most of the events in the book even happened. The character is integral to the novel but in reality was not even there.

The most mysterious character, fraud-wise, is Andrew Bogle. The courtroom and the book initially place him in the position of loyal servant, but how much of what he does is driven by survival or even hatred? He seems the most clear and transparent of the characters even as he is the least.

The three elements of this book don’t dovetail into each other but rather reflect and rub each other in strange ways. The William Harrison Ainsworth frame story seems to be particularly disconnected from the Tichbourne case and Bogle’s narrative and really only makes sense as a narrative choice in allusive or eliding ways, only really seeming to fit when thought about. In some moods this strikes me as more satisfying than if there had been clear links, and in other moods it strikes me as less. It does mean I’m happy to give some of Zadie Smith’s other novels a second go. 

A tête-à-tête between Johnson and AI

For some reason I’ve been getting lots of adverts of for AI tools, especially ones for writers. The ones on Facebook are ver funny, they have hundreds of comments but are all hidden because each one is pointing out that using AI to write something for you is not writing. Youtube has taken its own turn, deciding to advertise programmes that can write, package and release your book in under an hour. I thought I’d have a little play. 

I picked www.tinywow.com because it was free. 

First I asked it to write a short story of three paragraphs and used as a prompt ‘Samuel Johnson’s relationship with his little brother’, as that’s the theme of the novel I’m currently writing. 

Aside from the fact that this isn’t really a story, it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end, the AI made up Samuel’s previously unknown younger brother, Thomas. I did actually try and name Sam’s brother in my prompt but there was a character limit to the prompt and Nathaniel didn’t fit.

Unlike Nathaniel, Sam was really nice to Thomas, becoming his mentor and becoming a ‘testament to the power of sibling love and the joy of intellectual companionship’. It’s almost the exact opposite relationship to the one I’m writing about.

Next I asked it to write a 15,000 word essay about what Samuel Johnson would have thought about AI. Aside from the essay being a but cluttered for the short word count (with a new subheading every hundred words) the piece reads pretty well at first glance.

 It introduces Samuel Johnson as ‘an 18th-century English writer, poet, and moralist, was known for his keen intellect and wit. He is best known for his compilation of the first comprehensive English dictionary. Johnson's work often reflected his views on morality, society, and human nature.’ Interesting that some of the phrases used to describe him are exactly the same ones from the ‘story’, that must be all this particular algorithm knows of Samuel Johnson. The piece then often talks about Samuel’s beliefs in ‘honesty, integrity and compassion’ and says that his ‘philosophy centered around the idea that individuals have a moral duty to uphold principles of decency and kindness in their lives.’

The AI uses these generalities throughout to make it sound like the ‘essay’ is about something without it having to have any real content. I think it could be argued that Johnson did have a very strong belief in the moral duty to uphold principles of dignity (kindness perhaps being a little less certain). However, most writers and thinkers could be described as having those same beliefs. This is especially true of Samuel Johnson, who was a masterful repackager of standard moral teachings but not a hugely original thinker in himself. 

A more sophisticated AI might have used some more particularly Johnsonian phrases and ideas. His notion of ‘the vacuity of life’, that life is essentially an empty hole we fill with the things that are important to us, could have had some really interesting interplay with the notion of AI. Would Johnson have viewed AI as a way of filling this hole, or as something pernicious, taking away the important things that occupy us?

The ‘truest’ paragraph of the piece was the one about Johnson’s perspective on scientific progress; ‘Johnson viewed scientific progress with a mix of curiosity and caution. While he appreciated the pursuit of knowledge, he also warned against the dangers of unchecked technological advancement that could lead to moral dilemmas and societal disruptions.’ This is very true. Johnson loved science and had his own shed where he did dangerous chemical experiments. Yet, social stability was his big shibboleth, even as he tweaked the nose of the gentry, he believed in the arbitrary hierarchy because to shake it was to threaten that stability. 

Oddly, the piece becomes more casual as it goes on, with many exhortations to imagine Samuel Johnson doing various things.  ‘Picture Samuel Johnson scratching his head…Imagine Johnson scrolling through his Twitter feed…let's envision Johnson perched on a virtual soapbox…If Johnson sat down for tea with Siri, what discussions would unfold?’ I think these are probably pre-programmed methods to make an essay more engaging, yet I can’t help but wonder if they also have something to do with his imagine being used in a popular meme. (I remember once, volunteering at Doctor Johnson’s House and some students came in out of curiosity and were very excited that it was the house of ‘that meme guy’.)

The back of the ‘essay’ is also filled with rhetorical questions. Presumably, this is a way to pad the word count without having to make any conclusions or say anything definitive. It ends by bidding adieu to our imaginary tête-à-tête between Johnson and AI - becoming oddly Frenchified . Aside from anything, it shows that the AI has clearly not yet gobbled up the works of Johnson or even the Samuel Johnson Quote Page. No writer about Samuel Johnson could write a whole piece about him without one quote. 

Of course, it is impossible to know what Samuel Johnson would have made of AI, it’s quite a silly question (and so perfect for this blog). As someone who said that, “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors”, I imagine that a machine that steals from them to create contentless waffle would not appeal to him. 

The picture at the top was an image generated on the same site of 'Samuel Johnson playing ping-pong'.