Christmas Review: The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers became Dickens’s first novel, despite not beginning it’s life as one. It’s his cheeriest, cosiest and happiest books and it also owes a big debt to the eighteenth century novelists before him.

The original idea was that a man called Robert Seymour would create pictures of funny sporting mishaps surrounding a group of dim-witted Londoners who formed a club dedicated to country pursuits. In order for the punter to get their money’s worth, some young writer would cobble together a loose story from the pictures to bulk out the publication. However, that young writer was Boz, aka Charles Dickens, and he had other ideas. He decreed that the pictures should be driven by the writing and that the club should have a wider remit to allow for a greater variety of comic set-pieces. Robert Seymour presumably didn’t take it well, he killed himself (though he’d tried before).

Starting as it did, Pickwick Papers is naturally episodic but develops its themes and plot as it goes on. As such, it immediately has a more eighteenth century feeling, echoing Dickens’s own facourite authors like Smollett and Fielding. There’s also something Mr Spectator about Mr Pickwick and his Pickwickians, one of those loosely defined clubs, though nominally a scientific one. Mr Pickwick having published a very influential article on ‘tittlebats’ in the ponds of Hampstead Heath. It turns out tittlebats are sticklebats. There’s something a little Scribleran about the odd jabs at scientific societies. 

Samuel Pickwick, Tracy Tupman, Alexander Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winkle are elected as roving reporters, set to go out and explore the places they can get to through the coaching network, falling into various scrapes. In many ways, this book is a celebration of the coach/post system, with many of the events happening in ludicrously well-appointed inns and the characters able to nip across the country in mere days. The downsides of such travel are also featured, and I can’t say I’d have much liked having an outside ticket for several hours in the rain - though Bob Sawyer showed it could be fun if you had the right kind of booze.

As the book continues, the themes of innocence and experience, honest dealing and trickery begin to emerge. Mr Pickwick himself becomes a more rounded character, a mad approaching old age with a youthful energy and enthusiasm, who’ll get in all sorts of scrapes to support the course of true love and will face all sorts of privations to obstinately make a point. At one point he tries to ‘call up a sneer for the first time in his life’ and fails.. I like a character that can fail to sneer. His childishness does include a big dose of naivety, and that is set-off by Samuel Weller.

Weller was a later addition to the cast of characters which coincided with The Pickwick Papers really taking off. He’s a cockney bootblack with a ‘comical’ accent, a big heart and a greater dose of street smarts than Pickwick. I was prepared to find him rather annoying but I warmed. There’s a self confidence in him that creates very funny situations when everyone else is losing their cool. I especially liked his relationship with his own father, Tony.  

Tony is a coachman and my favourite character in the book. He has a skin the colour of ‘underdone roast beef’, and a dreaded fear of widows, after being ensnared by one. He did his best for his little boy Sam, turfing him out on the street to gain smarts and his mortified when Sam has been outwitted. The two have a casual, matey relationship that grows deeper as the book progresses. When Pickwick has a spot of bother in a prison, Tony suggests smuggling him up in a piano. Later, when Sam wants to be imprisoned to join Pickwick, he ‘borrows’ money from Tony and Tony ‘presses’ the charges. The scene where they all stride happily arm in arm into the Fleet brought a huge smile to my face.

There are many other memorable characters (it’s Dickens after all). These include the villainous Jingle and his servant Job Trotter. Jingle is another character with a particular way of speaking, it’s very truncated, described as ‘telegrammatic’ which works really well when he’s a conman with quick patter (his description of the woman accidentally knocking her head off had me laughing out loud), but less when he is trying on other masks. Job Trotter is defined by his supernatural ability to cry and his silent laugh, described as if he loves his joke to much to share any of it. 

There’s a subplot about Shepherd Stiggens, an evangelist, temperance vicar with a fondness for pineapple rum. He lurks around Tony Weller’s wife and drives him into rages he does a terrible job to suppress. I loved the meeting of ‘The Brick Lane Branch of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association’ - a very well observed name. There’s the odious lawyer, Fogg who is an “elderly, pimple-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man”. There’s the violent Wardle, the grasping Widow, the silly Bob Sawyer… oddly the characters with the least life are Pickwick’s compatriots, Tupman, Winkle and Snodgrass. 

I recently purchased a Toby Jug collection. It’s a small one. It consists of literary figures called Samuel. There are three Samuels and two jugs. The first is a Samuel Johnson jug, the second is one featuring Samuels Pickwick and Weller. It might not be a coincidence that Pickwick shares the same name as Johnson - as there is something Sam and Bozzy about Weller and Pickwick’s relationship (as well as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza). The quick temper and sense of righteousness also ties Pickwick and Johnson together, though I don’t see Johnson as a naive person. It’s also interesting that the closest out of the original group of Pickwickians is Nathaniel WInkle, who shares a name with Johnson’s little brother. 

Pickwick Papers is a book with a wonky timeline that features a number of seasons. The spirit of the book is largely sunny and joyful (even despite surprisingly large number of references to suicide) but there is a famous set of events that have Christmas at Dingley Dell. It’s almost like a dry-run for parts of A Christmas Carol, with feasting, festivity and Christian charity. There’s also a story told about a man who learns the ‘true’ meaning of Christmas with the aid of goblins presenting him with visions of the world. I write this as Christmas songs are playing, in a room festooned with decorations and my Mum cross-stitching on the other side of the table. Christmas is coming, and if you are reading this, it’s here and been,

A merry Christmas to everyone and a happy new year.  

Review: The Beau Monde by Hannah Greig

Back when I used Twitter, I enjoyed the tweets by Hannah Greig, so I was happy to come across The Beau Monde, her book about the British elites in the eighteenth century. It clearly started as a PHD thesis and that skews the tone away from a more popular, storytelling style of writing but it is clear and very readable.

The book exists to make a particular argument, the worlds of court and high society were not a shiny, vacuous bunch of spendthrifts, chortling ad scandalmongering while the real influence was being wielded by the emerging middle classes. They actual did stuff, had power and adapted to the new social world that was being built throughout the century.

A key concept was that of fashion. While it was important to follow fashion, the Beau Monde (or the Bon Ton) also created and regulated it. Unlike today, a fashionable item was not reliant on a brand, it wasn’t necessarily who made a thing that made it fashionable but who else had one. If new candlesticks were being made, they were being made to be like those in another fashionable house. In this way they weren’t merely consumers, but creators of the fashions - and that those fashions spoke of intricate networks of privilege, political persuasion and intimacy.  

One of the most fascinating chapters was about diamonds. These clear, glittering stones became the precious stone to wear and a person (male or female) could make their mark and stake their place in the fashionable world by the amount of diamonds and the craftsmanship of setting them. Yet this doesn’t mean that they simply had lots of diamonds, they pooled them. So if a family member had an important date, like a first presentation in court, the family would recall all the diamonds through their network, diamonds would be borrowed from friends, and all these diamonds would be reworked for that occasion before being called for and reworked for a different person and a different occasion. The chapter showed how the loaning, giving and reworking of diamonds strengthened family and even political relations.In fact, a new rich family simply buying new diamonds didn’t have the same advantage, as they missed out on the acts of social cohesion that the loaning of diamonds created. The chapter also showed how precarious being a jeweller was, as the work was mostly resetting, not selling new rocks.

A similar game was played with opera boxes. Keeping a box was expensive, so families would pool resources, not particularly out of a love of opera but because it was an arena for keeping connections and making statements. Two families sharing an opera box was often the signal of a new marriage, or the cementing of a political alliance.

There’s another great chapter about the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh. Much has been said of how these were great social mixing places (like the Rotunda and the theatre) that the cheap-ish entry ticket meant servants could afford to dress up and go for a special treat. However, Greig argues that the Beau Monde did not use this places to mix, but to meet each other and perform their status to others. There were deep invisible lines that meant that those in the circle knew where to be and what to do, and those without could watch. They were all together but all distinct. 

What was the purpose of all this, other than maintaining the caste? Politics. Whitehall, which had been Europe’s biggest palace had largely burnt down but the commons still met in what was left. The sessions of parliament set ‘the season’ and various social events were delayed if the house sat long. More than this, there wasn’t a big enough court complex to have a Versailles-like secluded world, so the business of politics fanned out across London and happened at the opera, theatre, pleasure garden and ball. Systems of patronage still existed, political parties were formed on dance floors and declared in fashion choices. Every act of the Beau Monde was a part of an interconnected web of very carefully balanced relationships that maintained and held commercial, political and cultural power.

Was I convinced by these arguments? Sort of. Certainly, it gave me a look at the world of the rich that presented them as more than tittering fops. It’s also very well argued and features many fascinating anecdotes, often told in their own words from letters and diaries. I’m always going to be wedded to my Grub St, my booksellers, my Johnson and Lunar Society as the true influencers on the eighteenth century and beyond, but I’m less dismissive of the Chesterfield and Walpoles. It was a good book that taught me and showed me a different view. I won’t be convinced that today’s aristocracy are a waste of time that needs abolishing though.

Review: Selected Writings by Abiezer Coppe

 Having loved Abiezer Coppe’s ‘Fiery Flying Rolls’ in The Mad Crew, I was keen to read more and so purchased his Selected Writings.

It starts with an interesting introduction, featuring as full a biography of Coppe as is possible, much of it coming from the work of Anthony Wood (who appeared as a narrator in the fiction, An Instance of the Fingerpost). A riotous student in Oxford, he became sucked into the more anarchistic side of new religious movements and eventually became one of the key figures in the very loosely organised ‘ranter’ group. He preached around the Midlands, often drunk, preached wildly on the south side of the Thames and then was accused of entering Coventry with two women sharing his bed. There he was arrested before being sent to Newgate in London, which he was let out of on the condition that he retracted his previous views. On his release, he seems to have carried on his preaching in London, and then setting up a conventicle in Barnes under the name of Dr Higham, where he died.

The book then starts with the two ‘Fiery Flying Rolls’. Despite having read them a couple of days before in the other anthology, I read them again. There’s a power in the writing, drawn from deep passion, deep anger at the rich and the corrupt and a deep glee at seeing them ‘get it’ when Christ inevitably (and shortly) returns again. They are also great writing. Coppe’s use of rhythm, alliteration and repetition is amazing. From that beginning,”My dear one/all or none/ everyone under the sun/ mine own” to the “unity, universality, universality, unity”, the text just flows.

I love the savageness of it, his “plaguey, filthy, nasty holiness”, that threatens the uncaring rich with “being served in thine own sauce” and accuses them of being elbow deep in others blood that even soap won’t wash off. I love his insistence that the poor are the same flesh as the rich and deserve love. That real communion is not an act of ritual but one of sharing. As he says, “I am about my act. My strange act. And when you hear of it, your ears will tingle.” It’s thrilling stuff.

Then we get to his ‘Remonstrance’, the text where he has to officially retract the things he said and wrote. He starts off by claiming that his works can’t fall under the new blasphemy laws, because those laws were written in response to his work - that they couldn’t be against the law if the law was written afterwards.

He says that there have been lies told about him, like taking two women to Coventry, that he parroted blasphemies when he was under other people’s influence but not since he achieved his own spiritual maturity. He claims many people have cited them the father of their babies and that he has accepted them, not because he was, but because to spurn them would be to starve innocent children.

He makes a point that God has often changed his mind. That he is not into circumcision as he used to be, that he used to set challenges for favourites, like telling Hosea to marry a prostitute. He denies he ever said God was in people (though he certainly did say that) instead saying that God is one with everything.

He claims that he never swore until he was twenty-seven and that he is big enough to be “neither offended by my weak brother, which eateth herbs. Nor judge my strong brother, which eateth meat.” He also says that he never denied the existence of sin, but feels it a rank hypocrisy to go after the sin of drink and not the sin of ignoring the poor.

The whole piece is a retraction, but it then also pushes forward on the things he really cares about. When it does come across as grovelling, it comes across as arch and insincere and then strikes back in full vigour when he can attack the christians who care more for form than charity. I’m surprised and worked and he was released from prison. An imprisonment he typically defines as ‘tedious’.

There are two short pieces in there as well. One in a poem about a true Christian, which sounds pretty orthodox. The other is called ‘Divine Fireworks’ and is something of a mini return to form. Not only does it use fire imagery but it’s an apocalyptic vision. The repeated phrase in it is, “It’s a whipping time. The day burns like an oven.” Perhaps the authorities weren’t so worried about Coppe then, perhaps the meaning is suitably clothed in the allegory of the vision or perhaps it simply didn’t sell, but Coppe didn’t get in trouble for it.

The back cover features a warning from the ‘Rolls’, “Read it through, and laugh not at it; if thou dost I’ll destroy thee, and laugh at they destruction.” That said, Coppe can easily be read for entertainment. Obscure 400 year old religious pamphlets aren’t an obvious good read, but Abiezer Coppe’s are and more people should read them.

Review: The Mad Crew: A Ranter Anthology

The Mad Crew: A Ranter Anthology is a book edited by Kirk Watson and sold through Amazon’s self-publishing division. I’m not saying all books published this way are bad (I’ve got my own book, Death of a Dream-Pedlar on sale there at a very reasonable price) but for classics and non-fiction alike, it can often be a cynical cash-grab.

The Mad Crew is very nicely formatted collection of well chosen piece, with each piece conveying a different aspect of some of the loose collection of people who are now known as Ranters. These were the extreme edges of the many ideas swirling through the early days of The Commonwealth. The country had declared war on the King, fought him, beat him, put him on trial and executed him. As the King was the microcosm of God’s macrocosm – it was like all bets were off and all new futures possible. There were the Levellers who called for smaller wealth disparity, Diggers who held land in common… and the Ranters, something of the lunatic fringe.

One thing that ties the Ranters together is a belief that God is all and so nothing can happen outside of God. This means that even acts considered sins are done through God. What’s more, the Original Sin, eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge brought the concept of sin into the world and salvation lies in being as innocent of good and bad as Adam and Eve. What’s more, if God is one, then all people are one and wealth should be shared (and wives…possibly).

I’m not very sure if the first piece, ‘The Mad Crew’ is really a piece of Ranter writing, I think it’s more a case of attacking through parody. Not only are the Ranter arguments presented very weakly, quite absurdly, but there’s an almost moronic glee taken in the notion that who sins most is most holy. What’s more, the anonymous author of ‘The Mad Crew’ has a habit of expressing things in the most eye-catching but provocative way. The oneness of God is described as, “When people drink, they drink God. They lie with God in their beds.” There’s also the very striking, “God is the whore and the whoremaster.” A lot of the book is about whoring and drinking – he repeats many times how he enjoys it, that God loves him for it and he will continue doing it. The level of cartoonish glee is what makes the piece seem a possible parody.

Laurence Clarkson’s ‘A Single Eye’ is a far more mystical work, phrased as a dialogue, it tries to use classical logic and scholastic-type arguments to argue the case of Ranter ideas. He has some very interesting notion, that God saying “let there be light” is God creating himself, that all people have the light of God in them and they can bring it out more. It defines sin as a product of human imagination and almost sounds a little Alestair Crowley-esque, “If that within thee, do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.” It’s a pretty cogent piece of explanation but it lacks the energy and glee of the first.

Poor old ‘A Single Eye’ also pales in comparison to Abiezer Coppe’s wonderful ‘A Fiery Flying Roll’ (and its sequel ‘A Second Fiery Flying Roll’). This is an energetic, brilliantly rhythmic, passionate piece of prose. It grabs at the beginning with its call to, 

    “My Dear One

All or None

Everyone under the Sunne

Mine Own

 

Though he does talk about, “sin and transgression is finished and ended’, he’s not really talking about those aspects. His big thing is simple. God is coming back and the rich ought to be donning their brown trousers in preparation. He calls God the ‘might Leveller’, though says he wasn’t involved in the Civil War himself. God’s not just coming like a thief in the night, he’s coming like a highwayman, thundering and demanding money. He will break the rich with his little finger and they are to “bow or howl.” The rich that look away from the poor with have their eyes ripped out and those whose hands are stained in blood will have it up to their elbows till soap won’t wash it off.

He talks about his visions, of being forcefed the word of God till he shat it out into the form you are reading it. He talks of his, “secret mysteries and mysterious secrets”. He talks about how he stares at posh carriages and gnashes his teeth, but how he hugs beggars, even noseless ones. What’s more;

“I am about my act. My strange act and when you hear of it both your ears will tingle.” I’m not sure about ears, but the hairs on the back of my neck tingle a number of times whilst reading this book.

The last piece, “The Light and dark Sides of God’ by Jacob Bauthumley is a huge shift. This takes a very reasonable tone, seemingly neither trying to argue or preach, only meditate out loud. It argues that God is unknowable because he is so inextricably linked with what there is to experie
nce and how we can experience it. God merelys says, “I AM” and that’s all that can be said about him. He’s in all things, which makes organised religion a bit pointless. He’s “one, intire, perfect and immutable being”, there is no bad in God – it can’t even be understood. There are, “no distinctions in God.”

I really enjoyed Bauthumley’s description of the Trinity. The first is God’s love for us, the second is our love for God and the third is our love for each other. Communion is the act of coming together and sharing. Heaven is a state of peace and not a place in the sky. Sin is taking the self away from God – many of them notions that have some currency today.  For this thoughtful, non-violent and peaceful book, he had a hole drilled through his tongue. 

While Abiezer Coppe and his fiery, flying rolls were the easy highlight of the book, the more thoughtful pieces gave greater nuance to the ranter notions, whilst ‘The Mad Crew’ made it cartoonish. The Mad Crew as a collection, however, is extremely well put together and interesting.

 

Review: Mania and Literary Style by Clement Hawes

 

Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart begins with a sincere belief, that understanding supposed ‘mad’ writing through pathological means is wrong. This is not only because it puts a needless straitjacket on interesting and creative interpretations of a work but because it’s what the rich and powerful want you to do, they want you to dismiss new ideas and enthusiasm as madness. People like Christopher Smart wrote as they did, not because of madness, but because they were writing in a rhetoric of mania.

First the book needs to define the manic style, give examples of its use and then apply it to the writing of Christopher Smart – and the book does it very well. I was a little sceptical at first – Jubilate Agno certainly struck me as a work where Smart is working through his thoughts, ideas and psychoses but it is also true that writing it off as only the product of an unspecified madness is to diminish an extraordinary work of literature. 

 

Hawes begins by defining the features of this manic rhetoric. Beginning with a feeling of socio-economic resentment, a use of lists, mixtures of genre bending and a ‘peculiarly serious playfulness with language’. All of this grounded in what he calls the ‘manic first person’, a peculiar, porous form of first person that sometimes incorporates the divine and the listener within it. The manic rhetoric also includes certain tropes and ideas, many of them with a biblical base. He calls them topos and topoi. As a writer, Hawes loves his topos and topoi, everything is a topos or topoi, at one point I began wondering whether I was a topos or topoi.

 

The book theorises this manic style was developed in the messy time of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period shortly after. In this time, the people went to war against their anointed king, won it, put him on trial and executed him. With the old way of structuring society ripped up, there was a brief period where multiple alternatives competed for dominance. Being the time it was, these ideas were naturally conceived and disseminated within biblical example and structures. While this revolution seemed to have ended with the reversion of the status quo, one of the groups vying for a say were those later known as ranters. One of these ranters that forms a case study in this book was called Abiezer Coppe. 

 

I have to thank Hawes for introducing me to Abiezer Coppe and his Fiery, Flying Roll in particular. Immediately after reading this I bought myself a copy of it and will write about it separately, but it’s a phenomenal, strange, funny and powerful work. In his writing, Coppe took is place as an outsider, thinking thoughts that were considered extreme even in that time of intellectual maelstrom and turning it into a liminal space - essentially he positions himself as someone who is not on the edge but the doorway between different worlds.

 

As a random aside, I also learnt a little about a Quaker called James Naylor who rode into Bristol on a donkey with naked women praising him and singing, and that the Quaker mode of calling each other ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ was not a symptom of excessive formality but actually of radical informality - those being the informal versions of ‘you’ and ‘your’.

The next writer who serves as a case study is Swift. He’s adopting the rhetoric of mania to parody it. He uses many of the features that Hawes finds in Coppe and will later find in Smart. Swift also supposes this manic rhetoric to be the default mode of a Grub Street hack, as he particularly shows in the narrator of A Tale of the Tub. Swift doesn’t get a lot of space though, as Hawes is keen to move onto the real subject of the book (and the reason I got it), Christopher Smart and Jubilate Agno.

First, Hawes locates Jubilate Agno as a work that sits in almost the exact space as Swift’s parody writer, between the ranters and Grub Street, but for real. There’s a lot of interesting discussion about the structure of the piece, particularly the alternating of ‘versicles’ beginning ‘let’ and those beginning ‘for’. There’s been a lot of rethinking about the poem from this angle, with it first being printed as clumps of ‘let’ followed by clumps of ‘for’, to being published with alternating ‘let’ and ‘for’. One interesting idea in this book is that it was not intended to be read by two people, one reading ‘let’ and one ‘for’, but for one person reading the ‘let’ parts out loud and the ‘for’ parts in their head. The idea that the poem is celebrating the public and the private. Personally, I feel that the purpose of the poem changed as it was being written and so may have been intended to be read in different ways at different times - and then not intended to be read at all.

One thing Hawes does brilliantly is show how wonderfully slippery Jubilate Agno is and how the constant wordplay and constant shifts of meaning in it make it at once elusive and all-encompassing. He states that the poem works in “a state of absolute metaphor in which anything can potentially stand for anything else”. He also says that in the poem, “all creation is related, so that arbitrary connections are just as meaningful as logical ones.” Another quote I wrote down as being extremely accurate to reading Jubilate Agno was, “Smart’s wordplay is a renegotiation of the gulf between the immeasurable realms of the private and idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the universal on the other.” It’s a poem where the word ‘translated’ is used a lot and things are constantly being translated into other things.

He’s great at unpacking lines of Smart, in more detail than even the footnotes of the Oxford edition. He writes a chapter about the ‘horn’ section of the poem, where Smart uses metaphors of horns to write of his emasculation and the loss of his inheritance and family, transfers into boasting about the Horned Moses (an idea born of mistranslation that Moses has horns), which then transfers into talk about horns of plenty. His point is to explain how these different elements reposition Smart and his masculinity in different ways, leading to a writing that is oddly positioned outside gender in a way he saw a similar to a passage in Coppe. Personally, I saw it as a way of self therapy, the section starts with huge hostility to his wife, who he sees as cuckolding him, working through those feelings and ending up as a call for God to be merciful to his wife.

Finally, Hawes arrives at his last big idea on Jubilate Agno, which he really bigs up as the key to the poem. A notion of space in the poem, redrawing boundaries between those inside his Godly ark and outside. It was a complicated idea, but I took it to mean that this manic rhetoric grew as a way of expressing a utopia but the trouble with utopias is that they are dead on arrival - and so the slipperiness of manic rhetoric is to create an idea of utopia that doesn’t congeal into something dead but stay as an alive idea. He says, “Smart’s incessant wordplay, which often induces a sense of infinite semiotic regress, works against any possible petrification of his exuberant work into dogma.”

The last part of the book is about how Smart has been read and interpreted and about how he’s ultimately been done dirty and reduced into a diagnosis (often the diagnosis I’ve made of him having a bi-polar disorder). While he doesn’t deny that Smart may have been suffering a neurochemical illness, his writing is more than that. As Hawes sees it, his writing (like Abiezer Coppe’s before him) is political, not pathological and to read it as the later ultimately serves the voice of the powerful over the powerless.

 

 

On Idler 32: On Sleep

 I have a few books to review but my thoughts on them have not properly formed yet, so I go, as I often do to one of Johnson’s essays. The one I picked was from the 25th of November, close to the date I am writing this but from the year 1758.

It’s about sleep and that appealed to me because I am currently feeling very sleepy. However, Johnson’s thoughts on sleep spin off into some very uncomfortable directions, ones that may keep a reader awake.

He begins neutrally (and Johnsonianly) enough, by talking about how we are so used to sleep that we accept it as a given and ask few questions about it. Yet sleep is a very strange thing. Even in the twenty-first century we have only flimsy ideas of what it is and why we need it. We have theories about the repackaging ideas and strengthening neural paths. We know good sleep knits our bodies back together and reduce stress - we still don’t know exactly why or how.

Sleep is a huge change in us. We go from moving, active souls to ones dead to the world (even those who move around a lot as I do). As Johnson says; “the gay and the gloomy, the witty and the dull, the clamorous and the silent, the busy and the idle, are all overpowered by the gentle tyrant, and all lie down in the equality of sleep.”

Sleep is a great leveller. All people need it and succumb to it eventually. Even Alexander the Great needed sleep, and regarded that as one of the main things that reminded him that he was human. There have been people who tried to do without it, Margaret Thatcher famously said she only had four hours of sleep a night, we don’t know how that affected her or helped cause the dementia she suffered late in life. Ronald Reagan also claimed to sleep four hours a night and succumbed to it, Trump claims to have only three.

Johnson also notes that sleep is the end of waking emotion, that all emotions are turned off by sleep - and that we are glad to do it. This is where he starts walking down a very dark path. 

“There is no height of happiness or honour, from which man does not eagerly descend to a state of unconscious repose.” Even the happiest, most fulfilled person reaches a part of the day when they want nothing more to do than sleep. In some ways it makes us equal, there is not state or position in life which we don’t want to let slide into unconsciousness. Those “distinctions of mankind are more show than value” if even the greatest can’t bear to be conscious of their greatness for more than a few hours. Johnson sees people’s desire to sleep as a sign of their unhappiness at being awake. “All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied, and surely none can be much envied who are not pleased with themselves.”

What’s more, sleep is not enough. We try and escape ourselves in other ways too. As well as sleep, Alexander took away his consciousness by drinking. If it’s not drink, it’s a daydream, being lost in a good book, music. “Almost every man has some art by which he steals his thoughts away from his present state.” To Johnson we need sleep because being awake is such a painful state.

Although Johnson would lay in long, he wasn’t very good at getting to sleep and would have people talking to him till late in the night. He mentions this as well, saying that company is just another way of being outside oneself. “In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert.” 

In the end, for Johnson all we really want in life is “forgetfulness of ourselves”. That is a gloomy thought but I’m in a gloomy mood. Off to bed. 

Review: The Early Career of Samuel Johnson by Thomas Kaminski

 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.