Birch, Johnson, and Elizabeth Carter: An Episode of 1738-39

Abstract

Dr. Johnson's twenty-five-year friendship with the historian, antiquary, and clubman, Thomas Birch (1705-66), is significant for several reasons. First, it covers Johnson's earliest and most obscure years in London; second, it shows him in a curious association with a man of nearly the same age whose contemporary eminence and excellent social and intellectual connections contrasted remarkably with his own during the years before the Dictionary; and third, it gave rise to a large number of little-known Johnsonian passages in Birch's various correspondences. The Birch papers in the British Museum reveal their compiler as, among many other things, a voluminous if unsystematic and usually noncommittal chronicler of Johnson's career between 1738 and 1765. As a Whig with predominant Whig connections, Birch sometimes dealt harshly with Johnson. As a weathervane of taste, he was as often content to report current gossip or the progress of Johnson's projects as he learned of them through the newspapers, or in conversation with other friends or with Johnson himself. Once, by request, he wrote a short but extremely laudatory letter concerning Johnson's Dictionary. But the few well-known documents on the Birch-Johnson friendship suggest that relations were somehow disordered. Johnson's ten known letters to Birch are peremptory, cold, and without friendly expressions; his review of Birch's History of the Royal Society, published in 1756, was distinctly unfavorable; and his rumored final verdict on Birch (“a dull writer” [Boswell, i, 159]) is perhaps more widely known than Birch's services to English historiography. Johnson was content to remember Birch for a single talent: “he had more anecdotes than any man”—they flowed “like the river Thames” (Boswell, v, 255). Sir John Hawkins quoted Johnson on Birch, and the characterization, adapted by Boswell, has been endlessly repeated at Birch's expense: “Tom is a lively rogue; he remembers a great deal, and can tell many pleasant stories; but a pen is to Tom a torpedo, the touch of it benumbs his hand and his brain: Tom can talk; but he is no writer.”