Designing the ‘Life of Johnson’ by Bruce Redford, and: Samuel Johnson in Historical Context ed. by Jonathan Clark, Howard Erskine-Hill (review)

Abstract

174 Reviews 310 endnotes. Rather than construct his own account of several key phases in Smart's career, he gives brief sketches on the grounds that others have done the job, the re? sult being a disconcerting tendency to shiftinto fast-forwardjust when the narrative should slow. Instead he targets his energies at less well-documentedgrey areas, always insistent that 'the past cannot be reconstructed with scientific certainty,and it is up to the biographer to offerargument rather than a factual account' (p. 15). Sensible scep? ticism, one might think; but in practice this idea of argument replacing (as opposed to organizing) facts is all too literally meant. Mounsey presents his biography as a postmodern take on its genre, but the result is rather less elegant, and often dissolves into a morass (in two of his favourite words) of speculation and conjecture. Eschewing the old trick of sliding from 'may' to 'would' to 'did', Mounsey not only sticks with his 'mays', but also lets them breed and compete, so that 'several chapters overlap in date since they give differentand clashing hypotheses of what might have occurred' (p. 20). Where any one hypothesis gains favour, it is often the most melodramatic. The idea that Smart's diagnosis (such as it was) would not survive modern clinical scrutiny is orthodox now. But Mounsey feels compelled to elaborate further on the injustice of Smart's confinement, presenting a far-fetched account of his anodyne and largely unnoticed journalism of the 1750s as 'politically dangerous' (p. 17), and concluding that among the 'possible villains of the piece' who may have had him put away we might count 'a hypothetical member ofthe British government' (p. 200). There are many excursions like this. The incarceration itself is given a luridly Hogarthian rendition, with Mounsey insisting that 'little else is known of conditions at Potter's except from the internal evidence of [. . .] Jubilate Agno\ which he then reads with unguarded literalism. The metaphorical line 'For they work on me with their harpingirons ' is taken to show that 'an instrument of torture was used on patients who answered back' (p. 208). Yet there is external evidence of conditions at Potter's, and though fragmentary it adds up, albeit to something duller: Elizabeth Le Noir's memory of visiting Smart in 'a small neat parlour', for example, or the reports of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale that he spent his time tending the garden and teaching Latin to Potter's young sons. One of the achievements of Mounsey's provocative book is to have shown how dated Arthur Sherbo's study has become. But until a new biography is attempted in less fanciful and involuted style, Sherbo must remain in use. St Anne's College, Oxford Tom Keymer Designing the 'Life ofJohnson'. By Bruce Redford. (Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, 2001-2) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. xv+181 pp. ?30. ISBN0-19-818739-4. Samuel Johnson inHistorical Context. Ed. by Jonathan Clark and Howard ErskineHill . (Studies in Modern History) Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. xii +318 pp. ?50. ISBN 0-333-80447-3. No sooner was Johnson dead than his friends turned biographer and fought for possession of his soul. Originally, Boswell's Life ofJohnson won, being the biggest and best, but it is no longer the monolith it once was. As Marshall Waingrow's edition of Boswell's original papers forthe Life progresses, so the Life becomes more process than product, and its dominant image of a dominant Johnson more questionable. Bruce Redford's Lyell Lectures constitute an intermediate gloss on this situation. Redford begins by illustrating the 'sustained negotiation between author and printing house' (p. 33) which produced a text out of Boswell's contorted manuscripts. He looks MLR, 99.1, 2004 175 at the ways in which Boswell produced a kind of kinetic portrait of his subject, the influence ofdrama on Boswell's scene-setting and Johnson's own social performances, and the framing of the body of letters. A concluding chapter takes a famous portrait and a famous letter as further examples of Boswell's ability to turn something raw and problematic into a finished and legible product while preserving something...