Johnson and the Authorship of Four Debates

Abstract

Because in the closing hours of his life Dr. Johnson was unable to conclude the task of identifying his early compositions for the Gentleman's Magazine, the early canon of his work has remained obscure; and for his share in the Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia we have had to rely on Boswell, who questioned Johnson at an inopportune time, for Johnson's answer did not settle the matter: “He this year [1741], and the two following, wrote the Parliamentary Debates. He told me himself, that he was the sole composer of them for these three years only. He was not, however, precisely exact in his statement, which he mentioned from hasty recollection; for it is sufficiently evident, that his composition of them began November 19, 1740, and ended February 23, 1742–3.” The vagueness of this statement has raised two questions about Johnson's portion of the debates: (1) what are the dates, initial and terminal, of Johnson's exclusive authorship, and (2) did he write any reports which fall outside of that period, that is, when he was not “sole composer” of them? In answer to the first question G. B. Hill and, more recently, Benjamin B. Hoover have established July 1741 through March 1744 as the period in which Johnson's exclusive share of the reports was published. In partial answer to the second question, Hill attributed to Johnson two debates, from the Guthrie period (which Hoover apparently overlooked in his broad discussion of authorship); and Hoover found Johnson to have revised for Cave certain reports that first appeared in the London Magazine. Still more recently, Donald J. Greene, arguing against the terminal date, ascribed to Johnson the debate on the Removal of the Hanoverian Troops, which appeared in the magazine from May to December-Supplement, 1744. If this attribution is correct, and I believe it is, then the debates which Cave published from July 1741 to December-Supplement, 1744, were, with one un-assigned exception—the short debate on the Corporation Bill which appeared in March and April 1744—written by Johnson. The purpose of this paper is to show, by reexamining the evidence concerning four debates, that one of Hill's two attributions is wrong (on Buttons and Button-holes, 1738), that the other is correct (on the Registration of Seamen, 1741), that one of the revised London debates is in all likelihood Johnson's work (on the Navy Estimates, 1740), and that the Corporation Bill, 1744, is also from his pen, thus making the sequence unbroken from July 1741 through the 1744 Supplement.