Samuel Johnson's Sources for "The Life of Roscommon"

Abstract

Johnson's biography of Wentworth Dillon, Fourth Earl of is of special interest to the scholar investigating The Lives of the Poets primarily because of the various revisions it underwent before inclusion in the 1783 corrected edition of the Lives. The first Life of Roscommon, which appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine for May 1748, displays curiously un-Johnsonian format: of its approximately 2,630 words, roughly eight-ninths are relegated to footnotes.1 As Boswell points out, Johnson afterwards much improved this essay and indented the notes into text in order to include it in the fourth volume of Prefaces, Biographical and Critical (1779).2 In addition to making stylistic changes, Johnson primarily expanded his description of Roscommon's poetic character and individual works, adding very little new biographical information. Finally, some minor changes and additions appeared when his Life of was published in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1783). Determining Johnson's immediate source for the biographical information in any of these three versions might seem to be very simple undertaking. In the footnotes to the 1748 Life, Johnson repeatedly refers to notes on Waller. In the 1779 and 1783 Lives, he likewise records his indebtedness to Fenton, from whose notes on Waller most of this account must be borrowed, though I know not whether all that he relates is certain.3 It has been customary, because of such statements, to assert that Johnson based his biography of Roscommon on The Works of Edmund Waller ... Published by Mr. Fenton (1729; rep. 1730, 1744).4 If we accept Fenton's Waller as Johnson's source, we must arrive at several incorrect conclusions concerning Johnson's 1748 Life of Roscommon. First, Johnson must have used more than one source in gathering biographical information, since he quotes lengthy passage from John Aubrey's Miscellanies upon Various Subjects (1696), which deals with the preternatural intelligence Roscommon received concerning his father's death. Second, Johnson seems to have been careless in making biographical identifications, since he erroneously reports that Dr. Hall, Roscommon's tutor, afterward became Bishop of Norwich. Fenton's Waller more accurately identifies Dr. Hall as merely a person of emi-