The Myth of Johnson's Misogyny: Some Addenda

Abstract

A great deal of the Johnsonian scholarship of the last fifty years or so has been devoted to the demolition of the many myths that accumulated around Johnson in the century and a half before that time-myths for which chiefly Macaulay, building on Boswell, was responsible, though he received valiant assistance from later Victorian and early twentieth-century literary historians. My book on Johnson's politics has, I think, been largely accepted as exploding the chief one promulgated by Macaulay, a dedicated Whig propagandist, that Johnson was a bigoted, authoritarian Tory. That Johnson despised history, also a Macaulayan construct, still much loved by historians, was demolished by John A. Vance's Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History (1984). That Johnson, as a Tory reactionary, must have been hostile to modem science, was put to rest by Richard B. Schwartz's Samuel Johnson and the New Science (1971). As long ago as 1934, that great editor L. F. Powell was so exasperated by Macaulay's assertion that Johnson had no knowledge of or interest in any place beyond the narrow limits of a few square miles of central London-a view supported by a fabricated saying that Boswell attributed to him, The man who is tired of London is tired of life, for there is everything in London that life can afford'-that he printed, in the third volume of his edition of Boswell's Life, an eleven-page tabulation of Johnson's travels outside London. That Johnson's writings and literary criticism are characterized by abstraction and hostility to imagina