“The True Culprit Is the Mind Which Can Never Run Away From Itself”: Samuel Johnson and Depression

Abstract

“The True Culprit Is the Mind Which Can Never Run Away From Itself”: Samuel Johnson and Depression1 Serge Soupel (bio) The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. —John Milton, Paradise Lost (I.254–55) I have here little company and little amusement, and thus abandoned to the contemplation of my own miseries, I am sometimes gloomy and depressed, this too I resist as I can, and find opium, I think useful, but I seldom take more than one grain. —Samuel Johnson, Letters 4: 381 It is very fantastical and contradictory in human nature, that men should love themselves above all the rest of the world, and yet never endure to be with themselves. —Abraham Cowley, “Of Solitude” In the second epigraph quoted from Johnson’s letter to Richard Brockelsby written less than four months before his death, the word “depression” does much to establish the validity of the concept long before what we know today as depression. In his seminal article, “Depressions’s Forgotten Genealogy: Notes towards a History of Depression,” George Rousseau goes to some length to sing the praise of Johnson as the first user of the word in a psychological context. What the epigraph says (“I am sometimes gloomy and depressed”) is not the only example. It may be to the point to start with a pungent physical portrait of the man that will likely explain much of his psycho-physical condition. Boswell’s appraisal of Johnson as a “huge, slovenly, near-sighted scholar, his face scarred by scrofula, his body distorted by compulsive tics, his speech interspersed with absent-minded clucks and mutterings” can be given its [End Page 43] female pendant (Pottle 13). This is borrowed from Fanny Burney’s letter to Samuel Crisp of 28 March 1777, at which time Johnson had another seven years to live: He is indeed very ill favoured,—he is tall & stout, but stoops terribly,—he is almost bent double. His mouth is in perpetual motion, as if he was chewing;—he has a strange method of frequently twirling his Fingers, & twisting his Hands;—his Body is in continual agitation, see sawing up & down; his Feet are never a moment quiet,—&, in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion.… he had a large Wig, snuff colour coat, & Gold Buttons; but no Ruffles to his Wrist, and Black Worsted Stockings…. He is shockingly near sighted, & did not, till she held out her Hand to him, even know Mrs Thrale. He poked his Nose over the keys of the Harpsichord, till the Duet was finished.… His attention … was not to be diverted five minutes from the Books, as we were in the Library; he poured over them, almost brushing the Backs of them with his Eye lashes, as he read their Titles; at last, having fixed upon one, he began, without further ceremony, to Read, all the time standing at a distance from the Company. We were very much provoked, as we perfectly languished to hear him talk; but, it seems, he is the most silent creature, when not particularly drawn out, in the world. My sister then played another Duet, with my Father: but Dr. Johnson was so deep in the Encyclopedie, that, as he is very deaf, I question if he even knew what was going forward. (225–26) As a rule, Dr. Johnson’s other contemporaries are more reserved in their portraits of this great figure. What looks like absent-mindedness, as noted by Fanny Burney as well as Boswell, is rarely underscored by his usual companions. This idiosyncratic trait came to be taken for granted. As a matter of fact, what Burney appears to resent is Johnson’s excessive mental absorption in matters unconnected with the group of people among whom he finds himself. Now, it is this very self-absorption that Johnson cannot always master, and therefore dreads: a self-absorption not, however, linked in any way to intellectual pursuits, like reading Diderot’s Encyclopédie instead of indulging in small talk, but a sort of mental imprisonment reminiscent of the situation in which Sterne’s starling finds itself in...