Johnson's Life Research Articles

Next Steps: Charles S. Johnson and Southern Liberalism

Charles Spurgeon Johnson would never forget childhood affront. Born July 24, 1893, he grew up in Bristol, Virginia, the Tennessee border, the son of well-educated and well-respected Baptist minister and mother who supplemented her public school education with uncommon amount of intelligence and social grace. Johnson remembered his parents as knowing of the Negroes and most of the white families that had any standing at all, and as living on terms ranging from tolerant indifference to restrained cordiality with all of them. He remembered Saturday afternoon shopping excursions with his mother, afternoons completed with visit to the town's drugstore soda fountain and trolley car ride home. Bristol was no idyllic racial oasis - racial distinctions manifested themselves in the small concentration of black businesses near the red light district and in the racial seclusion of poorer blacks, and Bristol played host to its own mob-instigated lynching, drunken spree the town consciously tried for generation afterwards to live down. Nevertheless, lines of communication between blacks and whites were open and well used. When the local paper carried a furtive note about new race legislation, the import seemed distant until the clerk at the drugstore, always friendly and overly generous with his servings of ice cream, nervously busied himself when Charles and his mother arrived one Saturday afternoon and ignored them until the owner appeared, expressed his respect for the family and for Charles's father's profession and character, but alerted them that something had happened, seemed, and that he could not serve us any more at the counter. The conductor the trolley car, too, underwent sudden change of attitude and behavior. Friendly assistance was replaced by strange grimness and determination as he directed blacks to special corner of the car. These friendly old men were now the agents of new and obnoxious policy. For Charles Johnson and other local blacks, it was the beginning of new self-consciousness that burned.(1) Charles S. Johnson had found his cause. As sociologist, teacher, writer, researcher, editor, college president, commission member, foundation advisor, and full-time reformer, Charles Johnson dedicated himself to adjusting America's attitudes toward its black citizens and to improving the condition of race relations in the country and especially in the South. His father was preacher but Charles Johnson, himself, had little of the charisma so often associated with southern preachers. He led no mass movement. He shunned controversy. His name was far more likely to appear in byline than in headline. But Johnson's role as powerful black leader, as one of those giants upon whose shoulders Martin Luther King, Jr., and the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement stood, is no less substantial for its lack of publicity. For thirty years he served as the consummate race diplomat in hostile territory - the American South. This essay will provide glimpse of Johnson's activities and ideologies as he attempted his constructive collaboration with southern white liberals in an undying effort to improve race relations where they were most miserable.(2) A specific examination of Johnson's relationship to southern liberalism is appealing for number of reasons: highlights the significant contributions of man who tended to work outside the spotlight; adds to an understanding of black leadership in the South; and provides southern black view of southern liberalism, view under-examined in many accounts of the movement. The scope of this exercise allows complete exploration neither of Charles Johnson nor of southern liberalism. Instead, this essay provides an analysis of the intersection of Johnson's life with the spirit and the strategies of the southern liberal movement, particularly as manifested in his relationship with two organizations, the Commission Interracial Cooperation [CIC] and the Southern Regional Council [SRC]. …

Johnson's 'Dictionary' and Dictionary Johnson

Popular ideas about the authorship of dictionaries have a curious double life. On the one hand, any and all dictionaries of a given language are likely to be thought of under the impersonal rubric of'the dictionary': we have often been told and often told others to 'look it up in the dictionary'. On the other hand, some particular dictionaries are closely identified with the names of their principal authors, or with the authors of the texts on which they are based. This is more true of eighteenth-century dictionaries of English than later ones; among works in English, it is pre-eminently true of Johnson's Dictionary and Webster's. Even the remote revisions and abridgements of these works retain the name of the author of the early editions. In fact, the later works are the ones actually entitled 'Johnson's' or Webster's', whereas the editions published within the authors' lifetimes have more conventional titles: A Dictionary of the English Language ( 755) or An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). The later, eponymous titles are justified in many ways, of course, but they tend to conceal the extent to which even the early editions of the great 'one-man' lexicons are heavily reliant on still earlier dictionaries and are, in a sense, only new editions of that ongoing impersonal work which popular speech, with some wisdom, has dubbed 'the dictionary'. A Dictionary of the English Language (I755) became Johnson's Dictionary for some reasons that are only tangentially related to the fact that Johnson was the principal author, editor, and compiler. The appellation arose, in part, out of a certain phase in the construction of authorship in the late eighteenth century. Without denying that the eponymous title is in many ways apt, we wish to examine the extent to which A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) is really Johnson's personal creation. Such an inquiry leads us to ask a number of related questions. What kind of authorship and authority does Johnson achieve over his materials in the Dictinary? Is Johnson's personal life as a scholar and as a man visible in the Dictionary, as we expect it to be in the creations of most authors? Is the Dictionary the culmination of a 'declaration of independence' for authors, as Alvin Kernan has described Johnson's prepublication letter to Chesterfield?1 To what extent, on the other hand, is the Dictionary highly conventional, or merely compiled, the accretion of a

Regulated Loyalty: Jacobitism and Johnson's Lives of the Poets

Regulated Loyalty: Jacobitism and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets Dustin Griffin Most discussions of Jacobitism—whether in English political culture at large or in the writings of particular authors—sensibly focus on the period prior to 1760. For when George III reached the throne, fourteen years after Culloden, Jacobitism was pretty much a dead letter, and the new king, who reminded his subjects that he was a Briton born and bred, proclaimed himself a patriot, and invited the Tories into government, won the loyalty—if not, until his later years, the affection—of the great part of his subjects. But even if a Jacobite restoration was no longer a political possibility, sympathy for the old cause survived, whether as “sentimental Jacobitism,” or in the popular celebrations of the birthday of James III and occasional riots against the Hanoverians that Paul Monod has noted took place as late as 1779. 1 But by then the Hanoverians had been on the throne for 65 years, and Johnson thought that they had “established as good a right as the former family, by the long consent of the people.” 2 One family in effect had the consent of the people, and the other (in the minds of many people) an equal “hereditary right.” Most people (Johnson declared in the course of an animated argument with a Whig friend, John Taylor) would in 1777 have restored the Stuarts, if it were simply a matter of peacefully casting a ballot, but nobody, he maintained, would actually “risk any thing to restore the exiled family.” Even Taylor conceded that “the people of England,” if asked to vote which family had the hereditary right, would, from the point of view of “abstract doctrine,” choose the Stuarts. Taylor thought, however, that “the conduct of that family, which occasioned their expulsion, was so fresh in the minds of the people, that they would not vote for a restoration.” 3 The lively and perhaps overstated exchange partly conceals two interesting points: the decisive events of 1688 and 1746 were still “fresh in the minds of the people” in the 1770s, and the “people of England” were capable of holding strikingly ambivalent views of dynastic matters and of making subtle political judgments. [End Page 1007] This was hardly the only conversation in which Johnson in his final decade remarked upon the rival merits of the Stuarts and the kings who succeeded them, and by selective quotation one can make out a case that Johnson retained a “partiality” for the Stuarts. 4 It is easy to show that he could on occasion quite intemperately denounce kings of whom he disapproved. In 1775 Boswell reports that he “roared with prodigious violence against George the Second,” and that he regarded William III as “one of the most worthless scoundrels that ever existed.” 5 In 1783 he made an apparently invidious comparison between the Stuarts and Hanoverians: “this Hanoverian family [the contemptuous phrase makes them sound like not like a dynasty but a rabble of carpetbaggers] is isolée here. They have no friends. Now the Stuarts had friends who stuck by them so late as 1745.” 6 One can also demonstrate that in conversation Johnson considered that the Revolution of 1688 had some very unfortunate consequences. What he saw as a “relaxation” of “reverence for government” he imputed, “as its grand cause, to the shock which our monarchy received at the Revolution, though necessary.” 7 Indeed, “factious opposition” to the Hanoverians he traced “in a great measure, to the Revolution.” Even if the Revolution were “necessary”—to forestall the imposition of popery—“it broke our constitution.” 8 Before we conclude from such conversations as recorded in the Life that Johnson harbored Jacobite opinions in the 1770s, we should remember that the “conversations” are selected and reconstructed by Boswell for his own biographical and perhaps political purposes. 9 We should also recall the well-established point that the opinions Johnson expressed in spirited conversation and debate were not necessarily his settled views. Such caveats apart, it is crucial that even in the casual remarks about disaffection from the Hanoverians, Johnson’s main point is not that the Hanoverians are illegitimate or wicked, but that such...

Authorial Authority: Johnson's Life of Savage and Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol

Authorial biographies—biographies written by authors—as exemplified by Johnson's Life of Savage and Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol , constitute a distinctive subgenre of biography, remarkable for, among other features, a relative unconcern with facts, ideological independence, antipanegyrical orientation, and a tendency toward self-assertion and self-investment. This article compares the strategies by which Johnson and Nabokov constitute themselves as authors while operating within the biographical form.

An Interview with Ronald Johnson

Like his poem ARK, Ronald Johnson's life can be seen in three parts. first part begins and ends in Kansas, most of it spent in Ashland, a small town in the western prairies where he was born in 1935, with a brief stint in Lawrence, at the University of Kansas. second part he spent on the East Coast, traveling a great deal. He moved to New York City in the mid-1950s to attend Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. He spent the early 1960s walking through Britain and Appalachia, and served in the army during this time. His poems soon began to appear, first in an issue of Poetry devoted to the long poem and then in books: A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees came out on Jonathan Williams's Jargon Press in 1964, and Book of the Green Man, his long seasonal poem composed out of his experiences walking through England, was published by Norton in 1967, which also published Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses in 1969. By this time, Johnson had settled in San Francisco and had already begun working on ARK, thus entering the third part of his life. As his life shifted to the West Coast, so did his publishers: Sand Dollar (Berkeley) published RADI OS in 1977, and North Point Press (San Francisco) published the first part of ARK as ARK: Foundations in 1980, one of that now-defunct publisher's first titles. ARK 50 (Spires 34-50) appeared in 1984 as a National Poetry Series winner, and since then, ARK has appeared mainly in scattered literary journals. Johnson lived in San Francisco for twenty-five years, making his living, in part, writing cookbooks, before returning recently to Kansas, where this interview was conducted. three parts of ARK are The Foundations, The and The Ramparts, each divided into thirty-three sections. The Foundations, beginning at dawn and ending at noon, lays out the forms, ideas, and themes of the poem in great variety. Concrete poetry, lyric poetry, prose-poems, and poetic quotations use quantum physics, physiology and optics, and astronomy to reveal myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hermes, and the Wizard of Oz. The Spires, going from noon to sundown, are the vertical counterpoint to the horizontal of The Foundations. They rush up to the sky, their words rising rapidly, composed into high-flying windmills, pillars, and fireworks that the poet dedicates to other poets, friends, places, and mythic figures, such as Ariel and Prospero. The bring the horizontal and the vertical together into a grand arcade of arches. Each Rampart is composed of a cluster of three arches, and each arch of eighteen tercets. There are eleven encircling the structure, covering a range of material from Thoreau's Journals to Van Gogh's letters to Protestant Hymnals, culminating at crack of dawn with the rift-off of the spaceship that is ARK. Peter O'Leary: Let me start by asking how ARK changed over the course of the twenty to twenty-five years or so of its composition. Since it was published in increments, you always included incidental notes describing the next step or two... Ronald Johnson: I worked on it all the time. I knew it would be three parts. I didn't have The Ramparts quite named--I've forgotten I called them. But I was lucky to envision a form that left me three different periods. So that when I got to doing The I could just do Spires and think what is a Spire? And then when I got to The Ramparts, which was really influenced by the mosaic arches outside of the Watts Towers, each one of three lines is meant to be an arch. So I was just lucky. PO'L: ARK seems comparable to epic Modernist poems like Cantos, Paterson, Maximus, as opposed to modernist long poems like The Waste Land or Briggflatts. Did you conceive of ARK along the lines of the big modernist poem? RJ: Well I wanted it to be equivalent. Olson said that an epic is a poem with history. Zukofsky put a lot of contemporary history and Marxist politics into his poem. …

Passing as Autobiography: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man - narrative of a fair-skinned mulatto man who, after many difficulties on both sides of color-line and much agonizing over the Negro problem in America, chooses to pass for white - was published anonymously in 1912, leading to speculation about identity of its author. Accepted by most readers and reviewers as authentic autobiography, this text was, in fact, a fiction written by James Weldon Johnson, himself a black man who had already gained a reputation as a musician and song writer in New York and was at time U.S. Consul, government's representative, in Corinto, Nicaragua.(1) Although a number of readers in New York intellectual circles guessed book's author shortly after its initial release by small Boston firm of Sherman, French, and Company, Johnson's authorship was only publicly revealed when novel was reissued by Alfred A. Knopf, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, in 1927 at height of Harlem Renaissance. By this time black creative literature was very much in vogue, and Johnson himself had gained considerable fame as first black leader of NAACP. By 1927 he was also a prominent editor of African American poetry - Book of American Negro Poetry, a landmark work, had appeared in 1922 - and a significant poet in his own right - God's Trombones, a set of sermons in free verse, was also published in 1927. Criticism of Ex-Coloured Man since 1927 has traditionally focused on issue of whether text is autobiographical fiction, a question raised in all its complexity, but left hanging in ambiguity, by Van Vechten in his introduction to Knopf edition: The Autobiography, of course, in matter of specific incident, has little enough to do with Mr. Johnson's own life, but it is imbued with his own personality and feeling, his views of subjects discussed, so that to a person who has no previous knowledge of author's own history, it reads like real autobiography (v-vi). It was not until appearance of Joseph Skerrett's 1980 article on ironic detachment between Johnson as author and his unnamed narrator, Ex-Coloured Man, that question of text as autobiographical fiction was definitively answered in negative.(2) Skerrett interprets narrator as Johnson's anti-self or alter-ego, a figure based on a life-long friend identified by Johnson only as D, but revealed in Eugene Levy's biography of Johnson as Judson Douglass Westmore.(3) Skerrett's article is a brilliant piece of investigative criticism, for which we are in his debt, because he has made it virtually impossible to identify Johnson with Ex-Coloured Man at level of biography. But further complications remain to be explored: We underestimate complexity of text when we pose question of narrator's position as an either/or proposition - either anonymous narrator is to be taken as autobiographical mouthpiece of Johnson's conservative views on race and class, or he is to be read as butt of Johnson's irony, a view that identities Johnson as politically more liberal.(4) There are a number of levels of irony at play here: narrator is frequently self-consciously ironic in his treatment of significant issues concerning himself and his race, and thus appears to be a subject of considerable self-knowledge; but at other times he is blind to narrowness and bigotry of his own perspective and thus becomes object of Johnson's, and our, ironic gaze. An important part of establishing text as complexly ironic is an examination of crucial, but largely ignored, question of why a novel about a black man who passes for white would itself pass as a genre it was not: autobiography. decision to engage in this generic passing - parallel to Ex-Coloured Man's genetic passing - was one that Johnson took after a good deal of deliberation, at least according to account he gives in his own autobiography, Along This Way, published in 1933, in part to prove that he was not protagonist of his novel. …

Samuel Johnson and the politics of Hanoverian England

This is a lively and readable reinterpretation of the Georgian political order. Samuel Johnson's life (1709-1784) spans most of the eighteenth cetnury. His contacts in the literary and cultural, scholarly, and political worlds were wide, including Gibbon, Goldsmith, Fox, Burke, Reynolds, Adam Smith, and many others. This book uses Johnson's remarkable career as a point of entry into Hanoverian England. John Cannon explores major contemporary issues, such as education, the poor, capital punishment, the colonies, and Toryism. He challenges many assumptions about Johnson's own attitudes, and offers a substantial modification to the traditional picture of Johnson and the political world of the eighteenth century.

"Rasselas" and the Closed Field

In The Stoic Comedians Hugh Kenner asserts that Stoic is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed. While I would call Johnson a Stoic (that somewhat oxymoronic thing, a Christian Stoic) only in a limited and special sense, I think that Kenner provides a good point of departure for discussing Rasselas, a book about the endlessness of human quest and the closed field of human scope.' The gap between the two furnishes the satire of Johnson's epistemological fiction. The world presented in Rasselas consists of both objects and ideas that tend to form mutually exclusive and exhaustive sets. Man finds himself in a closed field, yet finally he is not one himself, and this makes for his misery as well as his hope. The book opens, as did Johnson's Life of Savage, on a monitory note that anticipates the ending; suspense, it is clear, is not an objective:

The rhetoric of Smith, Boswell and Johnson: Creating the modern icon

When James Boswell first meets Samuel Johnson in London in 1763, Johnson has already written the Rambler (1750-52), the Dictionary (1755), and Rasselas (1759), and dominates the publishing marketplace. They become close friends, and, until Johnson's death in 1784, Boswell often records in his journals Johnson's conversations, documenting his Wisdom and Wit and describing Johnson's encounters with his contemporaries. After Johnson's death, Boswell augments his own collection of Johnsonian memorabilia by soliciting anecdotes and letters from many of Johnson's friends, accumulating a mass of material which he pieces together and publishes in 1791 as The Life of Johnson, perhaps the most powerful and controversial biography ever written. In this influential biography of Johnson's life, Boswell presents Johnson as the great sage and philosopher, the composing genie who could dash off brilliant, eloquent essays and verse, seemingly without planning, revising or even rereading them. With this picture Boswell tries to create Johnson as the ideal writer of the age, whose writing method and style perfectly exemplify the paradigm of composition that prevailed in eighteenth-century Scottish rhetorical theory, particularly that of Adam Smith. Influenced by Smith's lectures, which he had attended while a student at Glasgow University, Boswell constructs Johnson as writer within this paradigm and thus fosters both a narrow view of invention and a mythological image of Johnson as inspired speedwriting genius. In the process, he misrepresents Johnson's theory of writing, tying Johnson too closely to what W.S. Howell calls Smith's new rhetoric (541), which focuses on style and views invention as an autonomous activity based on introspection and imagination rather than as interactive, systematic inquiry, Aristotle's conception of invention. A careful reading of the Life of Johnson reveals major contradictions in the picture Boswell sketches of Johnson as writer and indicates that Boswell's mythical image of Johnson's spontaneous writing ability tends to rest upon thin and questionable anecdotal evidence, upon the clever way Boswell arranges and phrases his material, upon the narrow conception of invention he inherited from Adam Smith, and upon his need to canonize Johnson into literary sainthood and even to make him the secular Godhead of the age, the Father of modern writing. At the same time, it is difficult to avoid concluding that most contemporary critics remain mesmerized by Boswell's myth and impelled by his same motives.

Slavery Days in Old Kentucky

Isaac Johnson's stark and moving memoir about his early years as a slave in Kentucky was privately printed in 1901 when he was 57 years old. It is not listed in any of the major bibliographical references and possibly as few as six copies of the original publication are still in existence. In essence, republication of this rare slave narrative makes it available for the first time. The story begins in the 1840s with Johnson's earliest recollections of his father, Richard Yeager, of his mother, Jane Johnson (a slave used by Yeager as his wife), and of Ambrose and Eddie, Isaac's two brothers. Their happy family life ends abruptly when Yeager, in need of money, sells his wife and children at auction. Seven at the time, Isaac never sees any of his family again. He goes on to detail the horrors of his life as a slave and to mention his service in the 102nd United States Colored Regiment. The book concludes with Isaac's unsuccessful search for his family in post-war Kentucky. In his introductory essay, Dr. Reinhart satisfies the reader's desire to know What then? as he describes the remaining years of Johnson's life, spent working as a well-respected stonemason in Canada and upstate New York. Why reprint this record of a shameful period in the history of the United States? In Isaac Johnson's own words, ...my actual experience[s] as a slave are given...to give the world a knowledge of the subject that no eloquence may ever make the same thing again possible.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life (review)

REVIEWS 283 tion. Working from Eve Sedgwick's and Luce Irigaray's notions of male "homosocial bonding" and the (figurative) exchange of women in literary culture, Epstein argues that biography "habitually" "figures the relationship between biographer and biographical subject as an abduction." Epstein traces a genealogy of biographical abductions from Walton's Donne, to Johnson's Life of Savage and Boswell's Life of Johnson, and, in an egregious contemporary example, Norman Mailer's "novel biography" of Marilyn Monroe. The argument is on the whole a powerful one, but in his discussion of Mailer's controversial biography, Epstein's metacritical self-awareness seems unable to resolve its own complicity in Marilyn Monroe's discursive abduction except through an atavistic confessional ritual; Epstein tells an effusive personal anecdote from his promotion and tenure ordeal exemplifying homosocial bonding within literary studies. While one can applaud critics who attempt to situate their own critical interests and practices, Epstein's autobiographical gesture runs the risk of displacing a much needed institutional critique with that most ideological of (autobiographical functions, the production of exemplary selves, hardly the task of a work that aspires to "contest the subject." But I am being overly critical; Contesting the Subject is just the beginning of what promises to be a substantive dialogue between biography and contemporary theory. Perhaps the 1990s will be the decade in which biography finally attracts the critical interest this poor relation so richly deserves. Steve Bradbury Program for Cultural Studies East-West Center Dorothy Herrmann, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992. 382 pp. $24.95. Unlike her husband, Charles, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (AML) has, until recently, received little biographical notice. This lack of attention is somewhat surprising given that she was the daughter of "one of the most famous men of his time," the wife of "America's last hero," the mother of the child kidnapped in the "crime of the century ," a nation-wide media target of Nazi sympathy, and, after regaining face, one of America's "most popular and beloved authors." With the exception of the literary analyses in David Kirk Vaughan's Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Boston: Twayne, 1988) and Elsie F. Mayer's My Window on the World: The Works of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1988), the latter of which Dorothy Herrmann failed to cite, AML has been greatly overshadowed by her husband in the numerous biographical accounts of this family. Dorothy Herrmann recently grasped this golden biographical nugget and chronologically unfolded the life of AML before readers in Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life. In the first of twenty-four unevenly balanced chapters, readers are introduced to a shy young girl, intimidated by her domineering father, the J. P. Morgan and Company partner, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, and senator from New Jersey, Dwight Whitney Morrow, and by the beauty and charm of her elder sister, Elizabeth. Later, the Trans-Atlantic pilot, Charles Lindbergh, who appeared, "so much slimmer, so much taller, [and] so much more poised" than Anne expected, enticed Anne for a flight which, according to Herrmann, filled the Smith College Anne with such 284 biography Vol. 16,No. 2 ecstatic and "quasi-sexual" emotions that both flying and Charles remained the two "inextricably linked" features of her life. Media intervened into the lives of Charles and Anne from the time of their announced engagement, and it hounded them throughout their married life. Herrmann 's account delves into the intricacies of the couple's often unsuccessful attempts to dodge the press. Their loss of privacy became tormenting after their first son, Charles, Jr, was "stolen" from their Hopewell, New Jersey, residence. To avoid the mobs of well-wishers and those who, through unscrupulous methods, attempted to gain access to their home, and to alleviate the fears that their second child, Jon, might suffer a similar fate, the Lindbergh's turned to the escape they knew best—flight. First, they began a series of flights taking them to four continents and thirty-one countries in order to survey possible routes and base points for Pan American Airways. Ultimately, however, it was their flight from America and a self-imposed exile to...

Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient (review)

344 BOOK REVIEWS sound book on doctors and medicine in the works of Herman Melville. His writing style reveals lapses in places—in the organization of some of his paragraphs and in some of his constructions. "Cruising toward the Japanese whaling grounds, Ahab's purpose intensifies" (p. 88) is illustrative. One might wish that the Garland editors and the series editor had given Smith a bit more help. But what we have is a study of an important aspect of Melville's career, a book that—though Melville and medical purists might quail—serves, with solidity and clarity, to interest and enlighten. —Gerard M. Sweeney University of Akron John Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. χ + 293 pp. Clothbound , $39.50 For readers with a fondness for Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), this study of the connection between his life as a patient and medical adviser and his writings on illness, therapeutics, and medical theory is a good survey of the medical world of eighteenth-century England. John Wiltshire takes what is known about Dr. Johnson's life and work and gives it a good quarter-turn to reveal the sufferer, the Samuel Johnson whom Boswell could scarcely see. He was a man who labored throughout his life against often debilitating physical and psychological maladies, and, consequently, a moral thinker who had strong opinions about how medical knowledge ought to be acquired and applied. For Johnson "doctors became friends, and his friends, like Mrs Thrale, became doctors" (p. 223). At one time or another, he knew both William Hunter, the eminent surgeon, and Joshua Ward, the equally renowned maker of patent medicines, and had as his physician, among others, Thomas Lawrence, Richard Brocklesby, and William Heberden. He wrote essays on medical subjects, reviewed medical treatises, meditated on disease and suffering in his essays and biographies, and freely and emphatically dispensed medical and psychological advice along with moral guidance in letters to his friends. Wiltshire uses all these sources to give us a view of Johnson as a man who, as a part of his moral and Book Reviews 345 practical concerns, lived and breathed eighteenth-century English medical theory and practice. Wiltshire begins with a strong first chapter on Johnson's anguished life as a patient—from the political and medical climate that led his mother to take her scrofulous toddler to be healed by Queen Anne's touch in 1712 to the nearly modern patho-anatomical conclusions of his autopsy in 1784. He documents eye troubles, hearing difficulties, a gait disturbance, the possibility of Tourette's syndrome, compulsive behavior, gout, asthma, melancholy, a persistent depression that required some sort of confinement at the Thrales' house in 1767 or 1768, and his final two years of "dropsy"—with edema, pulmonary dysfunction, and episodes of aphasia. On autopsy, Johnson was found to have aortic stenosis, emphysema, and a large gallstone. But the book is not the literary pathography this chapter might seem to promise. Wiltshire is concerned to estabüsh Johnson as a medical thinker and an amateur medical practitioner, and at times we lose our sense of him as a sufferer, even as a thinker, in the minutiae of his medical reviews and journalistic pieces. In the historical and biographical essays, many of them Johnson's anonymous early hack work, Wiltshire discerns a rational, skeptical approach to both theory and practice that is borne out in his life and opinions. Johnson wrote biographies of physicians, including Sydenham and Boerhaave, and the preface to Robert James's Medicinal Dictionary (1743^5), and he contributed skeptical reviews of philosophical and medical works to the Literary Magazine. The argument here is careful: This is a body of writing, very probably Johnson 's, out of which Wiltshire wants to construct the man's attitudes toward medicine. But at the same time, as part of his evidence of authorship , he must use Johnson's characteristic skepticism, a trust in observing before theorizing that goes back to Locke and Hippocrates, and his vivid attention to human suffering. He relies on fine textual evidence. Not a lively read—until we get to Johnson's reply to Soame Jenyns...

The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson's Lives of the Poets.

The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson's Lives of the Poets.

The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Johnson, Martin Maner

<i>The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson's Lives of the Poets</i>. Johnson, Martin Maner

The Rest of the Dream: The Black Odyssey of Lyman Johnson.

In "The Rest of the Dream, " Lyman Johnson, grassroots civil rights leader, tells his own story. All four of Johnson's grandparents were slaves in Tennessee. Yet his father was a college graduate, principal of a black school, and the inspiration for his son's love of justice. Lyman Johnson was born in 1906 during the darkest days of segregation. He learned from his father not to sit in the "crow's nest" reserved for blacks in his hometown movie theater. This refusal to accept second-class citizenship became a guiding principle in Johnson's life. Johnson was almost forty-three when he won admission to graduate study at the University of Kentucky in 1949. Crosses were burned on campus. Because of his family commitments, he returned to his teaching position in Louisville and never completed his doctorate. Thirty years later the university that fought to keep him out awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree. Johnson earned his doctorate the hard way -- by saying no to the crow's nest and other marks of inequality. Johnson's graphic recall of people and incidents and his storyteller's talent for narrative make this record of a unique American life filled with suspense, humor, tragedy, and triumph.

The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson's Lives of the Poets (review)

The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson's Lives of the Poets (review)

Fiction as Truth: Personal Identity in Johnson's Life of Savage

Fiction as Truth: Personal Identity in Johnson's Life of Savage

John Donne as a Patient: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Toward the end of 1623, probably in late November, John Donne, then fifty-one years old, for two years Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, was stricken with an acute, febrile, infectious, life-threatening illness.1 His mind remained clear and active, and as R. C. Bald's biography tells us, he jotted down notes fever heat.2 He seems to have been out of danger by Christmas, and during his slow convalescence he systematically organized his thoughts and recollections about his illness into a book titled Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which was entered in the Stationers Register on January 9, 1624, and was presumably off the presses shortly thereafter. Sir Geoffrey Keynes has offered the opinion that the first edition was small, rapidly exhausted, and required reprinting before the end of the year.3 A third edition appeared in 1626, a fourth in 1634, three years after Donne's death, and a fifth in 1638. The Devotions did not again appear in print for two centuries, the sixth being Dean Alford's edition of Donne's works in 1839. It was followed by the attractive Chiswick Press edition in 1840, and an eighth edition was published at Oxford in 1841. It was not until 1923 when John Sparrow's edition was printed that the Devotions was available to the general reader in a well-annotated modern text.4 Anthony Raspa's recent recension is entirely satisfactory.5 The chronology of publication reflects Donne's fluctuating reputation. His Jacobean style was unpopular during the Commonwealth, unfashionable in the Restoration, and the substance of his ideas remote from eighteenth-century rationalism. In 1777, when a consortium of London publishers planned the publication of the corpus of English poetry for which Johnson's Lives of the Poets was commissioned, Donne's name was not included. A major lacuna in the critical literature is the absence of Johnson's analysis and verdict on Donne, except en passant in his life of Cowley. The cluster of three editions of the Devotions circa 1840 had little impact on Victorian sensibility. Donne's reputation began to revive shortly

The Biographer's art: new essays

Leon Edel has recently noted that there exists, I am sorry to say, no criticism of biography worthy of the name. Reviewers and critics have learned how to judge plays, poems, novels-but they reveal their helplessness in the face of a biography. The Biographer's Art, by concentrating on the aesthetics of the genre, responds to the need for serious criticism of life-writing. This book is both a history of the genre and a substantial analysis of the great literary biographies from Johnson's Life of Savage (1744) and Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) through Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and Symons' The Quest for Corvo (1934) to the three greatest biographies of the mid-twentieth century: Ellmann's James Joyce (1959), Painter's Marcel Proust (1959, 1965), and Edel's monumental Henry James (1953-72). The masterful biographies by Ellmann, Painter, and Edel, that continue the tradition begun by Johnson and Boswell and show the influence of Strachey's innovative work, confirm that biography is still a flourishing art form. By firing the facts of an author's life with their own imagination, illuminating the relationship between daily existence and imaginative life, these life-writers follow the same process as fiction writers and create their own significant works of art.

The philosophical biographer: doubt and dialectic in Johnson's Lives of the poets

The philosophical biographer: doubt and dialectic in Johnson's Lives of the poets