A Festschrift presents special problems for the reader. Sometimes the august presence of the honoree looms over the entire collection. Roma Gill’s William Empson, for instance, has an unfortunate knack of reminding its readers that they are not in the witty, malicious company of Empson. Then there are the collections of which the reviewer comes to suspect that some contributors have raided their files to find an essay they just could not place elsewhere. The best examples of the genre carve out some crucial shift in literary or cultural history, like the essays Harold Bloom and Frederick Hilles collected for Frederick Pottle in From Sensibility to Romanticism.At first glance this does not appear to be Anthony Lee’s formula for A Clubbable Man. There are three main parts: “Essays on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell,” “Essays in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture,” and “Personal Reminiscences.” The subject matter is extremely various, ranging from Civil War memoirists to early nineteenth-century Asian visitors to British green spaces. That said, Lee has no doubt about what ultimately holds his diverse material together. All the essays in the collection are “unified like Greg’s life and career with relationships.” In a sense, the contributors “mirror Greg’s own extensive academic and ultimately humanistic networking.” As the title confirms, this work celebrates the lasting scholarly concerns and widening professional responsibilities of “a clubbable man” (2). Generous sentiments, but they provoke the inevitable question, What do these pages offer readers who are not in the club? Most readers will look for answers to this question in the book’s first two parts, and for this reason I will confine myself to them.Philip Smallwood’s “Mirrored Minds: Johnson and Shakespeare” opens the collection. The essay’s headings are not always well chosen. It would be an unusual investigator who denied “A Sense of the Dramatic” and “A Sense of Life” to William Shakespeare and, in a very different way, to Samuel Johnson. To recruit either for Christopher Ricks’ sneaky campaign “against theory” makes no sense for Shakespeare, who made no pretense to theory, or for Johnson, who is here about his sorry task of kicking stones and refuting the skeptics with a grunt. When Smallwood closes his “dialogue of the dead” with an “imaginary scenario of two souls communing” (18), we are on the verge of quitting scholarship or theory for the adventures of a soul among masterpieces.This is odd since the rest of the essays in this section focus chiefly on specific devices, genres, and conventions mobilized by Johnson and his circle in their efforts to enlarge the horizons of the middle-class citizen. David Hopkins’ “The General and Particular: Paradox and the Play of Contraries in the Criticism of Pope, Johnson, and Reynolds” takes a familiar topic in unexpected directions. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), Hopkins argues, introduced a new way of handling critical terms, “not as separable entities, but in relation to one another” (30). With this insight on board, he passes over to Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses (1769–90). William Blake’s fulminations against Reynolds’ generalizations, he judges, represented not so much a visionary awakening that overturns hidebound convention as a profound incomprehension of how Reynolds put particular and general into a new, quizzical relationship. Consequently, for Hopkins, the Discourses do not genuflect before unwarranted authority but negotiate “the inevitably ambiguous potential of most critical terms and statements” (25). And who schooled Reynolds in this flexibility and ambiguity? None other than Johnson, whom Reynolds is only too glad to acknowledge as his mentor in “the art of thinking” (Works 1: xx).Anthony Lee’s “‘The Caliban of Literature’: Spenser, Shakespeare, and Johnson’s Intertextual Scholarship” invites us to reconsider what thinking meant for Johnson when he compiled his Dictionary (1755) and set about his edition of Shakespeare (1765). Johnson was often self-deprecating about the low-level skills necessary for the accomplishment of either endeavor. Lee makes much bolder claims, arguing that both works contain “hidden pockets of private, subjective import that bear the imprint of Johnson’s personal response to many of the texts he venerated and embraced” (41). His essay pursues the Edmund Spenser–Shakespeare–Johnson connection. It would be interesting to see him expand this work to other authors.Adam Rounce’s “In Silence and Darkness: Johnson’s Verdicts on Artistic Failure” argues convincingly that the Lives (1777–82) shows Johnson rethinking the task of the biographer. Rounce argues that many of the lives are miniature dramas as well as biographies, circling round the question of artistic failure. Sometimes Johnson trains the lens of “deadpan comedy” (60) on this glum spectacle; sometimes he views it in the light of the grand history of human error. In any event, the Lives sounds a constant rebuke to artistic vanity: “The more an author tries to assert his status and importance, the more likely he is to fail” (66). Could it be that presumption is not one of the virtues that Johnson wants to foster among his middle-class audience?The move from Johnson to his circle proceeds without any lowering in quality. Aaron Hanlon’s “Smollett’s Ramblers and the Law of the Land” shows how Johnson established “the high-minded rambler” (75), a useful partner in the civilizing task his creator set himself. This high-mindedness inspired Tobias Smollett in the creation of Matthew Bramble, whose travels in Humphry Clinker (1771) acquaint him again and again with abuses of power by legal officials. In Launcelot Greaves (1760–62), the characterization of the hero owes much to Don Quixote, the most high-minded rambler of them all. Greaves has Quixote’s “keen sense of justice” (84), but Smollett invests him with a surer sense of how to use it, particularly in his battles with the false justice Gobble. In these novels, the high-minded rambler has no fear of taking up the service of public virtue and replacing personal malice with the impersonal justice of law.Gordon Turnbull’s “‘Not ‘Just a Macheath’: Young Boswell and Old Cibber in Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763” weighs the benefits the theatre brought to the apprenticeship of the young James Boswell. Previous scholarship has cast Boswell as an enchanted, uncritical spectator, captivated by the “subjective magnetism” of John Gay’s Macheath. Turnbull thinks this verdict underestimates “the range and complexity of his absorptions and replications of his theatrical experience and engagements” (103). Theatre furnished an indispensable tool in Boswell’s efforts to come to terms with London. The theatrical experience helped him slough off the burden of Calvinism, opening him up to the free thought and discussion that circulated in the midcentury city. Further acquaintance with Colley Cibber’s comedies nudged him into a deeper appreciation of the domestic virtues, something that he could hardly have arrived at had he restricted himself to the admiration of Macheath. Turnbull is particularly good at showing how literature mediated Boswell’s everyday life at every turn.Each of these last three essays shows the expanded role of literature for members of a polite, urban society. Not everything was sweetness and light in the middle of the eighteenth century, however. Robert Walker’s “The Social Life of Thomas Cumming; or, ‘Clubbing’ with Johnson’s Friend, the Fighting Quaker” offers the reverse side of the medal in an essay that confronts head-on the controversies and calumnies that cloud the fortunes of a less renowned member of the circle. Thomas Cumming’s career is much less obscure after reading Walker’s essay. Finally, in an expert piece of detective work, Walker exposes the identity of one of his cruelest antagonists. He identifies Gilbert Stuart as the most likely author for an anonymous piece in Town and Country (1774) that aimed to blacken Cumming’s name.At their best, the essays in this section encourage readers to reopen the question of Johnson’s authority in the world of letters. The judge, legislator, and controversialist is not so prominent. Instead, the focus shifts to his leading role in the larger attempt to legitimize literature and the arts as objects of attention and educated conversation. Johnson does not do this without some struggle. In his task of what we might crudely consider as making literature safe for the middle classes, he casts doubts on John Milton’s unflinching sense of his own rightness and independence of mind and has grave doubts about its implications for the world of politics. But could an author of milder demeanor have attempted Paradise Lost (1667)? Recognizing the significance of honest industry, Johnson has no patience for the idleness of the pastoral. The wit of the Restoration, often taken out of doors into the streets of London, strikes him as degenerate street theatre. He thinks modern audiences cannot countenance the implausible way Greek tragedians bring deities to the stage, although one suspects that he is suspicious that their presence encourages an unwanted liberty of speculation.Part 2 moves on a larger stage. Martine Brownley’s “English Historiography, the Development of Secular Autobiography, and the Memoir” calls attention to the strange scholarly neglect of the memoir. Brownley reminds us that most secular memoirs written in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England “were accounts of public affairs from personal perspectives.” Consequently, the genre became “a volatile amalgam of autobiography and history” (122). One might question the “personal” here since so many of the memoirists were, as Brownley surely shows, members of some faction or other at a very turbulent time in English history. This instability explains why, even if, as Brownley judges, memoir is not an intimidating genre, it is a sly one. Memoirists could not be too careful. The careful discussion of Thomas Herbert’s masterpiece of disguise, Memoir of the Two Last Years of the Reign of King Charles (1678), shows how, sensitive to the winds of change in politics, the author manipulates his narrative in Charles’ favor to the point that he appears as the king’s “faithful follower.” In real time, he “actually functioned as a spy, dispatching reports to members of Parliament . . . and also to army leaders” (200). Brownley warns us not to overlook how the deeply grained subjectivity of the memoir might be one painstakingly constructed to influence the reader. Although I have some doubts about stretching the length of the long eighteenth century even further, this essay merits close attention.Public and political concerns do not appear to be at the forefront in John Richetti’s “Poetic Performances: Pope’s Essay on Man and Swift’s ‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.’” Richetti’s first job is to show how Pope’s Essay (1733–34) is meant not just to serve as Viscount Bolingbroke’s interior decorator but to turn potentially dry discussion into “dynamic performance” (154). Richetti is so delicately attuned to the masks and obliquities of both authors that the ending of his essay comes as a complete surprise. There, he confesses his greater admiration for Jonathan Swift, whose closing lines in “Verses” (1739) “drop the mask and in direct address vehemently recount the defeat of his friends and fellow Tories when Queen Anne died in 1714” (167).In “Swift Shrinks the Duke of Marlborough: Public Delegitimation through Scale” Clement Hawes describes how, cognizant of how “the new prestige of quantitative results had produced new targets and techniques, new forms of legitimation and delegitimation” (169), Swift rapidly incorporated them into his satiric practice. He points to how these developments affected Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726). This is well-traveled territory, but we are on more rewarding ground when the essay shifts to Marlborough. The duke’s prodigious demands on the public purse and the vastly expanded role he envisaged for the army were the subject of Swift’s most coolly indignant contributions to The Examiner (1710–11). A strong influence for this work was Cicero’s Verrine Orations, although Swift trimmed Cicero’s exuberance in favor of his own terse indignation. It was not just that Marlborough was expensive: his campaigns called for the whole balance of power within the state to be readjusted. There are two rival scales in conflict here. Swift’s political imagination could not countenance a standing army; Marlborough’s political ambitions necessitated one. By the use of such low genres as animal fable, Swift diminishes Marlborough still more. He transforms the general into the greedy cat, howling for his perquisites from the household larder. In reworking the fable of King Midas, he exposes Marlborough’s regal ambitions as well as his grand folly.In “Western Gardens, Eastern Views: Asian Travelers on Greenscapes of the British Isles,” Barbei Czennia maintains the public focus in her examination of the politics of public spaces. She presents to us four authentically Eastern travelers to England between 1751 and 1810. These are not the strategically fashioned world citizens of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) or Oliver Goldsmith’s Chinese philosopher in The Citizen of the World (1762). This is an ambitious essay. Czennia wants not just to record the impressions of these Eastern visitors to British green spaces but also to couple their accounts to some of the big guns of contemporary theory. Although he praises the picturesque countryside surrounding Dublin, the poet Mirza Abu Taleb Khan recoils from the “hungry, dusty children’s faces . . . bobbing up and down outside a wealthy traveler’s coach windows.” This may be a moving interlude, but to see it as “a first step toward questioning the legitimacy of British rule in other parts of the world, including India” (200), stretches credulity.Czennia raises the ante when she examines the case of Abul Hassan Khan. As a Persian ambassador, charged by his monarch, Ali Shah Qajar, with stimulating the East India Company’s interest in the silk trade, Khan begins his trip “surrounded by culturally sensitive, bilingual representatives of the British Empire” (187). One of them, Sir Gore Ousley, secures him access to a network of country estates. Here, his “seemingly unqualified enthusiasm for Western green spaces” conceals a latent criticism of the private splendor and public squalor they foster. Outside the charmed spaces of the gardens of the great, Britain is dirty and noisy, too much for Khan’s constitution. His sponsors supply him access to Richmond Park and Chiswick House and Gardens, “healing places enabling him to reconnect with nature in the most elementary sense” (201). Whatever else you would find at these places, you would scarcely find “nature in the most elementary sense.” These sites have a long history of royal and aristocratic patronage. High-profile gardeners planned and maintained them, and their construction sometimes demanded the displacement of whole communities. They were sites for pleasure, not utility. Surely this makes any comparison with the working, wild spaces of William Wordsworth’s Lake District implausible. Czennia is undeterred. When Khan’s aristocratic mentors provided him with refreshment at these locations, did he scent, she wonders, the machinations of perfidious Albion? Did he recognize he was being manipulated and fashion his memoir against “a Janus-faced global player that aggressively undermined political sovereignty in the visitor’s homeland while presenting itself to the world as a benevolent harbinger of progress and a (supposedly) superior way of life” (202)? If this is so, the conspiracy of cynicism in the gift exchange that brought the East India directors a solid gold dish and Khan a flattering portrait commissioned by the company itself can hardly be rivaled.Kevin Cope’s “Publishers Can Cause Earthquakes: Explanations and Enigmas of the Seismic Enlightenment” closes this part of the book. I have some misgivings about this contribution. The title straddles publishing history, science, and the numinous, hinting at some dissipation of focus. Cope cannot resist a good (or a bad) joke, an ill-chosen tactic for weighing scientific explanations, deciphering the enigmatic, or narrating disasters. To read that “[l]ong-eighteenth-century writers routinely connected earthquakes with miscellaneous phenomena” (218) sounds more like a collapse in organization than a foundation for a future fruitful critical inquiry. There are precedents for the study of extraordinary phenomena: Pierre Bayle on comets and David Hume on miracles would both have given Cope clues in ordering an essay on earthquakes. As it is, he is content to conclude that “earthquakes are capable of producing almost any story that could be written” (221). If this were the case, then his inquiry runs the risk of leaving history in the pursuit of one damned thing after another.This leaves one significant omission, Cederic Reverand II’s pugnacious “What Else Did Pope Borrow from Dryden?” In its simplest terms, the essay makes a case for paying more attention to John Dryden as translator the Dryden best known to his contemporaries. Reverand then proposes that the powerful presentation of female emotion offered in Dryden’s translations of Ovid’s Fables influenced Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (both 1717). The usual account of these poems sees them as Pope’s essays in the proto-Gothic. But Reverand exhorts us to revise this estimate. Are these poems not “simply part of the legacy [Pope] inherited from Dryden” (149)? Only Dryden/Pope scholars can rule on that. But the core of Reverand’s essay raises questions all classroom teachers should face. Time and time again, we read fliers for a new, expanded anthology that allows the silenced voices of marginalized lives to speak again. Every anthologist fashions himself as Tom Paine. But, when the editors of these anthologies turn to standard authors, Dryden among them, they recycle the same poems etherized on a table by earlier generations, generations whose preferences and premises today’s anthologists violently oppose. The Dryden of today’s critical anthologies is, Reverand submits, still the Dryden of T. S. Eliot, not the Dryden of his contemporaries or even the Dryden of Scott or Byron. How historical is that? Vigilance about the masks and evasions of the past should encourage us to be on the lookout for the blind spots of the present.At its best, A Clubbable Man is, indeed, about relationships. But the most significant relationship on display is not the professional relationships of its dedicatee but the relationship between eighteenth-century authors and audiences in the world of print. Pope, Swift, Johnson: all were masters of the art, disguising, ventriloquizing, self-fashioning. As Martine Brownley shows us, even the memoir writer frequently came in a mask. The relationship between authors and audiences is playful but extremely suspicious of play. Johnson notoriously objects to Milton’s impersonation of a shepherd; Swift unmasks Marlborough’s mask of Roman virtue. This should not come as a surprise. In “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), Immanuel Kant has no doubts that the first task of the enlightened person is to encourage his audience “to make use of his understanding.” With an excessive self-reliance, he adds that humanity must exercise this faculty “without help from another” (11). This is not the route taken by many of the authors in this collection discussed here, who are skeptical of the human capacity for understanding without a prompter. For them, the masks and dialogues are so many ways to engage their readers’ alert critical reaction.