The Club joins recent accounts of Johnson’s social world, such as Lyle Larsen’s The Johnson Circle: A Group Portrait (2013; reviewed in Scriblerian 52.1 [Autumn 2019], 106–108) and my own Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle (2019; reviewed above, pp. 180–183). While set on a scholarly foundation, this account is addressed to Johnson’s “common reader”—a dubious niche that Damrosch carved out with earlier accessible books on Swift and Blake. He meticulously cites his scholarly sources, but even meticulous citation does not diminish the scholarly culpability of not knowing what sources to cite. His choice of the G. B. Hill edition of what is perhaps Johnson’s greatest work, The Lives of the Poets, is either absurdly lazy or ignorant: this antiquated, century-old version has been superseded by two recent ones, the 2010 Yale edition and Roger Lonsdale’s superb 2006 Oxford edition. Likewise, instead of using Gordon Turnbull’s updated 2010 Penguin edition of Boswell’s London Journal, Damrosch avails himself of the 1950 Pottle version.In terms of its content, this is not a book that serious Johnson scholars will wish or need to consult: there is nothing new here, but rather a recasting of the oft-told tale of the Johnson–Boswell friendship (one accounted for with much greater acumen by the late John Radner in Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship, 2017), and some of their friends and associates, including Reynolds, Garrick, Burke, Adam Smith, and Gibbon, among others, and their relationship with the famous Literary Club.Among the book’s virtues are a clear and readable style, as well as a copious collection of illustrations appearing every two to three pages: these nicely bring a vivid vitality to the world Damrosch recreates. Unfortunately, these virtues are marred by errors, some rising to the level of impairing The Club’s status as a suitable introductory volume. For example, Damrosch calls the 1738 poem London an imitation of the sixth satire of Juvenal; it is, of course, of the third. When describing Boswell’s choice of lodgings on Downing Street during his 1763 stay in London, Damrosch writes, “One might imagine that he was a near neighbor of the prime minister, but not so. Though the official residence was indeed in Downing Street, it had fallen into disrepair and successive prime ministers preferred to live elsewhere.” Any reasonably informed scholar would know that the term “prime minister” was not used in any official sense until the nineteenth century; the “official residence” was in fact that offered to the First Lord of the Treasury. Such sloppy application of historical terms will confuse and misinform those very “common readers” that Damrosch presumably seeks to edify.An additional flaw appears in Damrosch’s literary criticism. While not a major aspect of his largely narrative-driven prose, he does at times set one’s teeth on edge. For example, his discussion of The Vanity of Human Wishes claims that it is “the only major poem Johnson ever wrote.” This blithely ignores the earlier London as well as the later masterpiece “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet”—one of the most deeply moving elegies in English. The discussion of the poem itself is thin, fragmentary, and unpersuasive. It reads like the prose of a facilely informed journalist rather than a specialist in the field. If the author’s goal is to stimulate the reader to move past biographical description and read Johnson himself—surely the aim of anyone who takes Johnson seriously as an enduringly important intellectual and writer—then that goal is not here met.On the other hand, Damrosch is on occasion capable of producing a thought-provoking observation; for example: “Johnson liked to be dogmatic in conversation, to provoke people to argue, but he was seldom dogmatic in writing.” It is quite true that, in the heat of the moment, he could talk “laxly.” However, as here observed, Johnson was too careful of virtue and truth to do so on the permanent pages of print. Rather, he tested his empirically gained knowledge against his vast reading and the cultural and intellectual currents of his time, leading his reader with perspicacity and careful deliberation to weighty moral and critical judgments.Despite its shortcomings, Johnsonians will likely applaud The Club for introducing Johnson’s engrossing life, intellectual accomplishments, and social context to a new generation of readers at a time when the significance and relevance of our cultural past is in danger of being erased; however, whether the “common reader” can be persuaded by works like this, neither popular nor scholarly, is a question worth asking. Certainly Virginia Woolf did it better.
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Nov 11, 2024
Emily Waller Singeisen 
Just Published
Open Access