Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Antioch Review

Samuel demands the muse: Johnson's stamp on imaginative literature.

Article Excerpt
The impact of Samuel Johnson on later writers derives from the extraordinary way in which his works are inextricably connected to his personality. He himself is one of the great characters in literature; his opinions and conversation were recorded in intimate detail in letters, journals, and memoirs and in Boswell's great biography. His work, therefore, has always been interpreted in the rich social context of his life. Though deeply serious, he brought a sense of humor and sharp wit to illuminate his great subjects: the powerful claims of the individual conscience, the moral struggle inherent in life, the suffering in human existence, the sense of his own imperfections, the pain of religious doubt. His moral and literary influence in the nineteenth century extends to writers as different as Jane Austen, whose social comedies depend on an underlying Johnsonian moral framework; Nathaniel Hawthorne, for whom Johnson embodied the tormented Puritan conscience; and A. E. Housman, who echoed Johnson's stoicism in his verse. In the twentieth century Johnson remained a key character and thinker. For Virginia Woolf, who used him in her novel Orlando, he was the noble archetype of the man of letters. Samuel Beckett, obsessed for years with his pessimism, wrote a play about him.

Jane Austen was devoted both to the character and writing of "My dear Dr. Johnson," whose works were frequently and appreciatively read in her home. Her family valued Johnson's orthodox Toryism, his Anglicanism, piety, and moral rectitude. He emphasized not the formal tenets of religion, but the individual's striving for goodness and humility. Austen's intellectual world view was permeated with Johnson. In Northanger Abbey (1818), Austen gently satirized the way people deferred to Johnson's judgments. Eleanor Tilney, advising Catherine Morland about how to please her brother Henry (Catherine's future husband), warns her that Henry will invoke Johnson's Dictionary as the absolute authority on diction: "The word 'nicest' as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson ... all the rest of the way." Austen also imitated the master, whose style she wittily adapted to the novel. In Rambler 115 (1751) Johnson's young narrator says, "I was known to possess a fortune, and to want a wife." Austen's most celebrated sentence, the opening of Pride and Prejudice (1813), is an elaboration, in Johnsonian style, of this line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Johnson's essays were full of epigrams and wise pronouncements that Austen put into the mouths of her characters. Johnson observed that all self-censure was oblique commendation: "this affectation of candour or modesty was but another kind of indirect self-praise, and had its foundation in vanity." In this novel the hero, Mr. Darcy, a rather pompous young man who talks in a deliberately Johnsonian manner, expresses that same belief to Elizabeth Bennet: "Nothing is more deceitful ... than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

In Mansfield Park (1814) Johnson is both a moral touchstone and source of wit. Edmund Bertram, the serious clergyman who's endowed with Johnson's common sense and moral concerns, offers his cousin Fanny Price, the solemn heroine, copies of "Crabbe's Tales, and the Idler." Later in the novel, when Fanny returns to her squalid home, Jane Austen writes that she "was tempted to apply to them Dr. Johnson's celebrated judgment as to matrimony and celibacy, and say, that though Mansfield Park might have some pains, Portsmouth could have no pleasures." Fanny refers to chapter 26 of Rasselas in which the widower Johnson, inspired by St. Paul's "It is better to marry than to burn" (I Corinthians 7:9), stated that "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures." Robert Scholes has argued that Jane Austen adopted the moral philosophy of the Rambler and Rasselas. She agreed with Johnson's ideas...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!