Johnson and Hard Work

"Anecdotal Evidence" has an admirable post up about Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and the (asserted?) similarity between Johnson and W. H. Auden. I have nothing to add about the Auden connection, but let me offer a couple of thoughts about Johnson.

First, the book. AE admires the new Oxford edition, but laments the “formidable price tag: $595.” “Without the library,” he laments, “ I would never have been able to read it.”

Comment: you got it, baby. Oxford didn’t fall off the turnip truck. They know that every library (worthy of the name) has to have the “definitive edition,” and that Oxford is, well, Oxford, so they are way up the sloped demand curve. Twill be interesting to see if they find a way to repackage it as an accessible paperback later.

[But hey, be fair: it wasn’t that cheap to produce, and somebody has to pick up the tab. And did you notice that an Amazon marketplace seller has it for a paltry $450?]

Second, AE remarks on Johnson’s commitment to hard work. “Johnson … accepted what is called, often dismissively, the Protestant work ethic. To many contemporary sensibilities, that must seem impossibly square, repressed, bourgeois…”

Comment: Even with the qualifiers, this doesn’t seem to me entirely fair. Recall that Johnson was nobody from nowhere. He arrived in London with no bankroll, no patron, no connections—nothing except his wits, or his wit. He had to work hard, or starve. At last he got his modest government pension, but even then, there was no ostentatious display. He continued to subsist at a level of austerity that would drive the average untenured university lecturer into the arms of the union business agent. And he wasn’t hoarding—a good deal of the money, he spent on others. There may be writers who pass as “impossibly square, repressed, bourgeois” (Trollope leads with his chin here). But even at the level of vulgar misunderstanding, Johnson isn’t even a contender.

Oh, and a third point. AE, channeling Anthony Hecht, says that Johnson “held cleanliness in ‘utter disregard.’” Perhaps he is thinking of Johnson on the (allegedly) mad poet, Christopher Smart:

He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it."