650. London’s Golden Age: The Mad Life of Dr Johnson (Part 1)

20:03Dominic Sandbrook:That's why I raised an eyebrow when you said there were elements of Dr. Johnson that reminded you of me, because I don't have violent, convulsive gestures.

20:09Tom Holland:Well, let's come on to something that is reminiscent of you, and that is, Dominic, his incredible intellectual brilliance.

20:15Dominic Sandbrook:What do you want? I don't want anything. There's an agenda here, undoubtedly. You're gearing up for something. I find this sinister and unsettling.

20:24Tom Holland:I'm just an incredibly nice person. And when there are compliments to be paid, I'm happy to pay them. Okay, go for it. So this little boy is growing up. He's covered in scars on his face. He's twitching, always bumping into tables and things. And yet it is clear the moment he goes to school, this guy is incredible. So his nursery teacher, who Johnson adored, she described him as the best scholar I ever had. And Johnson was always telling this to Paul Swell. Very, very proud of it. And then he goes to grammar school and he masters Latin and Greek and particularly Latin to an incredibly proficient degree.

21:00Tom Holland:He'll be one of Britain's great Latinists. And so basically the young Johnson will read anything, although interestingly, not all the way through. He was always very contemptuous of people who read books all the way through.

21:10Dominic Sandbrook:He's an expert at gutting a book.

21:12Tom Holland:Gutting a book, exactly. Again, quite Sandbrookian.

21:14Dominic Sandbrook:I will say he'd be very good on a podcast, although the convulsive motions would be disturbing.

21:19Tom Holland:Well, it would add drama to the video, I guess. And also he has an amazing memory. So all he has to do, it seems, is read a page from a book and he can recall it years later. So he's very, very intellectually impressive. However, there are clouds, it has to be said, on the academic horizon. So one of these is a quality that Johnson lamented all his life and was always trying to deal with. And he saw it as his besetting fault that he was indolent. And what he meant by indolent wasn't just kind of, you know, rank laziness, but I think a kind of depression. Yeah. A dejection so profound that he could barely move, let alone kind of open the pages of a book.

21:57Tom Holland:And periodically this would afflict him. And interestingly, this is why he was a very robust believer in corporal punishment. So to quote him, no severity is cruel, which obstinacy makes necessary for the greatest cruelty would be to desist and leave the scholar too careless for instruction and too much hardened

22:15Dominic Sandbrook:for reproof. You know, this, this would be an absolutely splendid Daily Mail page eight article. The way to deal with the mental health crisis is to bring back corporal punishment. That's what Dr. Johnson would have done. And he was the greatest Englishman.

22:27Tom Holland:I mean, one of the salient factors of Johnson is that he has no self-pity whatsoever. He does not say, oh, well, it's understandable that I didn't read a book because I was depressed. He says, thank God that I got beaten to make me read the book. And this is very much his approach to life. So that's one problem he has. And the other obvious problem is that his parents have no money. And this is a real problem because he's very qualified to go to university where he could earn the BA that would then open up all kinds of doors to him. But you have to have the money and he doesn't have the money.

22:57Tom Holland:And then unexpectedly, I said how his mother is slightly better connected than his father. and she gets a small legacy. And this is enough not to pay for Johnson to go for the whole of the university course, but for one year. And his father very touchingly matches this legacy by making the only contribution that he could, which is the loan of 100 books. And that's, to remove 100 books from his shop is quite a big deal. And it's a real investment. And so Johnson goes to Oxford. He's got his books. He's got enough money to last him for a year. And he goes to Pembroke College. And there it seems to his teachers and his contemporaries that he is forging a brilliant career for himself.

23:43Tom Holland:So one of his tutors said later of Johnson that he was the best qualified for the university that he had ever known come there. And one of Johnson's fellow students, he was caressed and loved by all about him. This was, I am persuaded, the happiest part of his life. But that was not Johnson's memory of his time at Pembroke. And he said to Boswell years later, ah, sir, I was rude and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit. And so I disregarded all power and all authority.

24:18Dominic Sandbrook:So like so many students, he was putting a sort of brave face on his private pain and people didn't see it.

24:24Tom Holland:Yeah. And there's a kind of quality of rebelliousness that Johnson is articulating there that, again, is a feature of his life, you know, the whole way through. And clearly also, he's very sensitive to how poor he is relative to all the other students. And he felt the effects of poverty in various ways. So, for instance, he couldn't afford to go home in the holidays. So he's, you know, after all the other students have gone, he's left kicking his heels in the college. And he's a man who hates being left alone. So he feels very wretched about that. His shoes fall apart. And a fellow undergraduate notices this and buys him a new pair and leaves them outside his door.

25:04Tom Holland:and Johnson is absolutely mortified by this and he experiences it not as how it was intended a kind of gesture of kindness but as an insult and worst of all of course as we've said he can only afford to stay there for one year and so at the end of that year he has to leave Oxford and head back to Litchfield and there it's miserable because his parents are incredibly guilty that they can't pay for him to continue his education and he is guilty because he knows that you know his parents have made this massive investment in him, but, you know, he can't get a BA. And so he can't kind of earn the money that he would ideally have wanted to.

25:43Tom Holland:And so then the question hangs over him, what is he going to do now? And I guess we have listeners who've just left university and I, you know, that's a pressing issue for many. And Johnson finds himself plunged into such a state of, as he calls it, dejection, gloom and despair, wondering what he's going to do with his life. But one of his friends who wrote years later to Boswell, because Boswell obviously didn't know Johnson at this period, so was always asking friends for reminiscences. This friend confessed, I was fearful that there was something wrong in his constitution, which might impair his intellects or shorten his life.

26:19Tom Holland:And Boswell suppressed this. He didn't put it in the biography, because of course, at that time, killing yourself was a crime.

26:25Dominic Sandbrook:It's generally thought, isn't it, that Johnson suffered from depression?

26:28Tom Holland:I think that would be the diagnosis today. It's not a diagnosis, of course, that Johnson recognizes in himself.

26:35Dominic Sandbrook:He called it his morbid melancholy.

26:37Tom Holland:Melancholy, or as we've heard, he calls it indolence. And I think, so in the five years that follow his return from Oxford, he genuinely felt that he was on the edge of insanity. And again, all his life, he would worry that madness might be lurking. and it's it's so unexpected in a way because Johnson will become the embodiment of common sense you know there's the kind of philosophers who say that nothing is real he responds to this by kicking a stone and saying thus I prove it is real now that's the timbre of the man he's a man of stolid common sense and yet all the time he has this shadow this anxiety that he might go mad and so he tries to escape his let's call it depression in various ways so he tries walking to Birmingham and back.

27:21Tom Holland:And he does this a lot. And he thinks that an invigorating walk will cheer him up. And actually, I think invigorating walks do cheer you up. So I think it wasn't a foolish thing for him to do. And he also takes a range of jobs. So he tries school teaching, he tries tutoring, he tries hack journalism. But again, he doesn't really make a go of any of them. So that's really depressing. He knows that he's brilliant, but he can't seem to make a mark on the world. And then on top of that, there's something that we've already mentioned, which is that he really isn't as prepossessing as he might be. So we have a description of him in his early 20s.

27:57Tom Holland:He was lean and lank so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye and the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible. And this is obviously a problem for Johnson when it comes to establishing good relations with the ladies. And Johnson is very, very keen on the ladies but none of them will give him so much as a second glance and so of course this plunges him even deeper into dejection but then when he's 25 years old

28:30Dominic Sandbrook:lightning strikes doesn't it because he meets a woman perhaps a little older than him uh who sees in him a veritable Romeo and an Adonis.

28:44Tom Holland:Yeah. I mean, when you say a little bit, she is a 45 year old widow. Yeah. But she thinks he's great. And she says to her daughter, you know, she has a grown up daughter by this point of Johnson. This is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life. And she falls madly in love with him. So there's a bit of a kind of macron vibe there perhaps and amazingly on the 9th of july 1735 in a church in derby there is this incredible development mr samuel johnson and the widow who has fallen in love with him mrs elizabeth porter become man and wife well what a twist that is so in the second half we

29:26Dominic Sandbrook:We will discuss Johnson's relationship with his wife, Teti, as she's called. And we will get to some of Johnson's great achievements and we'll discover how he begins to make himself a celebrity.

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29:56Dominic Sandbrook:I can think of a couple of examples, Tom. So we've just been recording a series about the fall of the Incas and Francisco Pizarro, who was the Spanish conquistador in charge. First of all, he betrayed his business partner, Diego de Magro. And then, shockingly, he betrayed the Inca

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31:56Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back to The Rest is History. In an astonishing twist, one of the most amazing turnarounds that we've ever discussed on The Rest is History, Samuel Johnson has got married. He's got married to Mrs. Elizabeth Porton. He calls her Teddy, doesn't he? And he likes Teddy for various reasons. She's a sort of jolly and energetic woman. He thinks she's gorgeous. And particularly, he's very impressed by what he calls her bosom of more than ordinary protuberance.

32:28Tom Holland:Yes. And he has a lot of pent up energy, I think it's fair to say, and is absolutely rapturous that he finds himself married to such a woman. So he I mean, he remains devoted to her all his life. And also, I think he feels incredible gratitude. You know, she has allowed him to know what it's like to be loved. She essentially is the person who has rescued him from his morbid melancholy. And also she has brought some money into his life because, you know, she's inherited from her dead husband quite a bit of cash. But of course, this only increases the pressure on him to make something of his life.

33:07Tom Holland:He doesn't want to end up like his father, who basically, you know, had been leeching off his mother. Johnson doesn't want to do that at all. And so he thinks, well, I've really got to put my shoulder to the wheel. I've really got to make something of myself. And so his first wheeze is to invest Teddy's money in setting up a school. Johnson thinks, you know, I've got a very good education. I'm very smart. That might be something I can do. And so he opens it in a small hamlet called Edgell outside Litchfield. And it is clear right from the beginning that it's not really going to be a success. He does not have parents flocking to hand over their children to him.

33:42Tom Holland:He doesn't have a degree but also he has this you know convulsive twitch i mean he looks absolutely bizarre come on

33:49Dominic Sandbrook:you go to an you go to an open day at this school the bloke's got no qualifications and he's jerking around like a madman i mean you're not gonna say trust your kids to him so he does however end up

33:58Tom Holland:with three pupils and one of these it's an 18 year old lad called david garrick is clearly a very very impressive student and johnson um actually becomes great friends with garrick you know they're separated by six years so they're actually almost you know contemporaries i mean they're closer in age than johnson and his wife completely so but despite this it is obvious that johnson is not cut out to be a teacher and as boswell puts it in his biography his oddities of manner and uncouth gesticulations could not but be the subject of merriment to them by which boswell means his students and in particular the young rogues used to listen at the door of his bedchamber and peep through the keyhole that they might turn into ridicule his tumultuous and awkward fondness for Mrs.

34:48Tom Holland:Johnson. So unsurprisingly, the school folds and this leaves Johnson even more desperate not to let his beloved Teddy down. So his next scheme is to write an exceedingly long and boring tragedy about a sultan and his greek slave girl called irene uh and since johnson has never seen a play at this point and he's still only 25 yeah it's not very good and it doesn't make any money and he's unable to sell it and so finally he settles on the plan that lots of people that we've covered over the course of the rest of his history settle on which is to leave the provinces and head for London. And Johnson travels there with David Garrick, who is no longer his pupil, of course, and is now planning to study for the law.

35:38Tom Holland:And they buy a single horse. It's all they can afford. And they take turns riding and walking. And then they arrive in London. And from the moment he arrives there, Johnson is absolutely transfixed by the capital, by its scale, by its energy, by its sense of potential. And Johnson is famous to this day as a man who adored London. So 30 years after his arrival, it was still thrilling to quote him. The happiness of London is not to be conceived, but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say there is more learning in science within the circumference of 10 miles from where we now sit in London than in all the rest of the kingdom.

36:20Dominic Sandbrook:So he loves it, doesn't he? I wonder a little bit whether he's quite a spectacle, Samuel Johnson and maybe in London there's a slightly less of an issue of people of him standing out and people staring at him as an oddball than there would have been a much sleepier quieter place like Litchfield but also London offers all kinds of opportunities that frankly just aren't there in a much smaller Midlands town and crucially he can make money doing literary things because there are all kinds of opportunities that there were not in the West Midlands. Yeah.

36:50Tom Holland:And you say make money. I mean, he doesn't make that much money, but it's, you know, it's more than he would have done if he'd been kind of kicking his heels in Litchfield. And so he starts doing hack work for a publisher called Edward Cave. Cave is very, very enterprising and he's invented what is in effect, I think, the first magazine that we today would recognize as a magazine. It's called The Gentleman's Magazine and it's just full of all kinds of different stuff. and pretty soon Johnson is writing most of it because he turns out to be brilliant at this kind of thing and he also does biographies and he does translations and he does studies of literature for Cave and then for Cave he pioneers a completely new form of journalism which is to cover debates in Parliament which his coverage of these debates then goes into the Gentleman's Magazine now Johnson doesn't actually attend the debates in fact he only ever heard one Yeah.

37:42Tom Holland:He's actually very like an ancient historian. He conveys the sense of what he thinks the speeches should have been. So he's basically, it's about the vibe rather than accurate transcription. It's basically making up parliamentary debates. He's got a sense of the character of the people who are giving them. He's got a sense of, you know, what they're talking about. But he does this so effectively that essentially anyone who reads these reports assume that they are verbatim transcripts. And the politicians themselves are so flattered by the words that Johnson puts into their mouths that they keep shtum about it.

38:16Tom Holland:They don't reveal that they'd never said any of these speeches. And eventually Johnson comes to feel that he might be perpetuating a fraud by doing this. And so he says, I would not be accessory to the propagation of falsehood. And so he gives that up. But it's a kind of momentous invention, this idea that you can cover what people are saying in Parliament. And it's something that lives with us to this day. And Johnson is really the founder of that. Now, obviously, Johnson is doing this hat work to make a living. And if you are a writer, probably the most famous thing that Johnson ever said is his great phrase, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

38:53Tom Holland:I mean, I do not know a writer who is not familiar with that saying. Inspired by those words. Johnson isn't just writing for money. Johnson wanted people to read him. In that sense, he wanted admiration. He wanted fame, I suppose. He wanted people to think of him as a great writer. And so one year after he's arrived in London, so that's 1738, he publishes a poem that inevitably is called London. It's about his experiences and thoughts on the capital. And it's a kind of feisty knockabout satire. And it actually makes him a lot of money, more money than his earning for his hack work for Cave. And it's also a kind of succès d 'estime.

39:36Tom Holland:It's a popular hit, but it's also very, very, it impresses the critics. And it makes a big smash. But it turns out, unfortunately, for Johnson to be his space oddity. So Bowie, after he'd released Space Oddity, it takes him several years before he gets on to Ziggy Stardust. And Johnson, And after he's published, London plunges back into obscurity. And by the time he's entered his 30s, he's increasingly feeling that he is a failure, that he is doomed to be a hack for the rest of his life.

40:06Dominic Sandbrook:He's comparing himself with his mate, isn't he? So he'd gone to London with David Garrick, his former pupil. But Garrick has given up the law by this point and is embarking on arguably the most glittering theatrical career in British, if not Western, history, becoming the most celebrated actor of his day, a man who establishes the template for acting in many ways. And Johnson is not a particularly envious or jealous man, is he?

40:32Tom Holland:No, I would say further than that, that he treats envy as something to be despised and disdained. But I think with Garrick, he does succumb to envy. And I think the chief reason for that is that because Garrick is often performing Shakespeare, he becomes the most famous shakespearean um actor of his day and he becomes associated with shakespeare and this for johnson is agony because johnson probably knows more about shakespeare than than anyone in his day i mean he's read the plays backwards he knows all all about them and it pains him i think to see

41:05Dominic Sandbrook:garrick pontificating about it while he is still a nobody what about tetty so um where does tetty fit into all this because let's be honest tetty flipping hates london doesn't she she's gutted

41:17Tom Holland:that they've moved to london yeah she'd love you know she's got all her friends back in the midlands um she's really missing them london's awful she thinks it's kind of crowdy and noisy and smelly and so poor old johnson is feeling very guilty about this um he needs to be in london because partly because he likes it partly because it enables him to make money and so he assuages his guilt by finding tetty quarters that are either on the margins of london or just outside it and all the money that he's earning essentially is going towards paying for the rent on these quarters where Teddy stays. But he, of course, has to stay in London in the centre of the city.

41:52Tom Holland:And so he has almost nothing left for himself. And in his poem, London, he had written this line, slow rises worth by poverty depressed. You know, he knew what he was speaking about. And all the years of his hack work, he lives in kind of run down, squalid accommodation. he wore shabby worn out clothes and in fact all his life his clothes would be shabby and even on one notorious occasion he finds himself with a friend walking around St James's Square all night for want of a lodging and the great literary biographer Richard Holmes has written a fabulous book about this stage of Johnson's life and his friendship with this guy he went roaming around St.

42:36Tom Holland:James is with and it's called um Dr. Johnson and Mr.

42:40Dominic Sandbrook:Savage so yeah this is a good example of how the Johnson Boswell story is a lovely window onto George and London isn't it because although Johnson loves London he knows how grim and dark it can be if you're on the kind of the wrong side of the wheel of fortune so the gin you know the sort of scenes of from Hogarth's engravings gin lane, the kind of the sewers, the ash pits that homeless people sleep on, the beggars, the prostitutes, all of that kind of thing. And he's not a judgmental person about the sort of down and outs, is he? He doesn't turn his nose up at them.

43:14Tom Holland:He's a moral person, but not a judgmental person. And because he knows what it is to be poor, because he sees the suffering of prostitutes and beggar children and alcoholics all around him. He never despises them. And if he does have a copper on him, he will always give it away. And if he has nothing on him, then he will stop and try and offer words of kindness. And I imagine that generally that they were received gratefully. I mean, there's huge, he's a massive man by now, lumbering, twitching. I mean, it might be slightly frightening for people, but I think people always sense the kind of the kindness in Johnson, which coexists with a kind of gruffness and a fondness for, you know, literary spas and things.

44:01Tom Holland:And Mrs. Thrail, who later in life became a great friend of Dr. Johnson's, she was the wife of a brewer, he became very close to her. And she said of Johnson that he loved the poor as I never saw anyone else do. And in doing that, I think that he is being true to morals and political principles that he had held since his childhood. So Johnson, as Boswell will be as well, from his youth is a Tory. And as he saw it, he identified with the poor, not despite being a Tory, but because of it. And this may seem odd to some of our listeners, because I think the Tories today are seen as the party of the affluent and of free market economics and all of that kind of thing.

44:47Tom Holland:But the meaning of Tory in Johnson's day was subtly different. And we've said how Johnson was always a natural rebel. And I think that in the mid-18th century, to be a Tory could very easily be framed as a kind of rebellion. Do you think?

45:04Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, totally. Because the 18th century is the Whig century. So the Whigs, we did a bonus episode for members of the Restless History Club about the Whigs and the Tories with George Owers, who's written a brilliant book about this, which I call The Rage of Party. He's online as Capel Loft. He's a great character. And he wrote this wonderful book about the origins of Whigs and Tories, explaining exactly where all this comes from. So the Whigs really dominate British politics in this period. They are cosmopolitan. They are the party of financiers. They're the party of the commercial classes. The great landowners as well.

45:39Dominic Sandbrook:Yes. so they they really dominate politics so the tories and this is very simplistic the tories are perhaps a little bit more inward looking they are more nostalgic they are more hierarchical they are more paternalistic maybe um they are more suspicious of europe and more suspicious of change and more suspicious of modernity than the whigs are and so as britain is being transformed in the 18th century by the wheels of kind of commerce and industry and whatnot. The Tories, who are perhaps a little bit more rural and a bit more backward looking, they feel kind of endangered that the world of the country squire and of old-fashioned ways and of merry England and stuff is being lost beneath the rush to embrace cosmopolitan modernity.

46:29Tom Holland:Yeah, and you can see this in Parliament because in the House of Commons, the Tories in Johnson's day are absolutely the underdogs you know they're never more than say a fifth of MPs and so as you say you know as Britain booms as commercial interests increasingly predominate the Tories do come to feel like they're an endangered minority and you said how the Tories are very keen on hierarchy Johnson all his life and despite his own humble background you know he's he's a great enthusiast for hierarchy so he put it to boswell i have great merit in being zealous for subordination and the honors of birth for i can hardly tell who was my grandfather he believes in the crown and specifically in the right of the exiled stewards to the crown so james ii had been exiled jacobus in latin and so the jacobites these are the people who will support Bonnie Prince Charlie, Johnson always has a slight kind of leaning towards them.

47:29Tom Holland:But simultaneously, he is also a devout and committed member of the established church, the Church of England. So if you're a monarchist, and if you're a member of the Church of England, in what possible sense then can you be reckoned a rebel? And I think it's because Johnson saw both these institutions, the crown and the church, as essential safeguards for the poor and the vulnerable against what Johnson saw as the predatory greed of the Whigs, the willingness of the Whigs to sacrifice the poor on the altar of kind of commercial and industrial expansion.

48:04Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, Johnson is a small C conservative, isn't he? And you could see him as being in that sort of bit of the graph, if you're doing a kind of graph of writers. You know, J.R.R. Tolkien is not that far away. Maybe even George Orwell isn't that far away. People who like the small and the traditional and the established and the rooted and they're distrustful of people who are who like the latest fashionable concepts from continental Europe yeah and there's an echo of of Orwell in

48:32Tom Holland:the fact that one of Johnson's favorite words is cant and cant I mean essentially it's the use of kind of modish fashionable words or sentiments to veil self-interest and the most famous expression of this appeared in a pamphlet that he wrote years later during the American Revolution. And he asks, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of ****?

49:01Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. In other words, the Americans whom he despises, he sees them as hypocritical. You know, their progressive sentiments are merely the veil for naked, greedy self-interest. Hey, he's not wrong.

49:14Tom Holland:I mean, that explains his take on the American Revolution. He's very hostile to it. But long before the American Revolution. He's already begun making a name for himself. And it's not just for his kind of take on politics, but also as a moralist. By the 1740s, he's starting to, well, he's not exactly famous, but he's starting to be read by people who find him a source of comfort and who find in him qualities that seem to his readers very attractive. So, you know, his deep sympathy for the underdog, be it the poor on the streets of London or slaves in the Caribbean and America, or even Native Americans whose land is being stolen by British and French colonialists in the wilds of Canada.

50:06Tom Holland:His kind of matching contempt for hypocrisy and, by extension, his insistence on what is practical, his impatience with theory, his feeling that kind of academic language, if you like, often expresses a form of oppression. And also, even as he has this sympathy for the underdog, he also likes a punch up. He has a relish for a fight. He talks for victory, as Boswell would one day put it. And in his writings, he does the same.

50:36Dominic Sandbrook:All of that is so George Orwell, isn't it? Or somebody like that of that tradition, or John Kerry, or John Gray. There's a Johnsonian tradition that runs right through British intellectual culture, the kind of anti-intellectual intellectual who speaks for the common man, who speaks for common sense, who is impatient with kind of cant and jargon, and dare I say political correctness. Johnson would have hated all that.

50:59Tom Holland:Oh, absolutely. He really would. But you say he's anti-intellectual. I mean, he's really not anti-intellectual.

51:05Dominic Sandbrook:Of course, he's an intellectual, but he veils his intellectualism in the language of pragmatism and earthiness and common sense and ordinariness.

51:14Tom Holland:I think that's absolutely true. But even as he's doing that, he is unapologetic in thinking that the things that interest him, Shakespeare or whatever, that there's no reason why people shouldn't read what he has to say about them.

51:30Dominic Sandbrook:Of course, exactly.

51:31Tom Holland:And so, again, through the 1740s into the 1750s, it's not just his kind of moral sentiments, but his learning that is coming to be admired. There is the sense that here is a man who knows almost everything there is to know, that his judgment on matters of literature or language or whatever is absolutely precise, and that he has an incredible mastery of the English language. and it's this sense that in 1746 brings him the commission for which i guess thanks to blackadder he's probably best known today and that is the compilation of a comprehensive english dictionary and to give a measure of the task that johnson is taking on when he accepts this commission in italy the task of compiling a comprehensive italian dictionary had taken an entire academy of scholars 20 years to complete.

52:28Tom Holland:In France, it had taken an academy of scholars 55 years to complete. It took Samuel Johnson, who had six junior assistants working with him. And interestingly, of those six junior assistants, five were Scottish. So, you know, his Scotophobia clearly was performative. It takes them nine years. And Johnson was a very robust English patriot, And he did not neglect pointing out how well this reflected on English scholarship relative to French scholarship. Having said that, you know, he's been a hack writer all his life. And in a sense, the compilation of a dictionary was the ultimate masterpiece of hack work.

53:06Tom Holland:And famously in his dictionary, he defined lexicographer, the writer of a dictionary, as a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge. but the brilliant thing about the dictionary is that it does actually when it's finally published serve to emancipate him from drudgery forever so for for decades he's been working in obscurity

53:27Dominic Sandbrook:hasn't he with this sort of anxiety that he's not really made anything of himself but now all of

53:32Tom Holland:that changes yeah and he's he signals his emergence into what is a kind of blaze of fame with a celebrated letter probably one of the most famous letters ever written in English literature So at the start of his project, this compilation of the dictionary, his publisher had found him this incredible patron. Johnson had never had a patron before, but now he has one. And this is he's a statesman. He's a scholar. He's the supreme arbiter of elegance, writes a series of kind of famous letters advising his son on the correct way to behave. And this is the Earl of Chesterfield. And Johnson is granted an initial audience with the Earl of Chesterfield, just as he's about to start writing his dictionary.

54:13Tom Holland:he then goes back to Chesterfield's house and he's refused admittance to his lordship by you know an array of servants and so Johnson just gives up going to Chesterfield and basically he forgets all about him and then the dictionary comes out and Chesterfield writes in a glowing review and basically says isn't it great I'm the patron of this how fantastic and Johnson completely loses his patience at this and feels that Chesterfield is trying to kind of step in and claim credit where credit is not due. And he writes him this letter. And Chesterfield, to give him credit, is so impressed by it that he actually kind of leaves it lying around in his salon so that people can read it.

54:55Tom Holland:And so the news of it gets out and people find it very funny. So this is the letter. Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement or one smile of favour, is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help. And I think it's fame among writers is precisely because it's something that so many writers have recognised perhaps in their own careers.

55:41Dominic Sandbrook:So the dictionary really turns Johnson into a star, doesn't it? And then he pours out a series of works that make him equally well known because he basically capitalises on his celebrities. Do you want to talk us through these?

55:55Tom Holland:Well, so there's a poem that we've quoted from in our series on Peter the Great. It's called The Vanity of Human Wishes, and it featured Charles the 12th. So people who want to hear that, go back and listen to our series on Peter the Great. He does biographies. He does a massive study of Shakespeare's plays. And he even gets his terrible tragedy, Irene, on. And that's courtesy of Garrick, who by this point has his own theatre. It's not a great critical success, but it does make him a bit of money. And that's important because despite his fame, Johnson is still incredibly poor. He's not making that much cash, I guess.

56:31Tom Holland:And also he does have this tendency to just give it away to beggars and so on. And actually in 1758, he gets arrested for debt and he has to be bailed out by Samuel Richardson, the famous novelist, the author of Clarissa. And then a year later, his mother dies and he's so short of money to pay for her funeral that he hurriedly writes this novella, which is called Rasselas. You can still read it to this day. It's actually great. I mean, it's pleasantly short, it has to be said. And it's the story of a prince who he grows up in this kind of sheltered paradise, the paradise of Abyssinia. And then he leaves it to search for the key to happiness and he never finds it.

57:08And you can see, you know, Johnson is clearly kind of working issues through there.

57:14Tom Holland:And it's a great publishing sensation. And again, it gives Johnson a bit of money, but again, it kind of all dribbles away. And finally, what does serve to set Johnson on a kind of secure financial footing is that in 1762 he is given a pension of 300 pounds and this comes from the crown and it is an expression of the state's regard to johnson for his creation of the dictionary and johnson hesitates whether to take it and one of the reasons for that is that it's coming from george the third who is from the house of hanover so not from the house of stewart and johnson is still affecting his loyalty to the Stuarts.

57:52Tom Holland:And also there's a famous definition of pension in his dictionary. In England, it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

58:03Dominic Sandbrook:So you could say there's an element of hypocrisy in him taking the pension. But the prime minister, the Earl of Butte, says to him, this is not for anything you are to do, but for what you have done. So basically, there's no strings attached. This is just a recognition for your achievements. Don't worry, there's no political subtext here. And Johnson takes it. And this transforms his finances. It does.

58:25Tom Holland:And from that point on, he always defends his taking of the pension in very robust terms. So that's a great help. But throughout this period, even as he is starting to become a celebrity, he remains beset by his indolence, his dejection, his feelings of depression. and I think that this is bred of a besetting sense of loneliness. So Teddy, his beloved wife, had died in 1752 and that means that Johnson is, you know, he's now living without a female companion and I think he feels the lack of female companionship very deeply. He, you know, he remains a creature of flesh and blood but he's not the kind of man as we will discover Boswell is who will go out and pay.

59:11Tom Holland:Johnson is also a man of the utmost moral probity. And there's a wonderful story that's in Bosworth's biography of how during the rehearsals for Irene, so at Garrick's theatre, Johnson writes to Garrick, I'll come no more behind your scenes, David, for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities. Yeah, he can't trust himself. No, he can't trust himself. And so he doesn't have a wife. And so he becomes ever more dependent on his friends to keep his melancholy at bay and he's always been a sociable man but now he becomes sociable in a kind of almost relentless way I think if there aren't people to talk to he misses their company terribly and he sort of hangs around so people will come

59:56Dominic Sandbrook:and see him in his rooms so he has an apartment in inner temple lane he'll hang out on fleet street in his favorite pub which is called the mitre he'll hang out at the shops at covent garden and so it is that on the 16th of May 1763 he meets one fan in particular a Johnson super fan the man who is going to ensure his immortality yeah and that fan of course was

1:00:23Tom Holland:the 22 year old James Boswell and he will be the subject of our next episode and just a warning unlike in this episode there will be quite a lot of bad behavior all right so that episode will be

1:00:36Dominic Sandbrook:out on Thursday. Now, there'll be a lot of people, I imagine, who thinking about the social circle of which Johnson was a part with Garrick and Boswell and all these great characters will reflect on how lovely it is to be part of a social circle themselves, a club modelled after Dr. Johnson's own club. And that is, of course, the Rest is History Club, which is probably the only club in human history that dazzles more brightly than the clubs of the 18th century. And members of the Rest is History Club can hear the whole of this series about Johnson and Boswell right now. And if you want to join them and be part of our chat community, as Dr.

1:01:09Dominic Sandbrook:Johnson would have called it, then you just head to therestishistory.com. And on that bombshell, Tom, thank you very much. And goodbye, everybody. Goodbye.

1:01:22Dominic Sandbrook:Hi, everybody. We have a very exciting merchandise update to share with you all. We do indeed, Dominic. So we have come back to you with another exclusive Rest is History t-shirt. And I say exclusive because it is only for members.

1:01:42Tom Holland:So Graham Johnson, who is one of our beloved Athelstans, has come up with an absolutely stunning illustration.

1:01:49Dominic Sandbrook:So this time, it is an absolutely beautiful scene that he has created to commemorate the journey of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.

1:02:00Tom Holland:So the scene on the T-shirt is kind of modelled in the style of a 1930s railway advert in Britain. And it shows Johnson and Boswell on their tour of the Highlands and Hebrides. And Boswell is sat there taking notes. And a large, I think it's fair to say, a Dr. Johnson is riding off into the mountains while his horse buckles slightly under his weight.

1:02:25Dominic Sandbrook:It truly is a wonderful T-shirt. I love it so much that under my hoodie, I'm actually wearing three of them right now because I like them so much. And if you want to get your hands on one of these lovely T-shirts, what you need to do? Well, you need to head to the new The Rest is History website, log in and head to the members section. And there you'll be able to get your hands on one of these delightful garments.

1:02:50Tom Holland:And if you're an Apple member, then you'll need to join our members mailing list to get access. So to do that, just send an email to the rest is history at goal hanger dot com with Apple member in the subject line and a screenshot of your membership. And you will then be sent the link.

1:03:08Dominic Sandbrook:Now, there'll be some people watching this who are not yet members of the show. And this surely is the spur that you need to get involved. So if you join the show, not only you'll be able to get your hands on this tremendous merchandise, you will also get early access to all our series. So you'll be listening before the hoi polloi. You will get exclusive members content. So the exclusive mini series that we're rolling out this year, you'll get bonus episodes. You'll get all kinds of unbelievable benefits. So many benefits that I can't even begin to list them now.

1:03:42Tom Holland:There's literally never been a better time to join up. So just go to the restishistory.com and you know what you've got to do.