Abstract
Johnson’s familiar writings on biography and autobiography in his mid-century Rambler and Idler essays emit new light when put into fresh contexts. Firstly, therefore, this chapter argues that an understanding of Johnson’s ideas about melancholy is the key to his views on the theory and practice of biographical writing. The proximity of Rambler 47 on sorrow to Rambler 60 on biography is a suggestive one. But why does Johnson in these essays and elsewhere steadfastly reject the term ‘melancholy’? This is an important question that cannot be quickly answered: the ensuing chapter will reflect on it in the context first of contemporary medical and theological understanding of melancholy, and then of Johnson’s own experience of melancholy as recorded in his own writings and filtered through conversations with Boswell.
There is nothing upon which more writers, in all ages, have laid out their abilities, than the miseries of life.
(Johnson, Sermons, vol. 5, 53)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Amy Louise Reed, The Background of Gray’s Elegy: A Study in the Taste for Melancholy Poetry, 1700–1751 (New York, 1924), 2.
Quoted in Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey (Philadelphia, 1990), 79.
Julian North, The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford, 2009), 17.
Recent scholarship on the book trade and print culture has revolutionised our understanding of publishing and reading in the eighteenth century and beyond. An account of literary biography in the period, therefore, must attempt to gesture towards some of the implications of copyright legislation in the period, although it is too complex a subject to do it full justice here. I have drawn my account largely from the following works: Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll: Bookseller (Oxford, 2007);
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004);
Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Cheltenham, 2006);
Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA, 1993);
Thomas F. Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry, 1765–1810 (Oxford, 2008).
Anthony Harding, ‘Biography and Autobiography’, in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford, 2005), 445–62 (445).
Isabel Rivers, ‘Biographical Dictionaries and Their Uses from Bayle to Chalmers’, in Isabel River (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London, 2003), 135–70.
The Works of Mrs Catharine Cockburn, Theological, Moral, Dramatical, and Poetical with an Account of the Life of the Author by Thomas Birch (London, 1762). For a nuanced account of this biography, see Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London, 2004), ch. 3.
See Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, 1987), and ‘Biography, Fiction, and the Emergence of “Identity” in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (New York, 2008), 339–55.
‘Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman’ had been serialised in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1743 (Lonsdale, Johnson, The Lives, 383, 384), although David Schwalm, in ‘Johnson’s Life of Savage: Biography as Argument’, Biography, 8 (1985), 130–44, argues that Johnson’s letter to GM aimed to ‘discourage sensation-seeking readers’, who at the time would have known the details of Savage’s life (132).
See the account in William Zachs, The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade (Oxford, 1998), 184–9.
Johnson to Hester Thrale Piozzi, 27 October 1777, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3 vols (Oxford, 1952, rpt. 1984), vol. 2, 559.
Letter from Boswell to Hester Thrale Piozzi, 9 July 1782, quoted in Mary Hyde, The Impossible Friendship: Boswell and Mrs Thrale (London, 1973), 73.
Copyright information
© 2013 Jane Darcy
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Darcy, J. (2013). Johnson, Melancholy and Biography. In: Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271099_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271099_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44455-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27109-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)