Abstract
In 1775, Samuel Johnson was taken on an extended visit to Paris—his only trip away from Britain—by the Thrales. After his successful Scottish trip in 1773, and his less successful Welsh one in 1774, France was key in questioning his prejudice against non-English lifestyles through encountering other societies. Hester Thrale was also making her first visit to France and shared many of Johnson’s reservations. Some were confirmed, but their overall experiences were supremely different. Unlike Johnson, she was open to French scenery, customs, and sociable encounters, and she writes with delight and surprise of the visit. We find, then, two almost diametrically opposed modes of approaching another culture, both of which are revealing about British attitudes and British capacity to deal with difference.
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Notes
- 1.
A louis d’or was supposedly equivalent to around seventeen English shillings. See https://msu.edu/~williss2/carpentier/part1/louisdor.html (accessed 11 January 2018).
- 2.
The Boswell reference is to Life, 53, and see n. 2 for Boswell’s identification of his source. As Clark notes in his chapter “Samuel Johnson: The Last Choices, 1775–1784”: “There are few studies of the Paris tour.” Clark discusses Johnson in Paris from a political angle, not least in terms of Jacobitism, but the studies he notes comprise only Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel, where the French trip is used as part of an argument “for the importance to Johnson of Lockeian epistemology” (2012, 79–112); Brian Jones, “Dr Johnson in Paris,” which looks at Johnson’s sight-seeing; and Wallace Kirsop, “Samuel Johnson in Paris in 1775”, which deals with Johnson as a tourist, his social and intellectual engagement while in Paris, and “with what is revealed about his involvement in the world of books and of bibliography.” (1995, 222n8).
- 3.
On the contemporary reputation of Johnson as a writer and intellectual in France, see Weinbrot, Aspects of Samuel Johnson, especially chapter 12, “Johnson Before Boswell in Eighteenth-Century France: Notes Toward Reclaiming a Man of Letters” (270–300).
- 4.
Until 1772 it had been held at what is now Place Vendôme.
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Ingram, A. (2021). The Cham on the Seine: Dr Johnson in Paris (and Mrs Thrale). In: Domsch, S., Hansen, M. (eds) British Sociability in the European Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52567-5_2
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