Johnson, Macpherson and the Memoirs of the Marshal Duke of Berwick

Abstract

This essay proposes a connection between two episodes on opposite ends of the familiarity scale. Johnson’s feud with James Macpherson brought out one of Johnson’s most extensively discussed intellectual and personal antipathies. That feud supplies the more familiar of my two episodes. The less familiar — recorded by Boswell, but rarely discussed — is Johnson’s involvement in the publication of a book entitled Memoirs of the Marshal Duke of Berwick (1779). Johnson had been sent the manuscript of this work (translated from a French original) by an English monk in Paris, who asked for Johnson’s help in getting it published. Johnson liked the monk, was keen on the book, and encouraged at least two publishers to take it on, offering personally to edit the proofs. But he held back from contributing a preface, which likely would have clinched a publishing deal. The reasons Johnson gave for this reticence, as recorded by Boswell, were oddly evasive. Jonathan Clark’s essay¹ winkles one explanation out of Johnson’s evasions. To complement Clark’s argument I shall suggest a further reason why Johnson may have wished to avoid publicly attaching his name to the Berwick Memoirs.