“I Also am a Man”: Johnson’s Lives and the Gender of the Poet

Abstract

In a conversation with Samuel Johnson shortly after the initial volumes of his Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) appeared, James Boswell raised the touchy issue of Johnson’s subordination to the London booksellers who initiated the project: “I asked him if he would [provide a preface] to any dunce’s works, if they should ask him. Johnson. ‘Yes, Sir; and say he was a dunce?’” ¹ Johnson’s reply asserts the complete autonomy of his critical judgments, declaring that even the economic concerns of those who financed the Lives would have no effect on the content of his prefaces. Most readers of the Lives agreed that Johnson maintained his intellectual independence, surpassing the work of his predecessors and transforming the “not very extensive or difficult” ² undertaking into something much more complicated: as Robert Halsband observes, the Lives represented “the culmination of his career as well as the art and craft of literary biography up to that time.”³

In a modern, industrial nation, the ability to act without relationship is still a mark of the masculine gender; boys can still become men, and men become more manly, by entering the marketplace and dealing in commodities. A woman can do the same thing if she wants to, of course, but it will not make her feminine.

Lewis Hyde, The Gift (1979)