The Annual Seminar and Dinner:
And now, for something completely different!

We've taken a new direction with the JSA's annual seminar and dinner for 2000. This year, we have a featured speaker who won't be talking about matters Johnsonian, or even literary, but his subject will very definitely be placed in the 18th Century.

Professor Roger Short, a leading authority on population, will discuss the theory of the British economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) that population tends to increase faster than the supply of food necessary to sustain it, and that war and famine provide the check against excessive population growth.

The title of Professor Short's paper is Malthus, Right or Wrong? And we can be assured of a very stimulating discussion on a topic that still generates controversy 200 years after its formation.

There'll be three other very entertaining papers also. Barrie Sheppard, whose paper is entitled Time: Now and Then, will look at conceptions of time now and in he 18th Century, with attention to Johnson's attitude to its keeping.

Book dealer Anthony Marshall's paper will be Getting to Know the Doctor: a Bookseller Sees the Light.

John Wiltshire will continue his highly diverting account of the relationship between Johnson and Garrick, the first part of which, delivered at the last seminar, was so much enjoyed.

The program, as usual, will contain some musical entertainment and proceedings will conclude with supper.

Distinction for Paul Tankard

JSA committee member and Publications Editor Paul Tankard has had the distinction of having an essay published in the scholarly annual, The Age of Johnson.

Entitled A Petty Writer: Johnson and the Rambler Pamphlets, it discusses Johnson as an essayist and gives us a fascinating, detailed history of the Rambler series and how it was produced and distributed. It also examines Johnson's view of his own work as a periodical essayist and his sober assessments of what the author could expect from his readers. Paul is a post-graduate student at Monash University, and is working on a doctoral thesis on Johnson and the everyday, entitled In Full Possession of the Present Moment.

Johnson and Boswell:
A jaundiced view

Not everyone has regarded Samuel Johnson and James Boswell as figures to be cherished. JSA member Ian Simmonds, reading Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage recently writes: The author seems to have been something of a Johnson scholar. The story is told in the first person by Langdon Towne, the painter. He and Robert Rogers spend some time in England and apparently meet with Burke, Reynolds, Dr Campbell, Fizherbert etc. At one point, while the discussion is on Johnson, Dr Campbell says:

"If he'd talk less and put the talk he saved into books, there'd be no room for my books on the shelf at the British Museum. Johnson's would fill the place to overflowing. Look at the time he wasted answering idiotic questions from that little squirt Boswell! He made his voice mealy and vapid. 'Oh, Sir, if you could have a third arm, where would it be placed?'

"Good God! Think of the murdered literature that lies at the door of that little drunken ass!" He hitched his stomach into a more comfortable position.

Dr Johnson's cat immortalised in verse

JSA Vice-President Kevin Hart has sent us a copy of the delightful An Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson's favorite cat (Hodge). It is a verse tribute by the minor English poet Percival Stockdale, which was published in a small volume of miscellanies in 1778 and again in a collection of his works in 1810.

Stockdale assigned the poem the date 1764, but in an introduction to a re-publication of the Elegy by Yale University press in 1949, Herman W. Liebert writes:

"One can only conclude that, in fixing this date, as in so many other matters, Stockdale's memory of events fifty years earlier was inaccurate. Mrs Thrale speaks familiarly of Hodge, yet she did not meet Johnson until January, 1765. She associates Hodge with Johnson's Fleet Street room, which seems better to fit the residence to which he moved in September, 1765, at Johnson's Court, No 7, Fleet Street, than his earlier quarters in Inner Temple Lane.

"Further, Stockdale himself was out of London, serving as a curate at Berwick, until 1769, at which time he was a neighbour of the Doctor in Johnson's Court. It seems most likely that his knowledge of Hodge should be assigned to this period, from 1769 on, rather than to a previous year."

Liebert adduces further evidence from Boswell that seems to indicate that Hodge survived beyond 1764 and that Stockdale's date for his death is in error. Liebert concludes his essay, however by saying:

"Dr Johnson preferred the portrait of a dog he knew to all the allegorical painting in the world. It is not too much to assume that he would look kindly on this attempt to preserve for posterity that little the passing of nearly two centuries has left of the cat who solaced his lonely hours."

An Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson's Favourite Cat

Let not the honest muse disdain
For Hodge to wake the plaintive strain.
Shall poets prostitute their lays
In offering venal Statesmen praise;
By them shall flowers Parnassian bloom
Around the tyrant's gaudy tomb;
And shall not Hodge's memory claim
Of innocence the candid fame;
Shall not his worth a poem fill,
Who never thought, nor uttered ill;
Who by his manner when caressed
Warmly his gratitude expressed;
And never failed his thanks to purr
Whene'er he stroaked his fable furr?
  The general conduct if we trace
Of our articulating race,
Hodge's, example we shall find
A keen reproof of human kind.
  He lived in town, yet ne'er got drunk,
Nor spent one farthing on a punk;
He never filched a single groat,
Nor bilked a taylor of a coat;
His garb when first he drew his breath
His dress through life, his shroud in death.
  Of human speech to have the power,
To move on two legs, not on four;
To view with unobstructed eye
The verdant field, the azure sky
Favoured by luxury to wear
The velvet gown, the golden glare -
--If  honour from these gifts we claim,
Chartres had too severe a fame.
  But wouldst though, son of Adam, learn
Praise from thy noblest powers to earn;
Dost thou, with generous pride aspire
Thy nature's glory to acquire?
Then in thy life exert the man,
With moral deed adorn the span;
Let virtue in they bosom lodge;
Or wish thou hadst been born a Hodge.

Johnson as warrior:
Garrick's tribute

JSA committee member Bronwen Hickman has reminded us of Garrick's wonderful verse tribute to Johnson as a dictionary-maker. She writes:

I recently came across a verse by David Garrick celebrating the publication of Johnson's Dictionary.

Garrick and Johnson left Lichfield together in 1737 and had pursued their separate careers in London. As Garrick's fame grew, Johnson was clearly aware of his friend's talents, and particularly of his wonderful ability with mime and facial expression.

Boswell records that when Dr Burney commented that Garrick's face was beginning to look old, Johnson said, "Why, Sir, you are not to wonder at that; no man's face has had more wear and tear."

Most of Garrick's verse was written for performance in the theatre, but the appearance of the Dictionary moved him to write a verse in its honor. In this, Garrick makes full use of the anti-French sentiment of the time, comparing the production of a French dictionary (by 40 members of the Academie Francaise) with Johnson's great work.

Upon Johnson's Dictionary (1755)

Talk of war with a Briton, he'll boldly advance
That one English soldier will beat ten of France.
Would we alter the boast from the sword to the pen
The odds are still greater, still greater our men.
In the deep mines of science though Frenchmen may toil,
Can their strength be compared to Locke, Newton and Boyle?
Let them rally their heroes, send forth all their powers,
Their verse-men and prose-men, then match them with ours.
First Milton and Shakespeare, like gods in the fight,
Have put their whole drama and epic to flight;
In satires, epistles and odes would they cope,
Their numbers retreat before Dryden and Pope;
And Johnson, well-armed, like a hero of yore,
Has beat forty French and will beat forty more.

Fred Nicholls leaves the Birthplace

Dr Graham Nicholls, (known to his many friends as "Fred") has left his long-time job at Curator of the Johnson Birthplace Museum in Lichfield to take up a research fellowship with Birmingham University.

His research project? To edit Johnson's Dictionary!

Dr Nicholls is well-known to Johnsonians throughout the world, both as the Birthplace curator and for his considerable scholarship. He is also current President of the Johnson Society. We will be carrying more details of his career and his new appointment in the next issue of the Southern Johnsonian.

Johnson and Garrick: Part II
Dr John Wiltshire

John Wiltshire, a foundation member of the JSA is Reader/Associate Professor at La Trobe University, and is a frequent speaker also at national and international meetings on Jane Austen. He is completing a book called Recreating Jane Austen for Cambridge University Press and (wearing his other hat) a collection called Sexuality and medicine: Bodies, Practices, Knowledges.

Malthus: right or wrong?

Professor Roger Short discusses the theories of the the theory of the British economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) that population tends to increase faster than the supply of food necessary to sustain it, and that war and famine provide the check against excessive population growth. Professor Short is Wexler Professorial Fellow in the Department of Perinatal Medicine at the Royal Women's Hospital. He has held several important teaching and academic posts in the United Kingdom and has published more than 300 scientific papers in a wide variety of journals. One of professor Short's major research interests has been the evolution of human reproduction and he has been able to shed new light on the causes of the current human population explosion.

Getting to Know the Doctor: A bookseller returns to the Johnsonian fold

Melbourne book dealer Anthony Marshall tells how his interest in Johnson was renewed and how he came to understand why Johnson was such a significant figure in English literature. Anthony has been a book dealer for 20 years both in England, and since emigrating to Australia in 1988. He was an Exhibitioner in Classics to King's College Cambridge.