Varied fare for the 6th Annual Seminar
The JSA's Sixth Annual Seminar and Dinner will be held on July 3, 1999 at the English Speaking Union. The seminar program is contained in this issue of the Southern Johnsonian.
Once again, there's a wide range of topics from six speakers and some provocative titles among them. All the speakers are JSA members, and Secretary Bryan Reid says that so far, there has been no shortage of people wanting to deliver papers. So, if you have an idea you are thinking of developing into a seminar paper for next year, start working on it now!
You'll be pleased to know that the indefatigable Nicholas Hudson has again agreed to come up with what promises to be another of his highly-entertaining presentations and this year, Jane Austen gets into the act through a paper from committee member Carla Hawley, who founded the Jane Austen Society of Melbourne.
John Wiltshire and Rusi Khan have previously given highly-informative seminar papers and we're looking forward to their new offerings.
Henry Gordon-Clarke is tempting Johnsonian wrath with his subject, while Denis Le Neuf has us intrigued with the title of his paper.
The usual high standard of catering can be expected for our lunch and dinner, and there will be some unusual entertainment, including a recital by leading blues guitarist Paul Wookey.
Please get your registration forms in to the Secretary as soon as possible, or notify him by phone or fax if you wish to attend, so that catering arrangements can be completed.
NOTE: The second-hand bookstall, which proved a popular feature of last year's seminar, will be repeated this year. Carla Hawley will be in charge of the stall, so bring your books for sale to her, and see her about purchases.
Viscount Eccles, who died on April 24 aged 94, had a distinguished business and political career, which included the portfolio of Education in the cabinets of Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan and was later President of the Board of Trade.
He was born on September 18, 1904, the son of a distinguished surgeon and was educated at Winchester and new College, Oxford where he read Economics. Embarking on a business career, he soon earned a senior position in the Central Mining and Investment Corporation.
On the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and from 1940 to 1942 acted as Economic Advisor to the British Ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon. He began his post-war political career after becoming Conservative MP for Chippenham and became Minister of Works in 1951.
He went to the House of Lords in 1962, then was appointed by Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1970 as Minister responsible for the Arts. As such, he was able to take many useful initiatives, including removing the library departments from the British Museum to set up the British Library. He left the Government in 1973 to become the first chairman of the British Library Board and was able to secure a high level of funding for the British Library.
He was made Baron Eccles in 1962, then created a Viscount two years later. Viscount Eccles was the author of several books on religious and political subjects. A lifelong collector of objets d'art and books, his work On Collecting is regarded as a classic of its kind.
After the death of his first wife in 1977, Lord Eccles married our Patron, then Mary Hyde, in 1984.
We send condolences to our Patron on the death of her husband
A message of condolence on the death of her husband, Viscount Eccles, has been sent to our Patron, Lady Mary Eccles, by JSA president Paul Brown on behalf of the Johnson Society of Australia. Paul wrote to Lady Eccles:
"I am writing to you both personally and on behalf of the Johnson Society of Australia to express condolences at the passing of your dear husband, Lord David Eccles…I regard it as a great privilege to have met him, when my father and I were so graciously hosted by you both, and your fellow-Johnsonians at the Cheschire Cheese. The lunch will always remain as one of my most pleasant memories.
"The memory of your husband will not only live on through the memory of that meeting. I now have by my side a copy of his little gem On Collecting. He and I shared the same "acquisitive urge", and I have benefited from his plain talking. He was such a skilful communicator.
"I am sure that your husband's memory shall live on as here in Australia…"
Lady Eccles has replied to Paul:
"Thank you and the Johnson Society of Australia for your kind consideration on the death of my David.
"Our 15 years together were sheer happiness and inspiration. It is very hard now to be alone, but the caring of all the Eccles family and my friends gives me courage and strength to try to carry on with the projects I shared with David.
"I do hope we meet in London. David would be pleased to know that you consider his On Collecting a "little gem." Do go on collecting."
The joint visit to the National Gallery of Victoria by members of the JSA and the Jane Austen Society on March 27 was a pleasant combination of socialising and instruction. Two entertaining and well-informed curators guided the party through the gallery's collection of 18th Century portraiture and conversation pieces, and many members later shared afternoon tea at the gallery or nearby Southbank.
We have acquired nine new members over the past 12 months, bringing our total membership now to 103. Two of the new members live in the United States, three are from Queensland, one from Western Australia, one from the ACT, one from New Zealand and one from Victoria. A hearty welcome to:
Lynn Barker, Hawaii, USA; Prof David Vander Meulen, of the University of Virginia, USA; David Cooke, Maryborough, Qld; Darren Lewis, Toowoomba, Qld; Ian Simmons, Duck Creek, Qld; David Hough, Swanbourne, WA; Michael Fisher, Auckland NZ; and Brendan Lawlor, Gardenvale, Vic; Tony Maples, Griffith, ACT.
John Wiltshire reviews 'A neutral being between the sexes': Samuel Johnson's sexual politics, by one of our first American members, Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1998).
"Do not consider me now as en elegant female," Elizabeth Bennett tells Mr Collins, "but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart."
It is often suggested that Mary Wollstonecraft's insistence that her female contemporaries are rational beings deformed by society and the marriage market lies behind this speech, but it might equally have been Samuel Johnson, whose absolutely even-handed treatment of men and women is the subject of Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer's book. Surprisingly enough, Johnson and Wollonstonecraft began a friendship not long before he died, but neither this, nor Johnson's strong and enduring attachments to such important 8th Century proto-feminists as Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox and Frances Burney is the subject of this book.
Instead of his biography, Dr Kemmerer focuses her attention on Johnson's writings - on Irene, The Rambler and Rasselas in particular - in order to establish, at source, Johnson's attitudes towards women.
As she notes, many writers, including many feminists, are more familiar with sneering comparisons of preaching women to dancing dogs that they are with Johnson's works themselves.
That Johnson in his writings is "an infinitely more interesting and subtle character" than the portrait produced by Boswell is her - surely undeniable - premise. Her book accordingly begins by deconstructing some of the sayings reported by his young friend. Arguing that Johnson is deeply influenced by William Law, she suggests that some of Johnson's more apparently disparaging comments on women and marriage can be readily interpreted as his attempts to discriminate between civil and ecclesiastical views of marriage. This goes a long way towards disposing of the myth of Johnson's misogyny but the force of Kemmerer's argument really rests on her examination of Johnson's texts.
Here she shows, to my mind absolutely convincingly, that Johnson is quite free of gender prejudice. Women may be scathingly criticised in The Rambler for example, but Johnson always balances his accounts of female misbehavior with subsequent accounts of male responsibility.
Though the personae of letters to The Rambler are often female, Johnson makes no attempt at "feminising" their voice: instead he adopts a position that Kemmerer calls "androgyny" - complete gender neutrality. In Rasselas, he creates an imaginary world in which men and women are intellectual and social equals. Imlac does not condescend to his female travelling companion as does the philosopher in Fontenelle's Conversations (which Kemmerer suggests, along with The Republic, is a source) but treats them with respect. Intellectual power, as the marriage debate shows, is distributed equally.
Johnson argues consistently that fathers should see that their daughters are raised to esteem themselves and should give them a liberal education. He is, so Kathleen Kemmerer suggests, more "radical" even than his blue-stocking friends, claiming - as might Elizabeth Bennet - women's unconditional right to education and authorship as merely their due.
It is to be hoped that Dr Kemmeer's lucid, soundly argued and scholarly
book will dispose, once and for all, of one of the more persistent of
literary myths, and instead reinstate Johnson as a pioneer of progressive
sexual politics.
(John Wiltshire will review the Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson
in a subsequent issue)
A Bookseller's Life
Trafficking in Old Books, by Anthony Marshall: a review by Geoff
Brand, fellow-bookseller and fellow-JSA member.
Boswell relates how in less than half an hour Johnson once dashed off an Idler to catch the post from Oxford to London. Something of this same ability shines through the work of Melbourne author (and JSA member) Anthony Marshall, who was introduced in he last newsletter.
For some years Anthony has been regularly contributing essays to the Australian Book Collector magazine on the craft of second hand bookselling, each one a fast-flowing, intelligent and witty treatment of some facet of the trade, full of facts and feelings, anecdotes and reflections.
These essays have now been collected in one entertaining volume, Trafficking in Old Books (Lost Domain, Melbourne). There's everything from the art of pricing, the joys of garage sales and the horrors of book fairs, the eccentric shoplifter, how to name a bookshop, how to approach your local book dealer with your unwanted books, the bookseller on Sale of the Century, to bookselling and the law, the GST, the problems of eating lunch as a sole trader and how to turn children into the next generation of bibliophiles.
There are intriguing characters and events: we meet Flash Harry, who graduated from using a torch to wearing a miner's helmet, the better to see titles on dimly-lit spines while having the use of both hands; we share a friend's discovery in a Rome bookshop of Giburnia, a play written by Raffaello Carboni in the Old Melbourne Gaol.
And there are intriguing questions, as well: What is the collective noun for a group of booksellers? A dithering? Was any felon sent to Australia for stealing books?
If you love the by-ways of old books, by all means read Austin Dobson. If you want to be led as well through the labyrinths of the second hand book trade by an articulate writer passionate about his craft, as Trafficking in Old Books to your collection.
Subs for 1999-2000
Due on June 30
A copy of your membership details is contained in this issue of the Southern Johnsonian. If your "membership to.." line is earlier than 06/99, you are in arrears with your subscription. Please let us have the overdue subscriptions as soon as possible.
Any queries about membership should be addressed to:
The Secretary,
PO Box 163
Albert Park 3206
(03) 9699 1425
reidb@ozemail.com.au
this
is a netexposure site
(c)1999