SOURCE: "A Candle-Light Picture: Anecdotes of Johnson," in Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman, University of North Carolina Press, 1985, pp. 97-132.

[In the following excerpt, McCarthy discusses Piozzi's Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and compares the book with James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.]

A transition from an author's books to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples, and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendor, grandeur, and magnificence; but, when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions,and clouded with smoke.

Most of the very very great Men are odious!¹

The canonical Johnson friendship is the one with Boswell. It has the force of a myth. Like Sherlock Holmes and Watson, the Johnson and Boswell of the Life exemplify that undemonstrative but rocklike loyalty between unequal men which has always been dear to the Anglo-American male heart. We see them strolling up a perpetual High Street, as in Rowlandson's cartoon, and forget that the actual time they spent together during twenty-one years amounted only to 425 days. The friendship of Johnson and Hester Thrale enjoys no such fame, in part, no doubt, because our culture affords no archetypes of male-female friendship to which it can be assimilated. Nevertheless, we can name very few people—perhaps only one person, Johnson's wife—who ever knew Johnson as well as Mrs. Thrale did.

"Uniformly great is the Mind of that incomparable Mortal," she once burst out in Thraliana, "& well does he contradict the Maxim of Rochefoucault, that no Man is a Hero to his Valet de Chambre.—Johnson is more a Hero to me than to any one—& I have been more to him for Intimacy, than ever was any Man's Valet de Chambre."² If knowledge of the subject were alone sufficient to make a book, her Anecdotes of Johnson would enjoy the primacy, and Boswell's Life would take a distant second place.

That their positions are reversed is in part a testimony to Boswell's superior literary skill. Whatever its value as biography (and it had been excoriated, as a biography, by no less eminent a Johnson scholar than Donald J. Greene), the Life is undoubtedly a great book. It consistently has a degree of esthetic finish and mythmaking power to which Anecdotes attains but fitfully. This said, it should be recognized that the Life and Anecdotes have different ambitions and different centers of gravity. Boswell's vision of Johnson is fundamentally comic; his physical distance from Johnson probably helped him achieve his comic vision. Hester's intense closeness to Johnson made that kind of detachment impossible. Where Boswell is able to relish Johnson as a genial father, not without a certain genial pooh-poohing of him as well, Hester must struggle with eighteen years' accumulated resentment of him. Her portrait is dark, as she knows: "a . . . candle-light picture . . . where every thing falls in dark shadow except the face, the index of the mind; but even that is seen unfavourably, and with a paleness beyond what nature gave it."³ The mood of Anecdotes is far more purgatorial than comic; its mode is not comedy but melodrama, and it is often quite uncomfortable to read. Yet, although it is artistically inferior to the Life, emotionally, in its different way, Anecdotes is very nearly as strong. Boswell's Tour excepted, it is immeasurably stronger than any of the other first-generation books about Johnson and stronger than all but a handful of subsequent books about him. As interpretation of Johnson it is pretty clearly superior to Boswell, largely because it mounts resistance to him at points where Boswell cheerfully embraces or blandly steps aside. . . .

The Truth and Artistry of Anecdote

Readers who know Anecdotes only as it figures in the Life know it as one of those other books about Johnson that Boswell seems always to be correcting. His corrections are not confined to specific matters. Throughout the Life there is a tendency to depreciate Piozzi's decency, probity, and truthfulness. Today we know that by 1790 Boswell had come to hate her and that he set out methodically to demolish her.⁴ His motives were partly those incident to all authorial rivalries; he had long known that she too was likely to write about Johnson, and her edition of Johnson's letters had especially frightened and depressed him. Partly also they arose from a sincere feeling of injured honor. By denying his report in the Tour that she could not read Mrs. Montagu, Piozzi had impugned Boswell's own truthfulness. Nor can his treatment of her be ascribed solely to revenge, for Boswell, unlike Piozzi, was a reverent sentimentalist of Literature and Great Men, and he really did believe that her presentation of Johnson was unfair.

Judged simply as a lawyer's brief, Boswell's treatment of her is masterly. It did more to sink Piozzi's general reputation, probably, than any other circumstance. (It so influenced the eminent nineteenth-century Johnsonian, G. B. Hill, that he peppered his edition of Anecdotes with snide footnotes against her.) Yet the truth is that Boswell's attack is largely a feat of legerdemain. His corrections of Piozzi are more showy than numerous; his very frequent concurrences with her are almost all silent. Something much nearer his real estimate of her book may be seen in an exchange of letters with Edmond Malone, his ally in the writing of the Life. "I have read Mrs. Piozzi's book twice through," writes Malone; "there is a great deal of good stuff in it." To this Boswell replies, in part, "she is a little artful impudent malignant Devil. . . . The Book however has a great deal of valuable memorabilia, which prove themselves genuine." In the Life his main charge is that she distills into one small volume all the occasional and forgivable ascerbities of Johnson's behavior during twenty years. Here Boswell is saying no more than Piozzi herself admits: "When I relate these various instances of contemptuous behaviour .. . I am aware that those who will now have heard little of Mr. Johnson will here cry out against his pride and his severity; yet I have been as careful as I could to tell them, that all he did was gentle, if all he said was rough."⁵ This disclaimer does not convince, for the emotional drag of Anecdotes is always towards Johnson's pride and severity. No doubt the Life, for all its own lopsidedness, is better balanced (it is, after all, about ten times the size of Anecdotes and that much more comprehensive), but it is also frequently shallow and euphemistic. The consequence, as most twentieth-century Johnsonians have understood, is that if Piozzi needs to be corrected by Boswell, Boswell needs as much to be corrected by Piozzi.

This remains true despite the fact that in writing Anecdotes she introduced into it a large number of what scholars would call "historical inaccuracies." That is, she departed from her original documents. In the climate of Boswellian legal-mindedness, it has been rather too easy to regard her changes as tokens of indifference to truth. ("Her code of truth is not severe," wrote the same scholar who dismissed her as "feather-headed.")⁶ In fact, the situation is more complicated than that, and in order to estimate the significance of her changes we need to notice, first, the circumstances in which she wrote, and second, the form in which she cast her remarks on Johnson, the anecdote itself.

Compositionally, Anecdotes is the fruit both of long consideration and last-minute haste. In about 1768 Hester began a "table book" of Johnsoniana, now mostly lost. The contents of that book were entered in Thraliana in 1777. This account, the basis of Anecdotes, is clearly a trial run for such a book, if not quite its first draft. It elaborates the 1768 original and closes with a formal "character" of Johnson of the type that conventionally closed an eighteenth-century biography. (This character, which she says Johnson himself read and approved, is retained in Anecdotes almost verbatim.) In Italy, upon hearing of Johnson's death, Piozzi began to meditate the uses of this material. Her first thought was to write a biography, but for that she felt unready. Next she adopted a memoir-plus-letters scheme like William Mason's memoir of Gray (in The Poems of Mr. Gray); this would have yielded a two- or three-volume book to which the memoir would serve as a preface. On this plan she began writing, and she proposed it to the London publisher Cadell. Having left her trove of Johnson's letters in London, she intended to work up the memoir at leisure and publish after returning to England; but Cadell, with an eye to the mushrooming Johnson market, urged haste and offered to send her the letters. To that she would not consent, and, perhaps fearing to alienate him—it was her first experience of dealing with a publisher—she proposed a compromise: "If you will have the Anecdotes and print them first .. . I am willing to double my diligence, and we may publish the two other volumes when I get back."⁷

Many discrepancies between Anecdotes and its Thraliana basis are surely results of this decision. The Thraliana account, long enough to make a preface, was not long enough to make an independent volume. When she speaks of doubling her diligence she means writing faster to meet Cadell's timetable, but in practice it must also have meant writing more. Comparison of Anecdotes with Thraliana shows a gradual increase in the disparities between them: the later pages of Anecdotes contain proportionally more material that has no parallel in Thraliana, and of the material that does have Thraliana parallels more has been amplified. There are even instances in which Piozzi assigns to Johnson anecdotes whose counterparts in Thraliana have nothing whatever to do with him. From a scholar's point of view these changes are egregious. From an esthetic point of view (a point of view which Piozzi herself would probably not have admitted), they are unfortunate because the imported anecdotes are not as good as the genuine articles.

Thus, through these genetic accidents, Anecdotes is not the book that Piozzi meant to write, and it may in some respects be inferior to that book. It would not in any case, however, have been different in kind, and its kind is one that historical scholars, who are sometimes lamentably literal-minded, tend to misunderstand. Its kind is the anecdote. Everyone knows what the anecdote is: it is a tellable story. It is what the sociolinguist William Labov has called "natural narrative." The reason why scholars tend to misunderstand anecdote is that they think of it as "natural" in the sense of "innocent of verbal artifice." Labov has shown, however, what people who tell and enjoy anecdotes know already, that natural narratives are formally patterned, may be highly ornamented, and are held by their hearers to standards of significance. They must be "tellable," that is, worth telling for reasons above the merely practical. They are, in short, a literary form. In the later eighteenth century this was all perfectly understood; that period is the greatest era of anecdote in English literature, a fact attested by the popularity—and size—of compilations like William Seward's Anecdotes of some Distinguished Persons (five volumes, 1795-97) and John Nichols's Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (six volumes, 1812). Noting in Thraliana the huge sum that Boswell was rumored to have made by the Life, Piozzi herself comments disgustedly, "the World is surely not in its Dotage alone, but its Anecdotage."⁸

Anecdotes are about people, and the ultimate ground of their tellability in the eighteenth century was the conviction that, as James Beattie put it, "human affairs and human feelings are universally interesting." One who acts explicitly on this premise is the diarist Thomas Campbell: "as I love to speculatise upon human nature," he writes one day, "I cannot help setting down .. . an anecdote I heared . . . from my fellow-traveller G—." He sets it down, and concludes, "What a creature is man!"⁹ Here anecdote is made to exemplify an ethical truth, to enact an ethically significant moment of human character. This is precisely the use of it that Johnson urges in Rambler 60, where he asserts that to be of value a biography must often pass over the showy outside of a man's career and take us instead into the recesses of private life—that is, into anecdote as defined in his Dictionary (1773): "a biographical incident; a minute passage of private life." Biography must be anecdotal, he continues, so that we may see how a man comported himself not as a general or a statesman or a writer but as a human being like ourselves. Considered thus, as a story whose significance is typical, not merely individual, anecdote becomes a species of semifiction; it differs from history in the same way that Aristotle says poetry does, by tending "to express the universal." Accordingly, the truth value of anecdote cannot be quite the sort demanded by scholarly historians. Accuracy with respect to circumstantial detail is not what it seeks; rather, it seeks the essential gesture.

Many of the changes Piozzi introduced between Thraliana and Anecdotes are designed precisely for this effect. She wanted a more concentrated, more "typical," more "universal," and more dramatic Johnson than her record supplied. Perhaps her finest single change is the one she made in rendering Johnson's sentiments concerning treatment of the poor. In Thraliana they are given this way:

But to return to his Notions concerning the Poor; he really loved them as nobody else does—with a Desire they should be happy—What signifies says somebody giving Money to common Beggars? they lay it out only in Gin or Tobacco—and why should they not says our Dr why should every body else find Pleasure necessary to their Existence and deny the poor every possible Avenue to it?—Gin & Tobacco are the only Pleasures in their Power,—let them have the Enjoyments within their reach without Reproach.

In Anecdotes this is first braced by a penetrating generalization, then rendered eloquent by the addition of a sentence lifted (in part) from quite another context in Thraliana.

Severity towards the poor was, in Dr. Johnson's opinion (as is visible in his Life of Addison particularly) an undoubted and constant attendant or consequence upon whiggism; and he was not contented with giving them relief, he wished to add also indulgence. He loved the poor as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy.—What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to common beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance."

The fairly colorless speech in Thraliana has been stylistically heightened and its ethical point sharpened. But the best is to come. Piozzi turns back several pages in Thraliana and takes a sentence out of a different Johnson speech on a different topic, fitting it into this new context so naturally that one can hardly believe it ever belonged to another: "Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."¹⁰ If this is not what Johnson on any one occasion actually said, it is precisely what we want him to have said. It satisfies us both in itself, for its bitter force, and as a representation of "the Author of the Rambler."

Almost as satisfying in the same way is a change that by scholars' standards is merely reprehensible. In Anecdotes Piozzi correctly gives Johnson's sentiments about the making of vows, in these terms: "Much of his eloquence, and much of his logic have I heard him use to prevent men from making vows on trivial occasions; and when he saw a person oddly perplexed about a slight difficulty, 'Let the man alone (he would say), and torment him no more about it; there is a vow in the case I am convinced; but is it not very strange that people should be neither afraid nor ashamed of bringing in God Almighty thus at every turn between themselves and their dinner?'" We accept these for Johnson's sentiments because we find similar utterances in the Life, in his diaries, and elsewhere. Yet not one of the words attributed to Johnson in this particular passage was uttered by him in its Thraliana originals." The phrase, "making vows on trivial occasions" comes from one of Hester's own observations. The first part of Johnson's supposed speech ("Let the man alone .. . I am convinced") is apparently pure invention, and the second part, with the phrase that makes it memorable, was spoken not by Johnson but by a nameless clergyman in an anecdote told to Hester by another friend. From these disparate and (as Boswell would say) "inauthentic" tiles, Piozzi fashions an emblematically truthful mosaic. The sentiments are true to Johnson, though perhaps the words never left his mouth, and they reach an epigrammatically satisfying climax. This is an achievement similar to Johnson's own in his "reporting" of Parliamentary debates. Supplied with little more than the names of the speakers and the sides they took, he composed speeches that would both represent their positions and afford the oratorial satisfactions that one wishes from, but never hears in, the real speeches of politicians.

These examples may serve to suggest that Piozzi's departures from her original versions are not slovenliness but artistry. The point wants stressing, for in Anecdotes there are indeed signs of authorial embarrassment which could be taken for slovenliness by the Boswellized reader. Cognate with Piozzi's indecision as to the form of the book and her capitulation to Cadell's demand for speed was a severe attack of authorial anxiety. Confronted with the task of writing her first book, she fell deeply into disclaiming her own competence and authority. Thus she permits herself to apologize for not (of all things!) having known Johnson better, she apologizes for not having more to tell, she doubts that she will ever again write for publication, and she tries to turn her supposed literary debility into a virtue, truthfulness—"To endeavour at adorning, or adding, or softening, or meliorating such anecdotes, by any tricks my inexperienced pen could play, would be weakness indeed."¹² This last claim looks like a mode of deceit when it is actually a plea for toleration by a frightened author.

Her uncertainty as to the form she wanted also marks the book. At first it promises to be a sort of biography-with-digressions, but soon the digressions choke the biography. Were the book intended comically we would probably call it "Shandean" and find grave excuses for its disorder, but it is not intended comically, and the reader with even a touch of a formalist critic in him will feel duly scandalized. Such a reader was Horace Walpole, whose withering remarks in a letter to Horace Mann are the second most famous attack on Anecdotes: "Two days ago appeared Madam Piozzi's anecdotes of Dr. Johnson—I am lamentably disappointed—in her, I mean .. . I had conceived a favourable opinion of her capacity—but this new book is wretched—a high-varnished preface to a heap of rubbish in a very vulgar style, and too void of method even for such a farrago."¹³ "Even for such a farrago" implies, at least, that collections of anecdotes were not held to high standards of structural integrity. The virtue of anecdote is to be sought in the individual specimens, not the arrangement of the total. Moreover, looseness of structure (to give it a kind name) is a trait Anecdotes shares with many an eighteenth-century classic, even though most paper over their cracks more plausibly. Boswell's Tour, for one, combines a travel journal with anecdotes of Johnson to what is ultimately somewhat odd effect, and the disproportion of the Life, in which Johnson's career from 1709 to 1763 figures as little more than a preface to BoswelPs own journal about Johnson, is not merely notorious but also grotesque. Moreover, it has had a far more damaging effect on posterity's idea of Johnson than anything m Anecdotes.

Revising Johnson

Despite BoswelPs campaign against it, Anecdotes quickly became a canonical text about Johnson; it looms large in the first extended life of Johnson that is not a personal memoir—Robert Anderson's, a life which already has the appearance of a standard modern biography in that it synthesizes the accounts of Boswell, Hawkins, Arthur Murphy, and Piozzi and treats them all as equally authoritative. Then began, with Macaulay's ineffable review of Croker's Boswell (1831), the phenomenon that Bertrand Bronson called "the Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson." A "folk-Johnson" extracted out of Boswell largely displaced all other knowledge of Johnson, even of his writings. In resistance to this caricature, twentieth-century commentators sought to recover Johnson the writer. A monument of their effort is J. W. Krutch's 1944 biography, the first to make use of the then recently published Boswell papers and Thraliana, and in many ways the paradigm for all subsequent interpretation of Johnson. Here Anecdotes resumes its place as a major witness, a place it has kept ever since.

Roughly, the two Johnsons correspond to the antithetical emotional drives of his two primal commentators. Both Boswell and Piozzi are themselves revisionists, using Johnson according to their needs. Boswell needs an embodiment of massive Authority, both to reverence as an example and to tease; Piozzi needs a latent romantic at war with his own romanticism—a figure that she can both identify and quarrel with, and a figure so obviously tormented and tormenting that her break with him will be pardoned. In veering away from the Boswell-derived folk Johnson, then, modern interpretation could be said only to have preferred Piozzi's antithetical revision of him. This would be a simplification, yet there is truth in it. On some topics it is now traditional to find Piozzi rather than Boswell satisfying: she gives us more usable hints. Among these topics are Johnson's boyhood relations with his parents and several tendencies in his temperament especially illuminating for his ethics and politics.

In writing of Johnson's boyhood Piozzi had the obvious advantage over all his other commentators of having been a mother. She knew what children are like. The stories she tells are emotionally pregnant and highly characteristic. Moreover, they tally with Johnson's own autobiographical fragment unearthed in 1805. Perhaps the first thing today's reader will notice about them is their entire freedom from sentimentality. They are, in fact, at times startlingly "Freudian."

The two brothers [Sam and Nathaniel] did not . . . much delight in each other's company, being always rivals for the mother's fondness. . . .

The trick which most parents play with their children, that of shewing off their newly-acquired accomplishments, disgusted Mr. Johnson beyond expression; he had been treated so himself, he said, till he absolutely loathed his father's caresses, because he knew they were sure to precede some unpleasant display of his early abilities; and he used, when neighbours came o'visiting, to run up a tree that he might not be found and exhibited. . . .

"Poor people's children, dear Lady (said he) never respect them: I did not respect my own mother, though I loved her: and one day, when in anger she called me a puppy, I asked her if she knew what they called a puppy's mother."¹⁴

Without these stories the interpretive power of every modern biography of Johnson would be diminished, and a psychobiography such as George Irwin's Samuel Johnson: A Personality in Conflict could hardly have been written.

Today's readers are so accustomed to seeing stories like these in biographies, and Johnsonians are so accustomed to these particular stories, that we do not stop to think how original it was for Piozzi to tell them in the first place. Five years before Boswell's Life and independently of his published Tour, she is here practicing the very method of seemingly unfiltered, candid-shot detail that Boswell is usually credited with inventing. If this claim seems exaggerated, we need only recall that the initial scandalous success of Anecdotes was of precisely the same kind, and arose from the same causes, as those of the Tour and the Life. Readers were shocked because all three works appeared to give the most indecently "raw" data about Johnson. The public of the 1780s saw no distinction, in this respect, between Bozzy and Piozzi, a fact attested by the journalistic joke of rhyming their names. In Peter Pindar's ludicrous "Bozzy and Piozzi, a Town Eclogue" (1786), both writers are made to reproach each other with those of their anecdotes that were thought most undignified or defamatory. Among them, sure enough, we find one of Piozzi's anecdotes of Johnson's boyhood: "Who, madd'ning with an anecdotic itch, / Declar'd that Johnson call'd his mother b-tch?"¹⁵ Until Anecdotes no biographer had declared it; to declare it was to fly in the face of eighteenth-century biographical decorum.

As a general model for this unsentimental candor, Piozzi had Johnson's own Lives of the Poets, but as a particular precedent for the startlingly forthright details of his childhood she appears to have taken Rousseau's Confessions (books 1-6, 1782), in which Rousseau self-consciously lays bare his own unsavory boyhood conduct. "Why Sir," she makes herself say to Johnson apropos one of his recollections, "how like is all this to Jean Jacques Rousseau!" This is an act of inspired resistance to Johnson, whose hatred and distrust of Rousseau's principles (absence of principle, he would have said) were intense. In Thraliana she was fond of drawing parallels between Johnson's sentiments and Rousseau's, and she says she made Johnson acknowledge them.¹⁶ That she admitted few of these parallels explicitly into Anecdotes is something of a loss, but what she did instead is more striking. In writing of Johnson's boyhood on the model of Rousseau's she brings into view the psychological, pre-Freudian Johnson who is, we now know, really there to see (he is present, for instance, in many Rambler essays) but who has hardly any place in Boswell's innocent vision. She is also doing something for which she has never been given credit: an avant-garde experiment in English biography. The credit for biographical innovation has traditionally gone all to Boswell.

The greatest value of Anecdotes is not, however, biographical; it is far less a biography than an extended character sketch. In Thraliana Hester enjoyed exercising herself in the brief character; we have noticed her characters of her father, herself, and Dr. Collier. The skill that she brought to characterizing Johnson was considerable, and many of her insights have been found so appropriate that we cannot do without them. Such an insight is her exceptional understanding of Johnson's feelings about the poor. Her eloquent comment on them, discussed above, affords a powerful corrective to the stock notion, derived from Boswell, that Johnson was an ossified Tory in the sense in which "Tory" has been understood during the past 150 years: a mere defender of upperclass interests and privileges. Its impact on modern writing about Johnson has been profound, and may be indicated by noting that Bertrand Bronson, in his seminal essay "The Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson," does not quote but rather remembers it. Johnson, he writes, "thought that the mass of the common people was in very little . . . danger from overabundance of material delights, and always protested at their being denied any innocent sweeteners of a bitter existence."¹⁷ Bronson had so assimilated the Piozzi-Johnson phrasing that his reminiscence of it appears half conscious. He does not cite Anecdotes.

It was not only Johnson's professed attitude towards the poor that Piozzi appreciated. She also discerned his fundamental identification with them and his latent anger at the comfortable middle classes—at, precisely, people like herself and Henry Thrale. She discerned it because she had suffered it. Two of her most potent anecdotes, painful to read because they cut so close to the bone, consist of Johnson's rebukes to her own unconscious snobbery. This is one of them:

I was saying to a friend one day, that I did not like goose; one smells it so while it is roasting, said I: "But you, Madam (replies the Doctor), have been at all times a fortunate woman, having always had your hunger so forestalled by indulgence, that you never experienced the delight of smelling your dinner beforehand." Which pleasure, answered I pertly, is to be enjoyed in perfection by such as have the happiness to pass through Porridge-Island of a morning. "Come, come (says he gravely), let's have no sneering at what is serious to so many: hundreds of your fellow-creatures, dear Lady, turn another way, that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge-Island to wish for gratification they are not able to obtain: you are certainly not better than all of them; give God thanks that you are happier."

This is the Johnson who wrote the devastating review of Soame Jenyns's fatuous attempt to justify poverty as being on the whole a good thing. Elsewhere Piozzi reiterates that "he loved the lower ranks of humanity with a real affection," and she adds: "though his talents and learning kept him always in the sphere of upper life, yet he never lost sight of the time when he and they shared pain and pleasure in common." To such remarks as these the modern understanding of Johnson's social psychology is profoundly indebted. J. W. Krutch's superb observation that Johnson reminded himself of reality by reminding himself and other people of hardships, Donald Greene's perception that Johnson needed to draw his strength from "the world of small, ordinary, suffering, inarticulate people," and W. J. Bate's understanding of Johnson's "temptations toward reverse snobbery"—these either derive largely from or concur with Piozzi's portrait in Anecdotes.¹⁸

Still stronger is her treatment of Johnson's general ethics. Perhaps no other writer has so succinctly stated the main ethical intention of his work. His precepts, she says, "tended towards the dispersion of romantic ideas, and were chiefly intended to promote the cultivation of 'That which before thee lies in daily life.'" The quotation is from Adam's reply to Raphael in Paradise Lost (8.193); Adam has just been reproved for a latently Satanic (Faustian, Promethean, romantic) demand to know more than his nature permits. The quotation locates Johnson precisely in the ethical tradition we have outlined in chapter 2, a tradition in which both he and Piozzi belong passionately if not wholeheartedly. It is a tradition of skepticism, and thus of resistance to imaginative extremes of all sorts, whether romantic, religious, or philosophical. Attuned, however, to the deep currents in Johnson as well as to his overt positions, Piozzi sees that he could not rest in skepticism. Such was the fierceness of his temperament that he had to push skepticism itself to an extreme, becoming a fanatic of skeptical reductivism. This is the tenor of her penetrating and ultimately satirical comment on "his favourite hypothesis," often quoted today as a commentary on chapter 32 of Rasselas, the chapter in which Imlac discourses on the meaning of the pyramids.

The vacuity of life had at some early period of his life struck so forcibly on the mind of Mr. Johnson, that it became by repeated impression his favourite hypothesis, and the general tenor of his reasonings commonly ended there, wherever they might begin. Such things therefore as other philosophers often attribute to various and contradictory causes, appeared to him uniform enough; all was done to fill up the time, upon this principle. I used to tell him, that it was like the Clown's answer in All's well that ends well, of "Oh Lord, Sir!" for that it suited every occasion. One man, for example, was profligate and wild, . . . followed the girls, or sat still at the gaming-table. "Why, life must be filled up (says Johnson), and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford." Another was a hoarder: "Why, a fellow must do something; and what so easy to a narrow mind as hoarding halfpence till they turn into sixpences."¹⁹

Usually when this is quoted as gloss on Johnson the middle sentence ("I used to tell him . . .") is omitted. That is exactly the sentence, however, in which Piozzi registers her critique. By insinuating that his hypothesis is monomaniacal, she points up how madly far into skepticism Johnson has gone. Hypothesis itself is an irony-charged word, especially in this context; it carries resonances of Swift's satires on intellectual crankery, and it thus suggests that Johnson has failed, in his frenzy of intellectual pride, to look skeptically enough at his own thought. This is not only strong exposition but also powerful criticism of Johnson, criticism that most, even of his modern commentators, have not been able to assimilate. Among them perhaps only W. J. Bate has had the courage and sagacity to confront as Piozzi does the strain of psychological reductivism in Johnson's thinking.²⁰ Johnson does indeed reduce all motives of human effort to the cravings of egoism or boredom, and among his authentic precursors, as Piozzi understands, are the hateful reductivist philosophers Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville.

We come now to a node of Piozzi's quarrel with Johnson, to the place in Anecdotes where she most tellingly expounds and resists him, and to a vantage point for observing the strategies of her own literary warfare. One of Hester's longstanding resentments, voiced frequently in Thraliana as well as in Anecdotes, was of Johnson's overscrupulous refusals to affect concern he was not absolutely sure he felt. With them went refusals to accept other people's expressions of concern at face value. In her life with him she endured these as daily refusals to be civil, as manglings of etiquette, aggravated by Johnson's infuriating assertions to the effect that civility was a system of cant and that he alone, in being surly, was being honest. "Canter indeed he was none," she writes in Thraliana in 1780; "he would forget to ask people after their Relation's Welfare, & say in excuse that he knew they did not care, for why should they? every body had as much as they could do in this World to care for themselves; & no Leisure to think of their Neighbour's Distresses, however they might take Delight in talking of them."²¹ In Anecdotes she envisions this behavior as a demonic puritanism whose antecedents are Mandeville and La Rochefoucauld. To appreciate what that signifies, we need a brief excursus.

Ever since its publication (1714), Mandeville's Fable of the Bees had been universally denounced for its mocking demonstration that Christian virtue and the ordinary customs of modern civilization are strictly incompatible. Very few books published in the eighteenth century were felt to be so scandalous and were so thoroughly unpopular. What galled readers was its thesis that "private vices," or "luxury," although contrary to Christian ethics are socially necessary, and that in strict truth no civilized society could afford to be Christian. Hence the Fable was received variously as an encouragement to vice and as a showing-up of everyone who both professed Christianity and lived a normal social life. Piozzi herself remarks of Mandeville's argument that he "strips Men naked to make them pious," meaning that his idea of virtue is inhumanly purgatorial. She sees no practical difference between Mandeville and his seeming antithesis William Law, author of the rigidly fundamentalist Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. They are equally extremists, and "each splits upon the same Rock too, for failing to define Luxury or Temperance, they both leave their Readers uninform'd whether any thing but Acorns & Water are allowable to people of strict Virtue, which Mandeville holds to be perpetual Self denial." (In this she concurs with Adam Smith, one of Johnson's nemeses, who detected "the great fallacy of Dr. Mandeville's book." The fallacy is "to represent every passion as wholly vicious, which is so in any degree and in any direction.") Mandeville is guilty of a reductive and inhuman ethical rigorism. Yet there was a side of Piozzi that confessed his force and even found him attractive. She speaks of his "coarse Truths," admitting their validity on an abstract, superhuman plane; more, she admires the wit and brilliance of the Fable, declaring (through the mouth of Una in her 1791 dialogues) that it "is a Work of wonderful Research, & vigorous Ability." She also sees in it "an admirable Antidote against Shafiburism," that is, against the liberal optimism which she believes has sapped Christianity's foundations. In British Synonymy, however, her considered verdict is against all ethical rigorists. Were we to be persuaded by them, "we must despair of pleasing God"; theirs is a counsel of moral suicide. Therefore, "whilst, as authors, we must ever esteem such men, and, as people of vigorous and powerful minds, we must for ever respect them, let us never take for teachers people, who, as our blessed Master expresses it, bind heavy burthens on the shoulders of others—and grievous to be borne—but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers."²²

Remembering Johnson's various assertions in defense of human weakness and his charming ingenuity in finding excuses for the bad behavior of people like Richard Savage, we might not be inclined to class him among those teachers. But Johnson's ethical practice is inconsistent; he could argue passionately both ways. If humane flexibility is one Johnsonian standard, then it is the standard by which Piozzi calls him to account for his departures from it. In Anecdotes she takes care to demonstrate his unofficial ethical alliance with Mandeville and with the equally raspish analyst of human depravity, La Rochefoucauld. "The natural depravity of mankind and remains of original sin were so fixed in Mr. Johnson's opinion, that he was indeed a most acute observer of their effects; and used to say sometimes, half in jest half in earnest, that they were the remains of his old tutor Mandeville's instructions. As a book however, he took care always loudly to condemn the Fable of the Bees." And now her own protest, in which many years of accumulated rage are crystallized:

Few things indeed which pass well enough with others would do with him: he had been a great reader of Mandeville, and was ever on the watch to spy out those stains of original corruption, so easily discovered by a penetrating observer even in the purest minds. I mentioned an event, which if it had happened would greatly have injured Mr. Thrale and his family and then dear Sir, said I, how sorry you would have been! "I hope (replied he after a long pause)—I should have been very sorry;—but remember Rochefoucault's maxim" ["In the misfortunes of our friends we always find something that does not displease us"].—I would rather (answered I) remember Prior's verses, and ask,

What need of books these truths to tell,
Which folks perceive that cannot spell?
And must we spectacles apply,
To see what hurts our naked eye?

Will any body's mind bear this eternal microscope that you place upon your own so?

She is right. Johnson had indeed read Mandeville, and avowed to Boswell that "he opened my views into real life very much." Piozzi implies, rather, that what he taught Johnson was a posture of excessive demand on life, a posture in some respects saintly but also intolerable in its constant nosing-out of human falseness. Johnson drives virtue to its apocalyptic limit. By opposing to this the more conventional, more moderate ethic expressed here in the words of Matthew Prior, Piozzi demonstrates again the extremity of Johnson's stance. His Mandevillian "microscope," however admirable theoretically, pragmatically is inhuman. So disturbing is this insight that most of Johnson's modern commentators have sidestepped it; again, only Bate has been able to embrace it and build it into a larger understanding of Johnson's mind.²³

Her use of Prior against Johnson, we may pause to note, is not fortuitous; it is a calculated and cunning tour de force. She liked Prior's verse, Johnson despised it, and they had disputed its merits, as we learn from Boswell. The lines with which she opposes Johnson are from Prior's Alma, a poem of which Johnson, in his Life of Prior, speaks dismissively: "His greater pieces are only tissues of common thoughts."²⁴ In Anecdotes Piozzi is having the last word, and having it with great effect. This must be the only instance in all of Johnsonian commentary of a Johnson position's being called to account and found wanting by the standard of so much lesser a mind as Prior. Moreover, that Prior is a lesser mind is very much part of the point. Piozzi, of course, knew that he is; she is using him exactly as a mouthpiece of the sane and ordinary—of, indeed, "common thoughts." He is shorthand for "that which before thee lies in daily life'." For all that Johnson, as she says, "intended to promote the cultivation of 'that which before thee lies in daily life'," he could not himself, she is also saying, condescend to do it. He is too wise, too truth-obsessed, too proud, too much the Great Man, too much the destroying demon.

Contemplating this theme, Piozzi is moved to reflect on the community's relation to its great writers: "It is easy to observe, that the justice of such sentences made them offensive; but . . . I hope that the reason our hearts rebelled . . . against his severity, was chiefly because it came from a living mouth." Unbearable in person, the great writer becomes acceptable when removed to a distance from us by the book: "Books were invented to take off the odium of immediate superiority, and soften the rigour of duties prescribed by the teachers .. . of human kind—setting at least those who are acknowledged wiser than ourselves at a distance." Books blunt the edge of competitiveness, lessening its damage to our self-esteem; they are socially endurable. Yet, for that very reason books also fade from our minds: "When we recollect however, that for this very reason they are seldom consulted and little obeyed, how much cause shall his contemporaries have to rejoice that their living Johnson forced them to feel the reproofs due to vice and folly—while Seneca and Tillotson were no longer able to make impression—except on our shelves."²⁵ This is Piozzi's own vacillation between Prior and Mandeville, or between daily life and the prophetic truth which overturns and lays waste. In her own temperament as in Johnson's there was a strain of prophecy, to which in later years she gave rein.

Clearly, a great strength of her commentary is the cunning with which Piozzi relates Johnson to other writers. Especially shrewd is her treatment of the troubled relation in which Johnson felt himself to stand towards Swift. It is far superior to Boswell's puzzled regret that Johnson appeared to have so little respect for his predecessor. Overtly she concurs with Boswell, although with the difference that she can state a reason: "Though no man perhaps made such rough replies as Dr. Johnson, yet nobody had a more just aversion to general satire; he always hated and censured Swift for his unprovoked bitterness against the professors of medicine." Later she returns to the topic: "He .. . for the most part professed himself to feel directly contrary to Dr. Swift, 'who (says he) hates the world, though he loves John and Robert, and certain individuals.'" Johnson, on the contrary, "said always, 'that the world was well constructed, but that the particular people disgraced the elegance and beauty of the general fabric.'" Her phrasing, however, suggests by the patness of its reversals that the distinction Johnson ostentatiously makes between himself and Swift is a distinction without a difference. What, indeed, is the difference between despising the world and despising the people it contains? A little later still, one of her most flattening anecdotes lets out the secret, and does it by means of literary allusion:

Mr. Johnson did not like any one who said they were happy, or who said any one else was so. "It is all cant (he would cry), the dog knows he is miserable all the time." A friend . . . told him . . . notwithstanding, that his wife's sister was really happy, and called upon the lady to confirm his assertion. . . . "If your sister-in-law is really the contented being she professes herself Sir [said Johnson], her life gives the lie to every research of humanity; for she is happy without health, without beauty, without money, and without understanding." This story he told me himself; and when I expressed something of the horror I felt, "The same stupidity (said he) which prompted her to extol felicity she never felt, hindered her from feeling what shocks you on repetition. I tell you, the woman is ugly, and sickly, and foolish, and poor; and would it not make a man hang himself to hear such a creature say, it was happy?"

The language given to Johnson in the last sentence smacks of Gulliver's language at the end of book 4 of Gulliver's Travels: "But, when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience." Probably Johnson never said these words; they are Piozzi's way of dramatizing the likeness she observes between his temperament and Swift's. It was a likeness perceived by another discerning woman, too. In the Hebrides, Johnson regaled his hostess Lady McLeod with a curt dissertation on human depravity; her muttered comment, Boswell tells us, was "This is worse than Swift."²⁶ Johnsonians today recognize in Johnson the affinity with Swift that seems to have made Johnson himself so uneasy, perhaps because he perceived in Swift's unrelenting, all-but-Gulliverian demands on experience the danger into which his own temperament could easily lead him, that he had to resist it by belittling Swift's achievement.

In sum, the Johnson we understand today is in important respects more the Johnson that Piozzi gives us than the one we find in Boswell. It is even tempting to suggest that had Boswell never written we might have known Johnson better from the beginning, for the light Piozzi sheds on him, although less brilliant than Boswell's, is often shed upon more relevant places. The needs that actuated Boswell were often idiosyncratic and remote from anything that Johnson normally said or did; who but Boswell would have had to make Johnson into a sanction for "high feudal ideas" of family and baronial rights? As a writer, Boswell has no natural quarrel with Johnson; therefore he never comes to grips with Johnson's writings. He merely admires them sentimentally. Piozzi, never a sentimentalist of Johnson or of anything else (she is much too fierce for that), resembles Johnson both in temperament and in her acquired literary behavior. Like Johnson she is a literary fighter, and she wins her fights by many of the same means. The means are revisionary, and their fundamental strategy is reversal. Thus, for instance, if Johnson repudiates Swift, Piozzi reattaches Swift to him, undoing his repudiation. If Johnson is a greater mind than Matthew Prior, Piozzi so stations both of them that Johnson's greatness shall appear to be a liability and Prior's littleness health. If Johnson takes care "loudly to condemn" The Fable of the Bees, Piozzi demonstrates that he is a Mandevillian at heart. If Johnson's precepts urge "the dispersion of romantic ideas," Piozzi shows him to be a fanatic in need of his own counsel. If Johnson inculcates a wise skepticism regarding human motives, Piozzi insinuates that he is too little skeptical of his own skepticism.

In some of this we observe that she tries Johnson by his own professed standards and finds that he does not meet them. This is a technique that she practices also with other writers whom she is resisting: with Pope, whose avowed ambition was "correctness" and whom, accordingly, she often finds insufficiently correct ("Swift is infinitely neater, and more attentive," she remarks on one occasion); with Burke, who demands that political doctrines take account of human need and whom she will find insufficiently ad hominem. Another of her strategies is to play one writer against another: Louis Racine against Pope, Swift against Pope, even Soame Jenyns against Pope; Mandeville against Shaftesbury; Tom Paine against Burke, as we shall see; Prior against Johnson. In all of this she behaves very much like Johnson himself, one of the fiercest revisionists who ever wrote. Revisionism is virtually the ruling technique of his Lives of the Poets, in which, for instance, Milton is powerfully deployed against Milton and Swift against Swift.²⁷ In a word, Anecdotes is a deeply Johnsonian book, Johnsonian in its procedural dynamics, and the strength of its commentary derives from those dynamics. To these passions and their triumphs Boswell is pretty much a stranger.

"With Much Violence"

The best of Johnson's earliest commentators all found in him the makings of drama. Boswell's Life is not just comic, it is displaced stage comedy. The Tour, written in the same manner, Boswell himself calls "this dramatick sketch." Boswell was not the only one in whom the figure of Johnson inspired theatrical effects; Sir Joshua Reynolds composed Johnsonian dialogues, and Fanny Burney in her Diary dramatizes Johnson at times as well as Boswell does. So too Mrs. Thrale, in the first of her dialogues upon her own death, in which Johnson is made to stand out as a brooding giant among frivolous nonentities like William Weller Pepys: "(Very loud) Nay but give me leave—I did not interrupt you.—No Man I say has a Right to obtrude unpleasing Images on my Mind, nor force me for his Pleasure upon making ungrateful Comparisons between my past & present State of Existence. Would you declaim upon the happiness of sound Health to Beauclerc? Would you talk to your Friend (sneeringly) Keppel of the twenty seventh of July?"²⁸ Granted that Boswell, Burney, and Thrale were all frustrated or would-be writers for the stage who found in Johnson an object for the exercise of their talents, still Johnson's own self-dramatization must have been compelling to inspire such uniformity of practice in rendering him.

In Anecdotes Piozzi does not use stage dialogue, although she sometimes uses stage directions, such as "(hesitating a while)," to set up an effect. Yet her accounts, even when strictly narrative, often give the impression of drama, and specifically of melodrama. In this one there are the abrupt, enigmatic character of Johnson's first speech and the tormented emphasis of "Do not ask me": "One day when my son was going to school, and dear Dr. Johnson followed as far as the garden gate, praying for his salvation, in a voice which those who listened attentively, could hear plain enough, he said to me suddenly, 'Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered into my heart was communicated in a dream.' What was it, Sir? said I. 'Do not ask me,' replied he with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation. I never durst make any further enquiries."²⁹

Indeed, if Anecdotes does not quite dramatize Johnson in the technical sense, it excels every other book about him in the degree to which it melodramatizes him. Inasmuch as melodrama is not an admired literary mode this may seem a perverse compliment; interpretively it would seem to promise disaster, since melodrama is antithetical to Johnson's whole literary effort. Yet interpretively, as we have seen, Anecdotes is powerful, and melodrama is emotionally right for it and unexpectedly persuasive.

The total effect of Anecdotes is its power to disturb; it was a shocker on its first appearance, and it can still make us wince. Its first readers ascribed their dismay to Piozzi's willingness to tell things improper in a memoir. Even before the book was finished, prudent Fanny Burney was wringing her hands in dread at the prospect of it: "What will she not say! . . . 'Tis an opportunity for imprudent anecdotes which might endanger indiscretion even in the most cautious & fearful;—She, therefore, always incautious & fearless!—O with how little pleasure, & how much pain shall I ever see her Book!" Fanny knew her woman. If we judge by a standard of biographical decorum which says, as James Beattie did in criticizing Boswell's anecdotes, that "Johnson's faults were balanced by many and great virtues; and when that is the case, the virtues only should be remembered, and the faults entirely forgotten," then we will agree that Piozzi was remarkably tactless. Few memoirists are likely ever to write, for instance, this: "Dr. Lawrence told [Johnson] one day, that if he would come and beat him once a week he would bear it; but to hear his complaints was more than man could support. 'Twas therefore that he tried, I suppose, and in eighteen years contrived to weary the patience of a woman."³⁰

This explosion, and other asperities in Anecdotes, erupt out of the feminist in Piozzi, who is here allowing herself to feel tired to death of what it has meant to her to be a woman. It has meant being an object of emotional importunity, being badgered, being always on call. Since most of Johnson's admirers (in print, at least) have been male, it is hardly surprising that such remarks have found no favor. They seem petulant only, and make it tempting to reduce Anecdotes to a sectarian document, "a more or less true impression of Johnson from a woman's point of view."³¹ But "a woman's point of view" is, of course, intrinsically no more sectarian than a man's. It differs from a man's chiefly, in contexts like this one, by virtue of the fact that women have commonly felt obliged to absorb a good deal of male ill treatment. In daily life they experience combinations of intimacy and violence that men are less apt to visit upon each other, and with these they experience fear. Such, certainly, was Hester's experience with Johnson. After resentment, fear is the root emotion of Anecdotes; she was afraid of Johnson's latent violence and anguish, and she makes us feel these in him as does no other writer. She does it by melodrama.

We feel that to live familiarly with him must have been a perpetual walking on eggshells:

[One] day, when he was ill, and exceedingly low-spirited, and persuaded that death was not far distant, I appeared before him in a dark-coloured gown, which his bad sight, and worse apprehensions, made him mistake for an iron-grey. "Why do you delight (said he) thus to thicken the gloom of misery that surrounds me? is it not here sufficient accumulation of horror without anticipated mourning?" This is not mourning Sir (said I), drawing the curtain, that the light might fall upon the silk, and shew it was a purple mixed with green. "Well, well (replied he, changing his voice), you little creatures should never wear those sort of clothes however; they are unsuitable in every way. What! have not all insects gay colours?"

This, she says in an acute phrase, is a specimen of Johnson's "temptation to sudden resentment." It was not the only demon in him. At many points in Anecdotes Johnson appears startlingly like (of all characters) Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. There is the same countenance expressive of a soul in torment: "his eyes, though of a light-grey colour, were so wild, so piercing, and at times so fierce, that fear was I believe the first emotion in the hearts of all his beholders." There is the same capacity to turn a normal social occasion into a purgatory:

Two gentlemen . . . dining with us at Streatham . . . when Elliot's brave defence of Gibraltar was a subject of common discourse, one of these men naturally enough begun some talk about . . . [cannon] balls thrown with surprising dexterity and effect: which Dr. Johnson having listened some time to, "I would advise you, Sir (said he with a cold sneer), never to relate this story again; you really can scarce imagine how very poor a figure you make in the telling of it." Our guest... needed no more reproofs for the same folly; so if he ever did speak again, it was in a low voice to the friend who came with him.

There is the same savage verbal mockery of inferiors, in a nasty little scene between Johnson and his black servant Frank:

"What is the matter, child (says Dr. Johnson), that you leave Streatham to-day? Art sick? " He is jealous (whispered I). "Are you jealous of your wife, you stupid blockhead (cries out his master in another tone)?" The fellow hesitated; and, To be sure Sir, I don't quite approve Sir, was the stammering reply. "Why, what do they do to her, man? do the footmen kiss her?" No Sir, no!—Kiss my wife Sir!—I hope not Sir. "Why, what do they do to her, my lad?" Why nothing Sir, I'm sure Sir. "Why then go back directly and dance you dog, do; and let's hear no more of such empty lamentations."

This sounds very little like our notion of Johnson (and it has no counterpart in Thraliana); it could easily be an exchange between Heathcliff and his wretched boy Linton. More recognizably Johnsonian, but no less Heathcliffian, are Johnson's mysteriousness of manner ("the lofty consciousness of his own superiority . . . cast . . . an impenetrable veil over him when he said nothing"), his power to penetrate people's disguises ("he hated disguise, and nobody penetrated it so readily"), and his power of pathos, "which no one ever possessed in so eminent a degree" and by means of which he browbeat Hester into keeping late hours with him.³²

Actually, Boswell's Johnson is just as unpredictable and aggressive as Piozzi's; it is from the Life, not Anecdotess, that posterity has derived its image of Johnson as "Ursa Major," prompt to knock down his conversation partners with the butt end of his gun. Boswell, however, valued Johnson's violence as an object of hero-worship. The attitude he takes towards it in the Life is adumbrated in his 1773 Hebrides journal. Here we learn that Boswell was perfectly aware of Johnson's irritability and its usual consequences: "I regretted that Mr. Johnson did not practise the art of accommodating himself to different sorts of people. . . . But Mr. Johnson's forcible spirit and impetuosity of manner may be said to spare neither sex nor age. I have seen even Mrs. Thrale stunned." But although Boswell regrets this, he also frankly admires it: "But I have often maintained that it is better so. Pliability of address I take to be inconsistent with that majestic power which he has, and which produces such noble effects. . . . What though he presses down feeble beings in his course? They get up again like stalks of ripe grass."³³ In this singular, proto-Carlylian view, Johnson's petulance of which he himself was ashamed—becomes an attribute of "power," and its "effects" are regarded as if they were esthetic objects. In the Life Boswell exerts his formidable skill to make them nothing less than things of beauty. Humanly speaking, this ambition is perverse.

Anecdotes is a much less beautiful but, I am suggesting, at bottom a more humane book. Piozzi makes us feel Johnson's purgatory, and the purgatories he created around him, as Boswell rarely does; she makes us feel, at moments, how it would really have been to live with such a man. Hugh Blair was one reader who felt it: "I should think it better to read him, and admire him at a distance like a stupendous object, than to have been too near him," Blair remarked after finishing Anecdotes. At the same time—and this is an effect unusual for melodrama—Piozzi makes us feel Johnson's human typicality. The man who dramatizes his pain, who resorts to "vehement lamentations and piercing reproofs"; the man whose "temptation to sudden resentment" is apt to unleash insults at the people he loves; the man who, reminded of a promise to write a charity letter, snaps, "When I have written my letter for Dick, I may hang myself, mayn't I?"—such a man is all too human. It has always been conventional among Johnson's biographers to imagine him as a representative man, albeit on a colossal scale. In him, writes Boswell, "the heterogeneous composition of human nature was remarkably exemplified." His life, writes W. J. Bate, "continues to hold attention because it is so close to general human experience in a wide variety of ways." In this his biographers have been his pupils, taking their cue from Rambler 60. Anecdotes partakes in this convention, and its portrait of Johnson is darker than most because Piozzi had experienced his overbearing humanity to a greater degree than anyone else who has ever written about him. But she also seems to have taken the cue of Rambler 14, one of Johnson's tacit apologies for his own bad behavior, in which he laments that "those who raise admiration by their books, disgust by their company."³⁴ The best part of every author, Johnson once cautioned an admirer, is to be found in his book, and he would have recognized with pain the theme that Anecdotes elaborates: Most of the very great men are odious.

Notes

¹ Samuel Johnson, Works, New Haven, 1958—, 3:79-80 (Rambler 14); Piozzi, Harvard Piozziana. 5 vols. Ms. Eng. 1280, Houghton Library, 4:f28r.

²Thraltana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776-1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951, p. 385. See Collins, P. A. W. "Boswell's Contact with Johnson." Notes and Queries (April 1956): 163-6.

³ Piozzi, of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. during the Last Twenty Years of His Life, ed. Arthur Sherbo, London, 1974, p. 141. For Donald Greene's critique of the Life, see "Tis a Pretty Book, Mr. Boswell, But—." Georgia Review 32 (1978): 17-43.

¹⁹ See Mary Hyde, The Impossible Friendship: Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, Cambridge, 1972, and Irma S. Lustig, "Boswell at Work: The 'Animadversions' on Mrs. Piozzi," Modern Language Review 67 (1972): 11-30.

²⁰ James Boswell, Correspondence and other Papers relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, ed. Marshall Waingrow, New York, 1977, pp. 140, 142, 143; Piozzi, Anecdotes, p. 133.

²¹ Sir Walter Raleigh, "Johnson Without Boswell," in Six Essays on Johnson, Oxford, p. 49.

²² Piozzi, "9 Letters to Thomas Cadell, 1785-88," The Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 37 (1852), p. 136. For the 1768 fragments see Thraliona, pp. xxi, 601-2; the 1777 account is Thraliana, pp. 158-215. The "character" is Thraliana, pp. 205-8, and Anecdotes, pp. 159-60. For the composition of Anecdotes see Thraliana, pp. 625-26; Piozzi, "44 Letters to Samuel Lysons, 1784-89," Bentley's Miscellany, 28 (1850), pp. 165-70; Piozzi, "9 Letters," p. 232; and James L. Clifford, "Mrs. Piozzi's Letters," in Essays on the Eighteenth Century presented to David Nicol Smith, Oxford, 1945, pp. 240-45, 255-57.

²³Thraliana, p. 867. For Labov see Mary Louise Pratt, Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington, 1977, chapter 2.

²⁴ James Beattie, Essays on Poetry and Music, London, 1776, p. 373; Thomas Campbell, Dr. Campbell's Diary of a Visit to England in 1775, edited by James L. Clifford, Cambridge, 1947, p. 46.

²⁵Thraliana, p. 185; Anecdotes, pp. 88-89 (my italics). See Thraliana, p. 180.

²⁶Anecdotes, p. 135. See Thraliana, pp. 260, 261.

²⁷Anecdotes, p. 148. See also pp. 140, 71, 134.

²⁸ Horace Walpole, Correspondence, New Haven, 1937-83, 25:636.

²⁹Anecdotes, pp. 63-64, 69.

³⁰ Quoted in Autobiography, Letters, and Literary ³⁰Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale), ed. Abraham Hayward, 2d ed., London, 1861, 1:288.

³¹Anecdotes, p. 66. For Rousseau-Johnson parallels see Thraliana, pp. 12, 172, 183n, 197-98, 203-4, 765-66.

³² Bertrand Bronson, "The Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson," in Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays, Berkeley, 1965, p. 165.

³³Anecdotes, pp. 94-95, 131-32; Donald J. Greene, The Politics of Samuel johnson, NewHaven, 1960, p. 66; Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, New York, 1961, p. 211. See also Joseph W. Krutch, Samuel Johnson, New York, 1944, p. 160.

³⁴Anecdotes, pp. 126, 111.

³⁵ See Bate, Achievement, pp. 68ff.

³⁶Thraliana, p. 466. See also Anecdotes, p. 120.

³⁷Thraliana, pp. 785, 421-22; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Oxford, 1976, p. 312; Thraliana, p. 1066; Piozzi, "Una & Duessa or a Set of Dialogues upon the most popular Subjects." "Begun in April & ended in July 1791," MS 635, John Rylands Library, Manchester, England, p. 17; Thraliana, p. 784; Piozzi, British Synonymy; or, an Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation, London, 1794, 2:169.

³⁸Anecdotes, pp. 120, 90; James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. Β. Hill and L. F. Powell, Oxford, 1934-50, 3:292. See Bate, Achievement, pp. 150ff.

³⁹ Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Β. Hill, Oxford, 1905, 2:207. See Boswell, Life, 2:78.

⁴⁰Anecdotes, pp. 89-90.

⁴¹Anecdotes, pp. 97, 150, 153-54; Boswell, Life, 5:211. Some of the words given to Johnson in Anecdotes are spoken by a different person in Thraliana, p. 466n.

⁴²Thraliana, p. 900. For Johnson's turning of Milton and Swift against themselves in the Lives see William McCarthy, "The Moral Art of Johnson's Lives" Studies in English Literature 17 (1977): 503-17.

⁴³ Boswell, Life, 5:382; Piozzi, "Three Dialogues on the Death of Hester Lynch Thrale", ed. M. Zamick, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 16 (1932), pp. 99-100. "Keppel" is Admiral K, court-martialed for "failing in duty" at the battle of Ushant, 27 July 1778.

⁴⁴Anecdotes, pp. 132, 67.

⁴⁵The Queeney Letters, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne, London, 1934, p. 109 (Burney to H. M. Thrale, 28 July 1785); Beattie to Sir William Forbes, n.d. 1786 (in Clifford, p. 259); Anecdotes, p. 86.

⁴⁶ Moses Tyson, in The French Journals of Mrs. Thrale ⁴⁶and Dr. Johnson, ed. Moses Tyson and Henry Guppy, Manchester, 1932, p. 42.

⁴⁷"Anecdotes, pp. 152, 158, 107, 131, 159, 149, 101.

⁴⁸ James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, ed. Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett, New York, 1961, p. 257.

⁴⁹ Blair to Boswell, 4 May 1786 (in Boswell, Correspondence, p. 154); Anecdotes, p. 125; Boswell, Life, 4:191; Bate, Achievement, p. 3; Johnson, Works, 3:78-79.