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Chapter 9 - Reputation

from Part II - Critical fortunes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Jack Lynch
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Summary

REPUTATION. n.s. [reputation, Fr. from repute.] Credit; honour; character of good.

Versoy, upon the lake of Geneva, has the reputation of being extremely poor and beggarly. Addison.

Let’s begin with a paradox: in the monumental Dictionary that made his literary reputation in both senses of the word, the English author who gave his name to an age has little to say about reputation in its first neutral sense – “Credit” – and undermines his second definition – “honour” – with two ironic authorities he quotes to illustrate the word. Shakespeare’s Iago, having just destroyed the virtuous Cassio’s reputation, dismisses the concept entirely: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving: you have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.” “Reputation” for “honest” Iago is only a social fiction. And the next quotation, Alexander Pope’s epigram from The Rape of the Lock – “At ev’ry word a reputation dies” – shows the true power of reputation’s “false imposition”: when it comes to the frivolous, cutthroat universe of polite drawing rooms, where surface appearance is all, reputation is a matter of life and death.

But perhaps this contradiction should not surprise us too much. That grand word lexicographer after all, is defined in the Dictionary as “harmless drudge.” Johnson concludes his preface to the completed volume with prideful despair:

In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much is likewise performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the authour, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. It may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed … I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise. (Works, 18:111–13)

This declaration of resolutely English authorial independence – most famously enacted in Johnson’s rejection of the Earl of Chesterfield’s belated offer of patronage in the famous letter of February 1755 – is shadowed by what the reputation that accompanies such achievement effaces: an interior self that is haunted by self-reproach, suffering, loss, and isolation. (Johnson’s wife Tetty died shortly before his labors ended. He never remarried.)

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

Bailey, JohnDr. Johnson and His CircleLondonOxford University Press 1945
1910
Boswell, JamesBoswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776New YorkMcGraw-Hill 1963
Ruskin, JohnPraeterita and DilectaNew YorkAlfred A. Knopf 2005

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  • Reputation
  • Edited by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book: Samuel Johnson in Context
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047852.014
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  • Reputation
  • Edited by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book: Samuel Johnson in Context
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047852.014
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Reputation
  • Edited by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book: Samuel Johnson in Context
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047852.014
Available formats
×