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Johnson and the Authorship of Four Debates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

F. V. Bernard
F. V. Bernard*
Affiliation:
Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, Mich
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Extract

Because in the closing hours of his life Dr. Johnson was unable to conclude the task of identifying his early compositions for the Gentleman's Magazine, the early canon of his work has remained obscure; and for his share in the Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia we have had to rely on Boswell, who questioned Johnson at an inopportune time, for Johnson's answer did not settle the matter: “He this year [1741], and the two following, wrote the Parliamentary Debates. He told me himself, that he was the sole composer of them for these three years only. He was not, however, precisely exact in his statement, which he mentioned from hasty recollection; for it is sufficiently evident, that his composition of them began November 19, 1740, and ended February 23, 1742–3.” The vagueness of this statement has raised two questions about Johnson's portion of the debates: (1) what are the dates, initial and terminal, of Johnson's exclusive authorship, and (2) did he write any reports which fall outside of that period, that is, when he was not “sole composer” of them? In answer to the first question G. B. Hill and, more recently, Benjamin B. Hoover have established July 1741 through March 1744 as the period in which Johnson's exclusive share of the reports was published. In partial answer to the second question, Hill attributed to Johnson two debates, from the Guthrie period (which Hoover apparently overlooked in his broad discussion of authorship); and Hoover found Johnson to have revised for Cave certain reports that first appeared in the London Magazine. Still more recently, Donald J. Greene, arguing against the terminal date, ascribed to Johnson the debate on the Removal of the Hanoverian Troops, which appeared in the magazine from May to December-Supplement, 1744. If this attribution is correct, and I believe it is, then the debates which Cave published from July 1741 to December-Supplement, 1744, were, with one un-assigned exception—the short debate on the Corporation Bill which appeared in March and April 1744—written by Johnson. The purpose of this paper is to show, by reexamining the evidence concerning four debates, that one of Hill's two attributions is wrong (on Buttons and Button-holes, 1738), that the other is correct (on the Registration of Seamen, 1741), that one of the revised London debates is in all likelihood Johnson's work (on the Navy Estimates, 1740), and that the Corporation Bill, 1744, is also from his pen, thus making the sequence unbroken from July 1741 through the 1744 Supplement.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , October 1967 , pp. 408 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

Note 1 in page 408 Johnson tried turning down the pages in the volumes of the magazine given to him for the purpose by his good friend, John Nichols. Arthur Murphy, “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, L. L. D.,” in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1897), i, 446; see also iii, 412.

Note 2 in page 408 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill and Powell (Oxford, 1934–50), i, 150—hereafter cited as Life.

Note 3 in page 408 The debates actually represent the parliamentary period from 25 November 1740 to 22–25 February 1743.

Note 4 in page 408 Life, i, 509.

Note 5 in page 408 “Some Notes on Johnson and the Gentleman's Magazine,” PMLA, Lxxix (March 1959), 77–78.

Note 6 in page 408 Two minor confirmations: the anecdote of the poisoned shirt of Hercules (GM, xiv, 517) is used in Idler No. 45; and the term “dismission” (pp. 348, 351, 357, 361, etc.) is recorded by R. W. Chapman in his listing of “Johnson's English,” Index vii, of his edition of the Letters.

Note 7 in page 408 Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), ii, 91.

Note 8 in page 408 The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1952), i, 12.

Note 9 in page 409 Benjamin Beard Hoover, Samuel Johnson's Parliamentary Reporting (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953), pp. 21–24.

Note 10 in page 409 Hoover notes that from Nov. 1740 through Apr. 1741, Cave printed reports from the London Magazine, with the exception of the debate on the registration of seamen in the January issue. Then in May and June, Cave published an original debate; this Hoover believes was not written by Johnson, and I believe he is certainly right. He believes that it may have been written “by an inferior hand” (pp. 24–25). This too I believe is right, and I would like to identify that hand as Guthrie's. My reason is that suddenly, after eight installments, a mere twenty-two page report yields large numbers of the words and phrases we have enumerated: “betwixt” five, “between” four, “hand(s)” nine, “too” two, contractions four, “nay” six, “I beg leave” and “give me leave” plus infinitives, ten, “I dare say” five, “eye(s)” two, “rupture” one, “juncture” fifteen, “head” three, “I say” one. Of the sixteen categories that have been discussed, this report represents thirteen.

Note 11 in page 409 Life, i, 509. Neither Hoover nor Greene (“The Development of the Johnson Canon” in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature, Chicago, 1963), makes mention of these two debates.

Note 12 in page 410 Guthrie quite possibly meant these passages to be especially wretched; he appears to have shared something of Johnson's attitude toward Walpole's administration (Life, i, 117). If Johnson took his hint from them, his treatment differs from Guthrie's in being more subtle, more clever.

Note 13 in page 411 Murphy, i, 379.

Note 14 in page 411 Hoover, pp. 56, 77–78.

Note 15 in page 412 If, among many pieces, the “Life of Boerhaave” shows Johnson not to have been averse to prepositional endings—though Fowler (Modern English Usage, p. 459) does not include him among the “great writers” who illustrate the practice—I nonetheless suspect that Walpole has been intentionally made to use this one.

Note 16 in page 412 Though a broad study of Johnson's knowledge of Guthrie's linguistic practices is beyond the scope of this paper, we may yet note one relative fact of interest. The OED editors found confiscable impossible to illustrate before 1880. They note that the term appears in Bailey and in Johnson, and that “Webster refers to ‘Browne’.” In Guthrie's debates, 1738–39, the term appears at least three times (viii, 571, 617; ix, 516). In the course of his revision of these reports, Johnson encountered examples of the word, though he did not cite them in the Dictionary.

Note 17 in page 412 “Two Additions to the Johnson Canon,” JEGP, lii (1953), 547, n. 9.

Note 18 in page 415 In known Johnsonian debates, Whig speakers are made to use this term, Clutterbuck (GM, xi, 455) and Yonge (xii, 677).

Note 19 in page 415 It is worth noting that the expressions which Johnson ascribes to the Whig Lords are generally better than those imputed to the Whig members in the lower house, though the language of Cholmondeley appears to be an exception. Why Johnson could not resist making a fool of this lord is suggested by an office he held: Cholmondeley was a Commissioner of the Excise. The language of only one other man, Walpole himself, is so consistently exploited for errors. Indeed, Johnson went so far as to coin a word and put the blunder in Walpole's mouth; in GM, xii, 70, he has him say: “others equally obliged by Treaty and by Interest to lend their help on this Occasion sit reluciive.” The term is not recorded in the OED. What puts even more of a premium upon it is Johnson's statement (Life, i, 221) to Boswell “that he had not taken upon him to add more than four or five words to the English language, of his own formation.” Cholmondeley is not made to circulate any of them, though, as we shall see, he is given the dubious distinction of discovering an intransitive use of the verb to tempt.

Note 20 in page 415 This change was perhaps intended as emphasis for an important report. Naming the debate in the running title had been the regular practice of the magazine in 1738. It was discontinued in 1739.

Note 21 in page 416 Text taken from GM, xii, 367. Paxton's testimony before the Secret Committee is given on pp. 377–378. News items about him appear on pp. 217, 386.

Note 22 in page 417 “An Essay on The Adventurer,” in Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare (Urbana, Ill., 1956), p. 150.

Note 23 in page 417 E. L. McAdam, Jr., Dr. Johnson and the English Law (Syracuse, N.Y., 1951), p. 10.

Note 24 in page 417 Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, Part x (London, 1946), pp. 51, 60.

Note 25 in page 418 Life, iv, 74. Boswell's emphasis. See also iii, 224.

Note 26 in page 418 McAdam, p. 84.

Note 27 in page 418 Life, ii, 417, 416.

Note 28 in page 418 Hawkin's claim of finding greater dignity and elevation in the debates of the Lords is well borne out by the study of the language that I have made: improprieties of expression are rarely found in them. Of all the lords, however, Cholmondeley is most consistently represented as shabby in thought and language.

Note 29 in page 419 The words “to it” appear to be a prepositional phrase, making “tempt” intransitive.

Note 30 in page 419 Samuel Johnson: Poems (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1964), p. xvii.