THE MIND IN THE MARKETPLACE: COMMERCIAL IMAGERY IN SAMUEL JOHNSON'S PROSE WORKS

MYRON DEAN YEAGER, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to prove that imagery and vocabulary drawn from commerce (including manufacturing, trade, and wealth) enable Samuel Johnson in his prose works to explain the literary process, evaluate aesthetic beauties, and provide moral instruction to an industrially emerging society. Johnson places the mind in the marketplace to examine literature and life. The Debates in Parliament reveal Johnson's awareness of economic affairs and employs that awareness to explain or evaluate attitudes toward national issues or to establish the moral condition of the people and their government. Debates on the exportation of corn, the investigation of affairs in England and abroad, and the financing of Hanoverian mercenaries reveal his knowledge of economics. Debates on the raising of seamen and on insurance and protection of ships reveal his interest in the economic and moral relationship between individual and nation. Debates on the provisions for the army and liquor licenses reveal the relationship between national economic policy and the moral well-being of the individual. The prefaces, reviews, and political writings show Johnson reporting on almost all areas of commerce and examining the relationship between commercial activity and human happiness. The prefaces introducing commercial treatises and the political writings on commercial affairs allow Johnson to serve as a reporter or teacher to report economic conditions or to teach his audience the elements of commerce. In other essays he draws upon commercial processes to discuss the literary profession, assess political and artistic values, or assess the moral values of giving and spending. Finally, in essays on colonization he reveals the moral consequences that the economically motivated colonial zeal could lead to. The characters of the Rambler, Idler, and Adventurer provide Johnson's readers with a moral standard against which they can compare themselves, and the images drawn from commerce in these periodical essays provide a metaphor to establish value and to offer instruction. Through the narrator, correspondent, character, or allegorical figure Johnson shows his reader the allurements and rewards of lives employed in securing riches or idled away in abundance or want. In other essays he constructs comparisons or transitions through images relying on terms of commerce or wealth. Johnson uses these images to ascertain morality or to evaluate the consequences of use or abuse of money and wealth. The Life of Dryden, Life of Pope, and Life of Addison, representative lives from the Lives of the English Poets, employ financial detail in the biographical and character discussions to explain how and why the poet wrote many of the works he did, to evaluate the beauties of the poetic product, and to teach the audience the moral values of the life and works. In discussions of specific works Johnson constructs images drawn from commerce, manufacturing, and wealth, to explain and evaluate the aesthetic beauties or poetic process, or to offer moral instruction. Commerce and manufacturing offer Johnson a metaphor for the literary process to make it and the lessons literature should teach more understandable to an audience of shopkeepers and scholars. Commerce, with its relationship to manufacturing and wealth, offers Johnson a vocabulary and source for images to explain the literary act, to assess aesthetic value, or to provide moral instruction. From his early hack work through the rest of his career, Johnson displays a knowledge of and interest in commercial affairs because of the relationship between business and happiness.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

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