SAMUEL JOHNSON: ORAL CRITIC

HARRY NORMAN LEVINSON, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation studies the conversations of Samuel Johnson, compares them to his Lives of the English Poets, and examines them in the context of their primary source, Boswell's Life of Johnson. The research involved all the sources of Johnson's oral remarks, the written criticism of Johnson that relates to these remarks, and an in-depth study of Boswell's Life of Johnson and Boswell's Journals, from which the conversations in the Life are taken. In Parts One and Two of this dissertation, Johnson emerges as a critic whose oral remarks constitute an important segment of eighteenth-century criticism. For Part One, there is a sufficiency of oral remarks about several eighteenth-century poets that enables us to determine Johnson's more candid oral opinions of them. The oral comments are most striking when juxtaposed with correlative passages in the Lives of the English Poets. In the case of Pope and Dryden, the contrasting evidence of oral and written remarks suggests that in the portrayal of an esteemed poet the written work exhibits a literary facade, or a rhetoric of classical criticism, which masks to some degree Johnson's verbal opinions of these authors and their works. With Young, Mallet, Thomson, Gray, and Swift, about whom Johnson speaks somewhat disparagingly, the oral remarks point out unusual contrasts and meanings in the Lives, sometimes meanings which are ignored or clouded, ironic or satiric. In Part Two, the credibility of Johnson's oral criticism and the representation of Johnson as oral critic in Boswell's Life of Johnson are established. The immediacy and thoroughness of Boswell's notetaking and journalizing report accurately Johnson's significant critical conversations over a period of twenty-two years, with an intensive productivity during the middle years from 1772 through 1778. When Boswell records Johnson's conversations, not only about literary figures and works but also about topics of more general interest, in addition to presenting his living biography, he is also displaying Johnson as the great oral critic of his day.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

COinS