{"id":136748,"date":"2019-05-30T11:16:15","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T15:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136748"},"modified":"2019-05-30T12:18:55","modified_gmt":"2019-05-30T16:18:55","slug":"escaping-samuel-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/30\/escaping-samuel-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"Escaping Samuel Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson<\/em>, 1775. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe see with other eyes, we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts than those we formerly used,\u201d wrote Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense<\/em> and The Rights of Man<\/em>. One of the most persuasive spokesmen for American independence, he championed the clearing away of British \u201ccobwebs, poison and dust\u201d from American society. American independence, he argued, could never be complete without that.<\/p>\n

Many Americans thought the same way: that apart from economic stability and success, what they needed almost more than anything else after political independence was intellectual and cultural independence, free from the stifling influence of British arts, letters, and manners. They resented their cultural subservience, which had not disappeared with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Yet for more than a century after the Revolution, the majority of literate and cultured Americans did not want to turn their backs on British culture, \u201ctheir ancient heritage\u201d\u2014especially its literature and the historical traditions of its language. About seventy long years after Paine\u2019s statement, the popular English novelist Anthony Trollope elegantly expressed this powerful, persistent, and apparently inescapable linkage: \u201cAn American will perhaps consider himself to be as little like an Englishman as he is like a Frenchman. But he reads Shakespeare through the medium of his own vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue before he can understand Moli\u00e8re. He separates himself from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture.\u201d Janus-like, and often in a less fully conscious way, Americans knew that their \u201cmental culture,\u201d whether they liked it or not, was linked to Britain\u2019s, and they had little taste for parting with it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

America\u2019s lingering literary and linguistic attachment to England is nowhere so evident as in the nation\u2019s pervasive ambivalence toward Samuel Johnson and his great dictionary, published in 1755, which many call the first major dictionary of the language. He was the great sage of English literature, and a brilliant essayist, moralist, poet, lexicographer, and biographer, the \u201cColossus of Literature\u201d and \u201cLiterary Dictator\u201d of the second half of eighteenth century England, a figure thoroughly synonymous with Englishness. Throughout his career as an author, Johnson advertised his multilayered and complicated dislike of America and Americans. In 1756, the year after he published his famous dictionary, he coined the term \u201cAmerican dialect\u201d to mean \u201ca tract [trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.\u201d He had in mind an undisciplined and barbarous uncouthness of speech. With typical hyperbole on the subject of Americans, he once remarked, \u201cI am willing to love all mankind, except an American<\/em> \u2026 rascals\u2014robbers\u2014pirates.\u201d <\/p>\n

Yet Americans could not get enough of him. They devoured his books, which libraries held in great numbers. His influence on American thought and language was vast. Thomas Jefferson recognized this as a grave problem: he wanted to get Johnson off the backs of Americans. In a 1813 letter to his friend, the grammarian John Waldo, Jefferson took note of Johnson\u2019s Dictionary<\/em> as a specific drag on the country\u2019s cultural growth: \u201cemploying its [own] materials,\u201d America could rise to literary and linguistic preeminence, but \u201cnot indeed by holding fast to Johnson\u2019s Dictionary; not by raising a hue and cry against every word he has not licensed; but by encouraging and welcoming new compositions of its elements.\u201d And yet, as one historian writes, \u201cIt was to prove more difficult to declare independence from Johnson than it had been to reject George III.\u201d The weight of Johnson\u2019s authority on culture in America was a legacy, both positive and negative, that would loom large in the American psyche far into the nineteenth century. Several of the leading American authors at the time actually fed the appetite for Johnson rather than attempted to dampen it. One of them, Nathaniel Hawthorne, revered Johnson. Although he complained in Mosses from an Old Manse<\/em>, \u201cHow slowly our [own] literature grows up,\u201d for him Johnson could do no wrong. In London during the 1850s on government business, he recorded in his English Note-Books<\/em> walking in Johnson\u2019s footsteps\u2014taking a meal at Johnson\u2019s favorite London tavern, the Mitre; traveling up to Lichfield in Staffordshire to pay homage to the great man\u2019s birthplace; and exploring Johnson\u2019s rooms at No. 1 Inner Temple Lane in London, where his imagination luxuriated in the sense of place: \u201cI not only looked in, but went up the first flight, of some broad, well-worn stairs, passing my hand over a heavy, ancient, broken balustrade, on which, no doubt, Johnson\u2019s hand had often rested \u2026 Before lunch, I had gone into Bolt Court, where he died.\u201d As for James Fenimore Cooper, he was liberally using Johnson\u2019s Dictionary<\/em> as his principal authority on the language, even after America\u2019s first large (unabridged) dictionary was published by Noah Webster.<\/p>\n

This type of American adulation of Johnson persisted into the second half of the century. Herman Melville, in Moby-Dick<\/em>, the novel he dedicated to Hawthorne, has his narrator, Ishmael, remark that in his telling of the story he had \u201cinvariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson [his dictionary], expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer\u2019s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.\u201d Louisa May Alcott, in her American classic Little Women<\/em>, features Johnson\u2019s Rasselas<\/em> and his book of essays, The Rambler<\/em>, in a memorable scene or two. Mark Twain, however, was not so positive about Johnson, bearing witness to this Johnsonian obsession even as he debunked it. He had a go at Johnson at the expense of American Johnson-lovers when he toured London only a few years before the outbreak of World War I. One day at the Cheshire Cheese tavern, near which Johnson had lived and where, legend has had it, he spent a good deal of time, Twain was enjoying some refreshment in the \u201cDoctor Johnson room\u201d with Bram Stoker, author of Dracula<\/em>, and the American journalist Eugene Field, when he burst out: \u201cLook at those fools going to pieces over old Doc Johnson\u2014call themselves Americans and lick-spittle the toady who grabbed a pension from the German King of England that hated Americans, tried to flog us into obedience and called George Washington traitor and scoundrel.\u201d One could understand the adulation of Johnson by the English, he continued, \u201cbut of our own people, coming to the Cheese, ninety-nine per cent do so because they don\u2019t know the man, and the others because they feel tickled to honor a writer a hundred and fifty years or so after he is good and rotten.\u201d For the rest of his time at the inn, in protest against his fellow Americans, he kept up his \u201cslaughter of Johnson.\u201d As for himself, he boasted he never read Johnson, \u201cnever a written word.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

An avalanche of British attacks on American society and culture in general and language and literature in particular in the early nineteenth century did not improve American self-confidence. While such British offensives did not exist in isolation from larger political events at the time that contributed to a hostility between the two countries, which eventually ignited in the War of 1812, that larger context fails to account for the harshness and frequency with which British writers insulted American life and manners. Many British travelers\u2019 attacks in books and the British press were simply outrageous and in poor taste, ill-informed or not informed at all, aiming to appeal sensationally to a portion of the British reading public that was either ignorant of America and prepared to think the worst of it, or welcomed such attacks as exotic and improbable adventure stories.<\/p>\n

Fanny Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, wrote a sensational best seller, Domestic Manners of the Americans<\/em>, based on her months of traveling all over the country. An engaging but also wounding account, often insightful and sometimes appreciative, it is marred by a recurring strain of anti-Americanism. As she sees it, the abuse of the language was no small part of Americans\u2019 lack of discipline and bad taste and manners. She shudders over what she saw and heard as the vulgarity of American manners and language, appalled at the \u201cstrange uncouth phrases and pronunciation.\u201d She is short on examples, but in an appendix she added to the fifth edition of her book seven years later in 1839, she records some family conversation in an unspecified part of the country. It contains this specimen of a father\u2019s pride in the chickens the family is about to serve up for guests: \u201cBean\u2019t they little beauties? hardly bigger than humming birds; a dollar seventy five for they. Three fips for the hominy, a levy for the squash, and a quarter for the limes; inyons a fip, carolines a levy, green cobs ditto.\u201d She links the speech she heard to the prevalent lack of refinement resulting from the low esteem in which women were held. If America was ever going to rescue itself from this revolting social malaise, she writes, it would have to be through the refinements of the arts: \u201cLet America give a fair portion of her attention to the arts and the graces that embellish life, and I will make her another visit, and write another book as unlike this as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

In those early years of nationhood, Americans only occasionally protested. If you feel insecure, you are not apt to fire back boldly at your critics. The now forgotten Philadelphia scholar and diplomat Robert Walsh, whom Jefferson once described as \u201cone of the two best writers in America,\u201d did protest in \u201cAn Appeal from the Judgements of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America,\u201d but he managed simply to reinforce the persistent British belief that Americans were vain and supersensitive to criticism, \u201ccherishing imaginary wrongs.\u201d The shocks to American confidence and self-respect, however, being dished out by these British travelers, commentators, reviewers, and authors eventually proved to be too much for Washington Irving. They drove him to write a nine-page essay, \u201cEnglish Writers on America,\u201d in which he aims to stir up Americans to believe in themselves:<\/p>\n

I shall not \u2026 dwell on this irksome and hackneyed topic; nor should I have adverted to it, but for the undue interest apparently taken in it by my countrymen, and certain injurious effects which I apprehended it might produce upon the national feeling. We attach too much consequence to these attacks. They cannot do us any essential injury. The tissue of misrepresentations attempted to be woven around us, are like cobwebs woven around the limbs of an infant giant. Our country continually outgrows them. One falsehood after another falls off of itself. We have but to live on, and every day we live a whole volume of refutation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If the English persist with their \u201cprejudicial accounts,\u201d they will succeed only in \u201cinstilling anger and resentment within the bosom of a youthful nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back at a century of such British mockery, the historian Allan Nevins in 1923 conveyed the seriousness of the threat relentless British mockery posed to the American psyche in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and the anxiety it stirred up in the young country: \u201cThe nervous interest of Americans in the impressions formed of them by visiting Europeans and their sensitiveness to British criticism in especial, were long regarded as constituting a salient national trait.\u201d Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. senator from Massachusetts, was appalled by the effect on American authors: \u201cThe first step of an American entering upon a literary career was to pretend to be an Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen.\u201d American poet, journalist, and commentator H.\u2009L. Mencken, in his linguistically patriotic book The American Language<\/em>, provides another retrospective in sections titled \u201cThe English Attack\u201d and \u201cAmerican Barbarisms.\u201d He describes the clash as \u201chair-raising,\u201d an \u201cunholy war\u201d of words. Captain Thomas Hamilton, a Scot, mentions a few of the prevalent barbarisms: \u201cThe word does<\/em> is split into two syllables, and pronounced do-es<\/em>. Where<\/em>, for some incomprehensible reason, is converted into whare<\/em>, there<\/em> into thare<\/em>; and I remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had called on a gentleman of taste in the arts, he asked, \u2018Whether he shew<\/em> (showed) me his pictures.\u2019 Such words as oratory and dilatory, are pronounced with the penult syllable, long and accented; missionary becomes missionairy<\/em>, angel, \u00e2ngel<\/em>, danger, d\u00e2nger<\/em>, &c.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

With considerable zeal, the British assault on American values, manners, and achievements also turned to the state of literature in the republic. In 1810, the Edinburgh Review<\/em> was severe: \u201cLiberty and competition have as yet done nothing to stimulate literary genius in these republican states \u2026 In short, federal America has done nothing, either to extend, diversify, or embellish the sphere of human knowledge.\u201d Again in the Edinburgh Review<\/em>, Sydney Smith, founder and first editor of that magazine, whose brilliant and witty essays and reviews particularly injured American pride, mischievously asked in 1820, \u201cWhy should the Americans write books, when a six week\u2019s passage brings them in our own tongue, our sense, science and genius, in bales and hogsheads?\u201d Harriet Martineau, while pleased by America\u2019s lack of \u201caristocratic insolence,\u201d wrote bitingly in Society in America<\/em> after her travels in America in 1836, \u201cIf the national mind of America be judged of by its legislation, it is of a very high order,\u201d but \u201cif the American nation be judged by its literature, it may be pronounced to have no mind at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The American literati chimed in with vigor. John Pickering, the Harvard-educated diplomat and American jurist and linguist, admitted in 1816, \u201cIn this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession.\u201d In his book The Importance and Means of a National Literature<\/em>, William Ellery Channing, the famous Unitarian minister and early Transcendentalist, declared that what he meant by a national literature was \u201cthe expression of a nation\u2019s mind in writing,\u201d and he called for America\u2019s literary mind to awaken. America needed \u201ca high intellectual culture\u201d that paid more attention to the spirit than to material aggrandizement: \u201cThere is among us much superficial knowledge \u2026 There is nowhere \u2026 an accumulation of literary atmosphere.\u201d More than half a century after independence, America still relied \u201cfor intellectual excitement and enjoyment on foreign minds, nor is our mind felt abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n

American literature did rise, however, and sooner perhaps than Jefferson had envisioned. James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to mention but a few writers, all made names for themselves by the 1840s and 1850s as creative artists to be reckoned with not only in America but also in England and throughout the Continent. Emerson, the prophet-poet who strove \u201cto extract the tape-worm of Europe from America\u2019s body,\u201d knew the American \u201crenaissance\u201d was dawning. \u201cWe have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,\u201d he declares in his pamphlet The American Scholar<\/em>, which was delivered and first published under the title An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837<\/em>. In his essay \u201cNature,\u201d he writes, \u201cThe foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?\u201d The speech secured Emerson\u2019s fame.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Peter Martin is the author of numerous books, including the acclaimed biographies <\/em>Samuel Johnson and <\/em>A Life of James Boswell. He has taught English literature in the United States and England and divides his time between Spain and West Sussex, England.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language<\/a>, by Peter Martin. Copyright \u00a9 2019 by Peter Martin. Published by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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