'He Must Have Had an Enviable Liver'

Among the moribund reputations briefly resuscitated by Dr. Johnson in his Lives of the English Poets was that of Elijah Fenton (1683-1730), who was probably best known for collaborating with Alexander Pope on his translation of The Odyssey. Pope was sufficiently grateful to write Fenton’s epitaph. Johnson’s description is memorable:

“Fenton was tall and bulky, inclined to corpulence, which he did not lessen by much exercise; for he was very sluggish and sedentary, rose late, and when he had risen sat down to his book or papers. A woman, that once waited on him in a lodging, told him, as she said, that he would ‘lie a-bed, and be fed with a spoon.’ This, however, was not the worst that might have been prognosticated, for Pope says, in his Letters, that ‘he died of indolence;’ but his immediate distemper was the gout.”

I remembered Fenton while rereading Leigh Hunt’s essay “Among My Books” (1823), in which he writes: “Fenton was a martyr to contented scholarship (including a sirloin and a bottle of wine), and died among his books, of inactivity.” Fenton seems to have been one of literature’s martyred fat men, along with Thomas of Aquino, Edward Gibbon and A.J. Liebling. Hunt adds:

“He must have had an enviable liver, if he was happy. I must own (if my conscience would let me), that I should like to lead, half the year, just such a life (women included, though not that woman), the other half being passed in the fields and woods, with a cottage just big enough to hold us.”