'No, No, My Girl, It Won't Do'

Read the passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson for this date, July 28, in 1763, for a strong suggestion of the sort of man he was. These unlikely friends had first met in Tom Davies’ bookshop at Covent Garden two months earlier. Johnson was fifty-three and author of the Dictionary and the Rambler and Idler essays; Boswell, twenty-two and a fledgling lawyer. He was keeping a diary and his life of dissolution was already well under way. The men met for supper that evening at the Turk’s Head coffee house on Gerrard Street in Soho, soon to be the meeting place for Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith and the other members of The Club. Boswell reports Johnson’s opening salvo:

“‘Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves. His excellence is strong sense; for his humour, though very well, is not remarkably good. I doubt whether The Tale of a Tub be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his usual manner.”

In his “Life of Swift” in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), Johnson would resume this theme of dubious authorship: “That Swift was its author, though it be universally believed, was never owned by himself, nor very well proved by any evidence.” His view of The Tale of a Tub had darkened in the subsequent decade: “[O]f this book charity may be persuaded to think that it might be written by a man of a peculiar character without ill intention; but it is certainly of dangerous example.” We can always admire a critic when he’s wrong, so long as he is interestingly wrong.

Johnson moved on to James Thomson (1700-48), author of The Seasons, and his evaluation is indulgent: “Thomson, I think, had as much of the poet about him as most writers. Every thing appeared to him through the medium of his favourite pursuit. He could not have viewed those two candles burning but with a poetical eye.”

Next up, the Christian piety of Hugo Grotius and Sir Isaac Newton, the latter of whom “set out an infidel, and came to be a very firm believer.” Boswell offers no transitions between topics (they are irrelevant, after all, in the best conversations). Johnson suggests Boswell “perambulate” Spain: “I love the University of Salamancha” (where more than a century later, Unamuno would serve as professor of Greek and Classics, and later as rector). Johnson says of Boswell’s friend Samuel Derrick (“The King of Bath”): “Had he not been a writer, he must have been sweeping the crossings in the streets, and asking halfpence from every body that past.” Finally, Boswell gives us a glimpse of Johnson’s compassionate understanding of human nature:

“As we walked along the Strand to-night, arm in arm, a woman of the town accosted us, in the usual enticing manner. ‘No, no, my girl, (said Johnson) it won’t do.’ He, however, did not treat her with harshness, and we talked of the wretched life of such women; and agreed, that much more misery than happiness, upon the whole, is produced by illicit commerce between the sexes.”