'Passions and Perturbations of the Mind'

In his Dictionary (1755), Dr. Johnson illustrates fifteen words with citations from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): addle, colly, costard, doter, to filch, to fleer, giddyheaded, griper, hotspur, to macerate, muckhill, mutter, oligarchy, quacksalver and squalor. By my count, seven of them would likely be understood, at least in part and making allowances for evolving meanings, by a contemporary English-language reader -- eight, if we acknowledge Shakespeare’s use of “Hotspur.” My spelling software fails to recognize only four of them. 

Boswell famously reports Johnson saying the Anatomy was “the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise,” and it remains inexhaustibly entertaining, an education between two covers. Take squalor, a word that always reminds me of the subtitle of Flann O’Brien’s fourth novel, The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (1961). Once you start quoting Burton, it’s difficult to stop. His prose in endlessly amusing, intentionally and otherwise. Here is the larger context for the sentence Johnson cites for squalor, found in the section of the Anatomy titled “Poverty and Want” (as causes of melancholy):

 

“[L]ike those people that dwell in the Alps, chimney-sweepers, jakes-farmers, dirt-daubers, vagrant rogues, they labour hard some, and yet cannot get clothes to put on, or bread to eat. For what can filthy poverty give else, but beggary, fulsome nastiness, squalor, content [OED: “having one’s desires bounded by what one has (though that may be less than one could have wished”]); drudgery, labour, ugliness, hunger and thirst . . . fleas and lice . . . rags for his raiment, and a stone for his pillow . . . he sits in a broken pitcher, or on a block for a chair . . . he drinks water, and lives on wort leaves, pulse [OED: “edible seeds of leguminous plants cultivated for food], like a hog, or scraps like a dog . . . as we poor men live now-a-days, who will not take our life to be infelicity, misery, and madness?”

 

In the section of the Anatomy devoted to cures for what Burton call “head-melancholy,” here is Burton’s other use of squalor:

 

“ . . . to avoid all passions and perturbations of the mind. Let him not be alone or idle (in any kind of melancholy), but still accompanied with such friends and familiars he most affects, neatly dressed, washed, and combed, according to his ability at least, in clean sweet linen, spruce, handsome, decent, and good apparel; for nothing sooner dejects a man than want, squalor, and nastiness, foul, or old clothes out of fashion.”

 

In the context of so unpleasant a subject as squalor, Burton manages to express empathetic compassion, with a suggestion of moral outrage, for those living in poverty, a sentiment Johnson would share. Burton died on this date, January 25, in 1640 at age seventy-two.