The Literary Club: Johnson and Boswell

Young handsome Boswell and more mature Johnson.

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Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was the son of a Stafford­shire book­seller, a baby who appeared to have suffered neurological damage at birth.  And later he became nearly blind in one eye. Yet Samuel starred academically, until he was forced to leave Oxford after his father’s death in 1731 left him impoverished. For a very intellectual man not to be able to work in a profess­ion was devastating. So it was not surprising that he became morbidly depressed. Plus his endless tics and odd noises only increased his fear of madness, ? obsessive-compulsive dis­order.

In 1735 Johnson married a much older Elizabeth Tetty Porter, widow of a Birmingham cloth merchant. Samuel used Tetty’s income to est­ablish a school, but the school closed a couple of years later. In desperation, Samuel headed for London with his friend David Garrick. In the theatre Garrick soon became a star, while Mr John­son worked at The Gentleman’s Magazine, where he met excellent and highly literate women (unlike Tetty?). Nonetheless when Tetty died in 1752, Samuel Johnson was beyond miserable.

Luckily for Johnson, the second half of the C18th was the time for gentlemen’s clubs. Portrait painter and founding president of the Royal Academy Joshua Reynolds and wanted to distract Johnson from the wild, untameable part of himself. So in 1763 Reynolds suggested they should invite clever friends to join them to dine, drink and talk. The new club, The Literary Club, met on a Friday evening until midnight, in the Turk’s Head Tavern on Gerrard St in Soho from 1764. It lasted for 20 years.

Thanks to Leo Damrosch for writing his excellent book The Club: Johnson, Boswell and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (2019). Apart from Johnson and Reynolds, the other founding members of the Club joined quite early in their car­e­ers, well before they rose to fame. Oliver Gold­smith had yet to publish his famous novel The Vicar of Wake­field; and politician Edmund Burke was still new.

Elections were made by unanimous vote eg James Boswell, act­or/man­ager of Drury Lane Playhouse and fath­er of mod­ern economics Adam Smith. In the 1770s they expand­ed the group to include historian-Parliamentarian Edward Gibbon, politic­ian Charles James Fox and playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. By 1775, a decade after it was founded, there were 23 men in the Club.

Other men’s clubs were united in their politics or profession, so why were these men drawn from widely different backgrounds? Appar­ent­ly Reynolds and Johnson wanted to have members from lead­ing politicians, lawyers, doctors and artists so that they could draw on a wide range of knowledge in their discussions. In the end, all members needed social skills and genius above all.

A group biography is always difficult. In this case the prob­lem was that the author had to track private convers­ations and secret love lives. So he relied on a single in-depth recreat­ion of a club conversation by Boswell, plus whatever Boswell located in contemporary C18th letters and journals.

The only thing I don’t understand was why Boswell couldn’t join the Club for years. After all, the very young Boswell already thought of middle aged Johnson as the font of knowledge when they met and befriended each other in a Russell St bookshop in 1763. So when young Boswell re­turned from his Grand Tour in 1766, he was very keen to join his mentor. Alas the other club members blocked him and he was not admitted until 1773!   

The Club, a literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds'

Wiki

In addition to Boswell’s written material, Damrosch could draw on other commentators: a world of con­ver­sations, ar­g­­um­ents, ideas and writings. Plus he used the biogr­aphies of Club members for another source of history e.g Burke was a wonder­ful source of political information, Garrick and Richard Brinsley Sheridan knew about contemporary theatre product­ions and Hester Thrale & Fanny Burney discussed women’s literature.

I wondered if the big issues of the day excited the minds of these bright men eg the riots erupting in American colonies after Parl­iam­ent levied taxes; Captain James Cook led his first expedition to the Pacific; the Industrial Revolution was launched; and the ab­ol­it­ion of slavery was debated. Dam­rosch noted that The Club had no shared agenda; instead, ideas of the individuals raised wider questions of aesthetics and politics, attitudes toward empire and war, social issues and religion. Britain was enjoying an ex­hil­arating age.

When Johnson’s anxieties over­wh­elmed him, Hester Thrale became his most intimate confid­ante. In 1765, a year after the Literary Club was formed, Thrale took him to live with her and her husband at Streatham Place in South Lond­on. So for the last 15 years of his life, Johnson depended on Hester Thrale who was a respectful and literate companion. Plus the Thrales had an excellent home library! No wonder he managed to write his last great work, Lives of the English Poets, at Streatham Place.

The Streatham Group, led by Hester Thrale, was important for anot­h­er reason. Excluded from the men’s groups, the Streatham Group inc­l­uded a number of remarkable women: Elizabeth Montagu, leader of the blue-stockings, playwright Hannah More and novelist Fanny Bur­ney. Fan­ny’s diaries and Hester’s notebooks were full of anecdotes and imp­ressions, reporting discussions about literature as a suit­able pro­fession for middle-class women, and the need for a women’s uni­ver­s­ity. Joshua Reynold’s sister Frances Reynolds was herself an artist and club colleague, as was bluestocking Elizabeth Carter.

Neither Club planned to damage Boswell’s special relationship with Johnson, although Boswell did still feel resentful. I don’t suppose Boswell particularly enjoyed Hester’s starring role at Streatham where he drank & talked too much. But one thing I nev­er heard of before: Boswell also had frightening depressions, pre­sumably worsened by his uncontrolled alcohol, gambling and random sex.

The Literary Society continued but the glory days had ended. Toward the end of Johnson’s life, he part­ic­ipated only c3 times a year, presumably because the exp­and­ed group size (now 35) reduced intimacy within the club.