Johnson.ghost.satire

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"Dr. Johnson's Ghost": Genesis of a Satirical Engraving Author(s): Morris R. Brownell Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 339-357Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817305Accessed: 04-03-2015 23:43 UTC

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"Dr. Johnson's Ghost": Genesis of a Satirical Engraving*

by Morris R. Brownell

One of the wittiest and most effective attacks on James Boswell, the biographer, is the satirical engraving depicting the ghost of Samuel Johnson reprov- ing a surprised James Boswell sitting behind a table covered with remnants of material. The ghost stands on clouds which fill the left half of the picture (fig. 1), and is supposed to be upbraiding Boswell in the words of Witwould, spo- ken to Petulant in Congreve's Way of the World (IVix), subscribed beneath the engraving:

Thou art a Retailer of Phrases, And dost deal in Remnants of Remnants, Like a Maker of Pincushions.

As long ago as 1941 Richard Altick noted the appearance of this engraving, "a piece of Johnsoniana . .. so good it deserves to be rescued from . .. obscu- rity," in the posthumous Works (1803) of Richard Owen Cambridge.1 Altick quotes from a "descriptive leaf" facing the engraving in the Works by Cam- bridge's son and editor, George Owen Cambridge, who states that the idea for "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" occurred to his father "at a time when the press was daily issuing fresh anecdotes relative to Dr. Johnson.... Happening to have an artist in his house, he employed him to execute the humorous ideas which had thus struck his fancy, and . . . [embracing] the earliest opportunity of shewing it to Mr. Boswell. . . he [Boswell] strongly solicited to have it engraved."2 Altick's interesting discovery that "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" was Cam- bridge's idea-Richard Owen Cambridge invenit-has not been noticed in the Johnsoniana section of the Clifford-Greene bibliography, which fol-

339


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340 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

lows Dorothy George's catalogue in ignoring the connection with Cambridge, associating the print with the Life of Johnson, and dating it accordingly about 1791.3

Because the date, occasion, and provenance of this engraving remain ob- scure, I propose in this essay to tell the story of "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" in greater detail: first, to reinstate Richard Owen Cambridge as its author; second, to establish its provenance in the rivalry of biographers after Johnson's death in 1784; third, to identify its occasion in the publication of Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides in 1785 rather than the Life in 1791; fourth, to define the object of its satire as Boswell's revolutionary method of anecdotal biography; and, finally, to make some remarks about a "ghost" portrait of Johnson in the print.

I. The Ghost and the Rival Biographers

The ghost of Johnson began to walk in the earliest notices in the press of forthcoming biographies after his death on 13 December 1784.4 At least seven biographical sketches of Johnson had appeared during his lifetime, and as many more followed within two years after his death, prompting the comment in the Morning Post (15 August 1786) that Johnson was "threatened with as many lives as a cat."5 Three principal rivals-James Boswell, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale), and Sir John Hawkins-all thought themselves Johnson's appointed biographer, and, as they prepared and published their Johnsoniana, the press avidly followed every episode of their rivalry, aiming an unending series of squibs, lampoons, and satires at Johnson and his biographers. Bos- well's Life of Johnson did not appear until 1791, but his Tour to the Hebrides, published in September 1785, preceded both his rivals: Mrs. Thrale's Anec- dotes (1786) and Letters (1788), and Hawkins' Life (1787).6 Commercial success opened their authors to the charge that they had exploited their friend for gain, and all were accused of defaming Johnson. As the Monthly Review observed in May 1786, "Johnson's enemies judiciously left the office of biographer to his friends." Horace Walpole's comment on Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes identified the inconsistency in all these early biographies that shocked Johnson's friends and delighted his enemies: "Her panegyric is loud in praise of her hero-and almost every fact she relates disgraces him," a thought he puts acerbically in a couplet recorded in his Visitor's Book: "In Johnson's fate Acteon's re-occurs, / Each piecemeal torn by his own pack of curs."7

Literary and legal controversy focused on the biographical method intro- duced by Boswell in the Tour, imitated by Mrs. Piozzi in her Anecdotes, and perfected in the Life: biography based on anecdote and the subject's conversation instead of a dignified portrait of the moralist and sage.8 Johnson's friends were disgusted by Mrs. Piozzi's portrait of the rude and irascible bully at Streatham, and what they saw as the ludicrous spectacle of Johnson led like a


''DR. JOHNSON'S GHOST' 341

bear through the Highlands in Boswell's Tour. The controversy about anecdotal biography was provoked by the publication of Boswell's Tour, and coin- cidentally this was the moment when the ghost of Johnson began to walk in newspaper squibs, doggerel verse, and satirical engravings.

The subjects of ghosts, superstition, witchcraft, and second sight in the Tour were seized on by reviewers as evidence of Johnson's credulity, and satirists made the most of the opportunity. The editor of the Morning Post, the Rever- end William Jackson, uses the theme of second sight when charging Boswell in the Tour with exploiting his friendship with Johnson for profit: "Had Dr. John- son been blessed with the gift of second-sight," Jackson wrote on 1 October 1785, "how it would have tortured him to have known the base advantages which have been taken of his celebrity to make money." Commenting two weeks later on the way the Tour had recouped Boswell's fortunes, in decline since the publication of his Account of Corsica (1768), Jackson associated Johnson with the ghost of Hamlet's father, murdered by his biographer, Bos- well/Claudius: "Suddenly the great Doctor's death proved the Caledonian's [Boswell's] resurrection. What would the literary Hercules [Johnson] say if he saw his name bandied about in such trash-'Rest perturb'd spirit!' " (Hamlet, I.v.182). This theme provided a rich vein of ridicule, and Johnson's biographers soon are being labeled in the press as assassins, butchers, or murderers, and their books as instruments fatal to Johnson. Referring to the Tour, and the forthcoming Life, John Wilkes is reported to have quipped that Boswell had "fired a pocket pistol [the Tour] at Johnson's reputation," and planned to "dis- charge a blunderbuss [the Life]."q

The most important verse satire of the Tour appeared in February 1786, when John Wolcot, writing under the pseudonym "Peter Pindar," published A Poetical and Congratulatory Epistle to James Boswell, Esq. on his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.10 Anecdote is the main object of Wolcot's attack, and although he does not raise Johnson's ghost the concluding lines of the poem must be considered the most likely source of Richard Owen Cambridge's idea of Boswell the scrapmonger and haberdasher of anecdotes pictured in "Dr. Johnson's Ghost":

Rare anecdotes! 'tis anecdotes like these, That bring thee [Boswell] glory, and the million please! On these, shall future times delighted stare, Thou charming haberdasher of small ware! (4)

If Wolcot is the probable source of Cambridge's idea for the engraving, George Colman the elder may have been the first to follow up the hints in the newspapers of Johnson as one of Shakespeare's ghosts. In A Posthumous Ode of S. Johnson (April 1786)11 Colman introduces the ghost of Johnson vainly attempting to stop the torrent of Johnsoniana pouring from the presses in the



spring of 1786 when the war between Bozzy and Piozzi was at its height. The poem begins with an invocation to the press:

Say Herald, Chronicle, or Post, Which then beheld great Johnson's Ghost, Grim, horrible, and squalid? Compositors their letters dropt, Pressmen their groaning engine stopt, And Devils all grew pallid. (163)

Soon Johnson's ghost appears hurling denunciations at the press:

Enough, the Spectre cried! Enough! No more of your fugacious stuff, Trite Anecdotes and Stories! Rude Martyrs of Sam Johnson's name, You rob him of his honest fame, And tarnish all his glories. (164)

After singling out for censure Thomas Tyers as well as Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi, the ghost stalks away "To sleep in POET'S CORNER" (166), where Johnson had been interred in Westminster Abbey on 20 December 1784.

The quarrel resulting from the publication (25 March 1786) of Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes-with its famous postscript denying Boswell's allegation that she could not stomach Mrs. Montagu's Essay on Shakespeare-was the occasion for a second dramatic appearance of Johnson's ghost in another popular satire by John Wolcot, attacking "the cock biographer" and the "hen," as Horace Walpole was then referring to Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi.12 Wolcot's Bozzy and Piozzi: or the British Biographers, A Town Eclogue (25 April 1786) is a mock sessions-poem in which Sir John Hawkins, Johnson's official biographer, pre- sides over a contest between Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi, who recite anecdotes drawn from the most trivial in their books, in order to decide who will bear "the Palm of anecdote away" (8). The ghost of Johnson visits Sir John in a dream as he naps between hearings, instructing the judge about the rival collectors of anecdote: Boswell, whose "head's a downright drum, / Unequal to the Hist'ry of TOM THUMB" (32); Mrs. Piozzi, whom the ghost wishes to "Give up her anecdotal inditing, / And study housewifery instead of writing" (32). After each rival has offered more anecdote, Sir John proves unable to decide the contest, bids both biographers desist, and the satire ends with a crude jab at Hawkins as he seeks out Johnson's black servant, Frank Barber: "Black Frank he sought on anecdote to cram, / And vomit first a life of surly Sam" (57).

"Dr. Johnson's Ghost" next appears in the title of Elizabeth Moody's spirited


''DR. JOHNSON'S GHOST'' 343

2. The Ghost of Sir Richard Blackmore (d. 1729) Appearing to Johnson While Writing the Life of Blackmore. Anonymous pen-and-wash[?J drawing, Post 1781. From A. M. Broadley, Doctor Johnson and Mrs. Thrale (London: John Lane, 1910), opp. p. 35. Photo: Huntington Library.

parody of the ballad "William and Margaret," which was published anony- mously ("By a Lady") in The General Evening Post (March 1786) and in The Gentleman's Magazine (May 1786).13 Unlike Colman and Wolcot's broadside attacks on Johnson's biographers, this poem concentrates on Boswell's Tour, and is the only verse satire to dramatize an encounter between Boswell and Johnson's ghost like the one in Richard Owen Cambridge's satirical engraving. Johnson's angry ghost visits Boswell at midnight, charges him with defamation and avarice, wishes Boswell had been knocked on the head in the Hebrides with "some vengeful stone," and stalks away as Boswell rushes from his bed, burns his "fatal book," and begs forgiveness.

By June 1786 the ghost of Johnson was walking again, in A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson,i4 a toothless satire about a bookseller who sends his printer's devil to the Elysian fields "in search of Johnson's ghost" to get his reaction to the Johnsoniana of Boswell, Mrs. Piozzi, George Strahan, and John


344 ~~HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

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Courtenay. Doggerel lines and strained Scriblerian notes feebly attack Mrs. Piozzi's vulgarity, and Boswell's impudence, vanity, and love of minutiae.

"The printshops teem with satiric prints," Horace Walpole wrote on the publication of Wolcot's Bozzy and Piozzi," and engravings appear to have as much to do with the genesis of "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" as newspaper squibs and verses. The closest iconographic parallel to Cambridge's print, apparently never engraved, is the anonymous undated drawing depicting "The Ghost of the Poet Blackmore Appearing to Dr. Johnson While Writing the Lives of the Poets" (fig. 2). This witty drawing pictures the ghost of Pope's bombastic lau- reate of bathos mounted "on a Lord Mayor's Horse," coming back to haunt Johnson for defending his reputation in the Life of Blackmnore (1781).16

A hint of Johnson's ghost is contained in verses subscribed on the unfinished proof of a print dated June 1786 by James Sayers, entitled "The Biographers" (fig. 3)17 in which Mrs. Piozzi, Boswell, and John Courtenay are seated beneath a bust of Johnson, all caricatured in the act of composing their memoirs under the frowning marble gaze of their subject. The lines subscribed conclude with the wish that Johnson could "visit his great Biographers." This invitation the same engraver, James Sayers, answered in an engraving of Johnson's ghost visiting Mrs. Piozzi (fig. 4) dated 7 April 1788, designed as a mock "Frontis- piece for the 2d Edition of D J[ohnso]n's Letters," the first edition of which was published 8 March 1788 (there was no second edition)."8 The engraving shows Johnson dressed in a white shroud entering Mrs. Piozzi's study from the right, pointing towards portraits of Johnson's biographers on the wall (Boswell, Hawkins, and Courtenay), and addressing Mrs. Piozzi who is seated at a desk where she has been writing in a book inscribed "Johnson's Letters," implying that she has concocted them. Johnson's ghost pleads with Mrs. Piozzi to stop writing about him, insisting that she has been been repaid for her hospitality at Streatham: "Good things I said, good things I eat, / I gave you knowledge for your Meat, / And thought th'Account was closed." (Notice that Johnson is offering Mrs. Piozzi a purse since his conversation has proved insufficient pay- ment.) This attack on Mrs. Piozzi's Letters (1788), the first published engraving in which the ghost of Johnson appears, is not likely to have escaped the atten- tion of an avid print collector like Cambridge.

Johnson's ghost, as far as I know, never haunted Boswell's Life, but the irre- pressible John Wolcot ridiculed Boswell once more in a poem entitled "Sir Joshua Reynolds," published in 1794, in which Johnson's ghost arises again to respond to rumors about Boswell's intention of writing a life of Reynolds. The poem begins with witty allusions to the terror of the French revolution, to Shakespeare's Macbeth, and cannibalism, burlesquing Johnson's sesquipeda- lian diction:



See Johnson's angry Ghost, ye Gods, arise! He drops his nether lip, and rolls his eyes; And roars, "O Bozzy, Bozzy, spare the dead! Raise not thy biographic guillotine; Decapitate no more with that machine, Nor frighten Horror with a second head: From Reynolds' neck the ponderous weapon keep:- Cease, Anthropophagus, to murder sleep."19

II. "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" and Boswell's Tour (1785)

These newspaper paragraphs, doggerel verses, and satirical engravings clearly indicate that the provenance of "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" and the primary target of its satire is Boswell's Tour (1785) rather than the Life of Johnson (1791). This is true even though the print contains both general and particular references to the Life, including an allusion to a specific conversation between Johnson and Richard Owen Cambridge. At least seven of the eighteen scraps of anecdote on Boswell's table correspond to entries in the "Alphabetical Table of Contents" in the first edition of the Life: specifically, "Drunkenness," "Hawkins," "Percy," "Piozzi," "Second-sight," "Witches," and "Whigs."20 Ti- tled quarto volumes on the top shelf behind Boswell in the engraving (fig. 1) refer to two of the authorities Boswell cites in the opening pages of the Life to defend "the minuteness . .. of my detail of Johnson's conversation" (precisely the issue raised by Cambridge's satire): first, the commentary on the Psalms of the Jewish rabbinical scholar, Rabbi David Kimchi (d. ca. 1270); second, Fran- cis Bacon's Apophthegms (1624).21

Another titled volume in the engraving, Erasmus' famous humanist collec- tion of proverbs, Adagia (1500), is not mentioned in the Life, but the volume marked Janus Vitalis appears to refer to a specific conversation recorded by Boswell between Richard Owen Cambridge and Johnson when dining at Sir Joshua Reynolds' on 9 April 1778. On that occasion Johnson corrected Cam- bridge's attribution of a sonnet to a Spanish writer with the emphatic retort: "Sir that is taken from Janus Vitalis," referring to the Italian poet and theolo- gian (d. ca. 1560).22 The allusion amounts to Cambridge's tacit commemora- tion of the brilliance of Johnson's wit at his own expense-an interesting counterpoint to his ridicule of Boswell's record of Johnson's conversation in the same engraving.

All of these books appear to be unequivocal allusions to the Life, but I be- lieve they are peripheral, best understood as afterthoughts, and perhaps later additions to a design inspired by the Tour. The cushion marked "Hebrides," which Boswell is clutching, suggests that the focus of the satire is upon anecdotes in the Tour which earned Boswell the sobriquet in the press of "James Anecdote, Esq." The hooded hawk, conspicuous on Boswell's chair in the en-



graving, is the heraldic device of Boswell's family which appears on the title page of the Tour.23 There is no need to go into detail, but at least seven of eighteen cushions or remnants on Boswell's table in the engraving refer directly to the Tour, and the rest can be related to its provenance: the "Wanderer," to Prince Charles Edward (1720-1788), the young pretender, the story of whose escape in 1745 was puffed on Boswell's title-page; "Flora Macdonald," to the heroine of the same episode;24 "Montagu," to the cause celebre of the war between Bozzy and Piozzi;' "Witches," to a prominent theme in the Tour;26 "Sav- age Lord" probably alludes to James Burnet, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), whose notions of primitivism and the savage life Johnson hilariously ridicules in the Tour;27 "William III scoundrel," and "Whigs" refer to Johnson's sharp remarks on party in the Tour.28

"Hawkins," "Thrale," "Piozzi," "Percy," and "More" all refer to persons who figure in the Life, but they are probably intended in Cambridge's print to re- mind the viewer of rivals of Boswell's Tour, and rival collectors of Johnsonian anecdote. "Climate" and "Company," two other remnants, are not prominent in the Tour, but both figure in Mrs. Piozzi's biographical works on Johnson, her Anecdotes (1786), and Letters (1788). "Drunkenness" is the theme of one of Mrs. Piozzi's notorious tales about Boswell in the Anecdotes (in vino veritas) which Boswell takes pains to correct in the Life, but drunkenness is also the subject of some discussion and incident in the Tour.29 The scrap referring to Johnson's apocryphal childhood epitaph on a duck (here abbreviated "duck master trod on good luck odd one"), does not appear in the Tour, but it circulated widely in different versions between 1784 and 1787, and it is certain that Cambridge would not have had to wait for the Life to encounter this popular anecdote treasured by Johnson's early biographers.30

The conclusion to be drawn from the "remnants of remnants" in Richard Owen Cambridge's design for the engraving of "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" is that they refer primarily to Boswell's Tour, and to the works of his chief rival in Johnsonian biography, Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes and Letters. All could have been easily collected before the publication of Boswell's Life from newspapers, journals, prints, and pamphlets by such a notorious newsmonger as Richard Owen Cambridge,3' leaving us to explain the delay in the publication of the engraving until Cambridge's Works appeared posthumously in 1803.

III. A Portrait Ghost of Dr. Johnson

If "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" is a satire of Boswell's Tour (1785), why was its publication delayed until 1803? The most likely answer is that Cambridge, like many amateurs who furnished hints for engraved satire in the period, never intended it for publication, but simply as a jeu d'esprit to amuse Boswell and other friends.32 Perhaps "the Author's delicacy upon the subject of all personal-


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ity," remarked on in the descriptive leaf, discouraged him from making his witty satire public. Possibly "Bozzi . . subjects" had gone stale, as Hannah More was complaining as early as April 1786.33 Whatever the reason, there is no doubt from George Owen Cambridge's later reference to Boswell "as sufficient authority for the present publication" that "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" was published for the first time in 1803.

The editor's comments about the portrait of Johnson in the engraving raise an iconographical ghost that warrants some concluding remarks. Speaking of the list of plates in the Works (1803), George Owen Cambridge states that "it was the intention of the editor in the choice of the PORTRAITS, to insert only such as had never before been published" (v); and he implies in the descriptive leaf that the figure of Johnson in the print is just such a portrait, when he introduces it as "an apposite frontispiece" to his father's essays in the periodical, The World, with the statement that "it will be more acceptable, as being a striking likeness of Dr. Johnson's figure, and the only whole length of him ever published."

This statement is certainly mistaken. On 18 January 1786, shortly after the publication of Boswell's Tour, George Kearsley had published an engraving in line and stipple, "drawn from the life, and engrav'd by Thomas Trotter," entitled "Dr. Johnson in his travelling dress as described in Boswell's Tour."34 This famous engraving (fig. 5), frequently reprinted as frontispiece to the Tour, may well be the source of the portrait figure of Johnson's ghost in Cambridge's design: the position of the left hand is identical, and the attitude of the head is similar, although the stance (left foot preceding right) and costume have been altered, the oak stick has disappeared, and the right hand lowered. If so, Trot- ter's traveling Johnson forms an iconographical link between Cambridge's engraving and the reception of Boswell's Tour.

Nevertheless, the existence of a Cambridge family portrait of Johnson was a firmly established tradition during the nineteenth century, when engravings after it were frequently reproduced, and it was described (in Johnsoniana [18361, for example), as "a whole length Portrait of Johnson from the Original painting in the possession of Mr. Archdeacon [George Owen] Cambridge" (fig. 6). The editor of Johnsoniana, John Wilson Croker, quotes Cambridge's son to the effect that the portrait was "considered by all who knew him [Johnson], to be an exact representation of his figure, appearance, and action."35

The recent appearance of two paintings in the sale rooms permits us to clear up the mystery of the ghost portraits of Johnson in the Cambridge family col- lection. The first is the anonymous oil painting dating from about 1786, The Ghost of Dr Johnson Appearing to James Boswell (fig. 7), evidently the design for the engraving of "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" (1803) to which it corresponds in nearly every detail. It is undoubtedly the picture commissioned by Richard Owen Cambridge from the "artist in his house."36 The second is the oil painting of the full-length standing figure of Johnson by an unknown artist (fig. 8)


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clearly derived from the earlier painting,37 and probably the design engraved by Edward Francis Finden in 1835 for Johnsoniana (1836), where the engraving is said to derive "from the original painting in the possession of Archdeacon Cambridge" (fig. 6). When the two paintings are placed side by side, it is obvi- ous that the Cambridge family portrait resurrects the full-length figure in the painting of Dr Johnson's Ghost Appearing to Boswell.

University of Nevada

N O T E S

*This essay was occasioned by the discovery of the descriptive leaf (Appendix A) in the Ht?ntington Library copy of The Works of Richard Owen Cambridge (1803), shelf- mark 352198. I am indebted to the library's staff and readers for assisting the research and writing of this article, and to Herman W. Liebert for improving a draft. 1. See Richard D. Altick, Richard Owen Cambridge: Belated Augustan (Philadelphia, 1941), 84-85. 2. See The Works of Richard Owen Cambridge, ed. George Owen Cambridge (London, 1803), leaf tipped in next to plate 16 between 368 and 369. See also the list of engravings, iv-"XVI: Dr. JOHNSON'S GHOST (with the descriptive leaf of that print) appearing to Mr. Boswell, to face The Worlds [Richard Owen Cambridge's contributions to the periodical, The World] between signatures-3A and 3B." For "the descriptive leaf," see Appendix A. We do not know the name of the "artist in his [Cambridge's] house," but Charles Bestland of West End, Hampstead, the publisher of the print, is a possibility, if he can be identified with the painter and miniaturist who was exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1783 and 1837. See E. Benezit, Dictionnaire. . des Pein- tres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1976), 1: 715. 3. Misled by the publication date of the print (1803), exhibition catalogues, illustration lists, and the standard reference works regularly associate "Dr. Johnson's Ghost" with Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791). See, for example, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Roger Ingpen, 2 vols. (Bath, 1925), 2: xii, caption: "One of the many caricatures of Boswell which appeared on the publication of his 'Life of johnson.' " See also Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum [1784-17921, 6 (London, 1938), hereafter cited BM Satires, No. 8281, xxv and 989-999; and James L. Clifford and Donald J. Greene, Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliogra- phy of Critical Studies (Minneapolis, 1970), No. 8: 17, 128. A recent and rare exception is Mary Hyde, The Impossible Friendship: Boswell and Mrs. Thrale (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), plate facing p. 101, captioned "A Satiric View of Boswell's Publication of the Tour of the Hebrides." 4. In a letter to Edmond Malone dated March 1786 Boswell requested a copy of the General Evening Post containing an attack on him entitled "Dr. Johnson's Ghost," probably Elizabeth Moody's ballad (see below, n. 13). See Marion Pottle, Catalogue of Boswell Papers, forthcoming Yale University Press, L 933. I owe this reference to the courtesy of Professor Frank Brady.



5. The Morning Post is quoted by Lucyle Werkmeister, "Jemmie Boswell and the Lon- don Daily Press, 1785-1795-Part I," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 67 (Feb- ruary 1963): 89; see also The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson, ed. 0. M. Brack, Jr., and Robert E. Kelley (Iowa City, 1974). 6. See Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1786), hereafter cited Anecdotes; Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1788), hereafter Letters; and Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2nd ed. (London, 1787). For the rival biographers, see James L. Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) (Oxford, 1941), chap. 12, esp. 255-276; Bertram H. Davis, Johnson Before Boswell: A Study of Sir John Hawkins' Life of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1957), chap. 1; and Mary Hyde, The Impossible Friendship. 7. For The Monthly Review, see John Ker Spittal, ed., Contemporary Criticism of Sa- muel Johnson, His Works, and his Biographers (London, 1923), 4. For Walpole, see letter to Horace Mann, 25 March 1786, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Corre- spondence [hereafter Correspondence], 25 (New Haven, 1971): 636; and "On Dr. John- son's Biographers," Correspondence, 12 (1944): 258. Cf. Walpole's epigram in his annotated copy (p. 524) of the first edition of Boswell's Tour: "When boozy Bozzy belch'd out Johnson's sayings, / And half the volume fill'd with his own brayings, / Scotland beheld again before her pass / A brutal Bulldog coupled with an Ass." See Allen Hazen, A Catalogue of Horace Walpole's Library (New Haven and London, 1969), No. 3069, 2: 535-536. 8. For the legal issues of anecdotal biography, see Werkmeister, "Boswell and the Lon- don Press-I," 93. 9. Quoted by Mary Hyde, The Impossible Friendship, 100. 10. (London, 1786), page numbers cited in the text. 11. Dated in the title 15 April 1786, in Prose on Several Occasions Accompanied with Some Pieces in Verse, 3 vols. (London, 1787), 3: 163-166. 12. My quotations from Bozzy and Piozzi, cited in the text, are from the tenth edition (London, 1788). For Walpole's remark, see Correspondence, 25 (1971): 640. 13. See "Dr. Johnson's Ghost/By a Lady," The Gentleman's Magazine, 56 (May 1786): 427-428, reprinted in Poetic Trifles (London, 1798), 59-62. Cf. Pope's Ghost: A Ballad to the Tune of William and Margaret (London, 1744), in which Pope's ghost visits Colley Cibber. See David Foxon, English Verse 1 701-1 750, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1975), 1: 613, P 761. 14. To his Four Friends.. . with Notes Critical, Biographical, Historical, and Explana- tory (London, 1786). 15. Correspondence, 25 (1971): 641. For earlier engravings featuring visitations of ghosts, see Eustace Budgell appearing to Robert Walpole (BM Satires, No. 2555 [17421); Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough to Robert Walpole (No. 2786 [1746]); Oliver Cromwell to Charles James Fox (No. 6410 [17841; Mirabeau and Dr. Richard Price to Edmund Burke (No. 7864 [1791]). 16. For the "Ghost of Blackmore," see A[lexander] M[eyrick] Broadley, Doctor Johnson and Mrs. Thrale (London, 1910), plate opp. p. 36, here reproduced as fig. 2. The drawing, "property of A. M. Broadley," exhibited at a Lichfield centenary exhibition, cannot



now be traced. See Bicentenary of the Birth of Dr Samuel Johnson. Official Guide to the Celebration at Lichfield, 15th to 19th September 1909 (Lichfield, 1909), No. 161, p. 39. For Pope's Blackmore, see Imitations of Horace, Epistle I.i, lines 13-16, The Twick- enham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 4, ed. John Butt (London, 1939), 179. For Johnson's Life of Blackmore, see Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), 2: 235-256. 17. See Mary Dorothy George, BM Satires, 6 (1938): No. 7052, 356. 18. BM Satires, No. 7417, 6:547-548. 19. The Works of Peter Pindar [John Wolcot], 5 vols. (London, 1812), 4: 210-211. 20. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2 vols. (London, 1791), 1: A-B4. 21. Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-1950), 1: 33-34, hereafter cited Life. Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides is vol. 5 of this edition, hereafter cited Tour. I am indebted to Howard Weinbrot for this reference. 22. Life, 3: 251. 23. 1 owe this aperfu to the hawk eye of Herman W. Liebert. For "James Anecdote, Esq.," see Werkmeister, "Boswell and the London Press-I," 90. 24. For the "Wanderer," see Tour, 5: xxix, 187-205; for Flora Macdonald, Tour, 5: 184-187. 25. For Elizabeth Montagu, see Tour, 5: 245-246n., and Irma S. Lustig, "Boswell at Work: The 'Animadversions' on Mrs. Piozzi," Modern Language Review, 67 (January 1972): 11-30. 26. See Tour, 5: 45-46. 27. See Tour, 5: 81. 28. See Tour, 5: 255, 271. 29. On "Climate," see Tour, 5: 377; Anecdotes, quoted from Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1897), 1: 141-351 and 288n.; and Letters, quoted from The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1952), subject index, s. v. "Scots" (2), 3: 459. On "Company," see Letters, 2: 50. On "Drunkenness," see Tour, 5: 248-249, 258-259, 544-545; Anecdotes, 1: 320-321; Life, 2: 188, and n. 3. 30. For versions of the epitaph before Boswell (Life, 1: 40), see Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes, 1: 153, and n.; James Harrison[l7, "The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson," prefa- tory to A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson (London, 1786); and Hawkins, (Life, 6. Cf. Brack and Kelley, ed., Early Biographies, 64, 249-250. 31. See Altick, "The Riding Magazine," Richard Owen Cambridge, chap. 7. 32. On the role of the amateur in satirical engravings in the period, see Frederick George Stephens, BM Satires, 4 (1883): xxxiii-xxxiv, and Mary Dorothy George, BM Satires, 6 (1938): xxxiii. 33. For Cambridge's delicacy, see the descriptive leaf (Appendix A). Hannah More is quoted in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 1: 143. 34. See Mary Dorothy George, BM Satires, 6 (1938), No. 7028; and "The Portraits of Johnson," Life, 4: 461, No. 10.



35. See Johnsoniana, ed. John Wilson Croker (London, 1836), xxi, "List of Plates," No. 28, and p. 358n; James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. John Wilson Croker, 10 vols. (London, 1872), 1: xx, describing the frontispiece to vol. 1. For other engravings desig- nated the Cambridge family portrait of Johnson, see Boswell's Life, ed. J. W. Croker, 10 vols. (London, 1848), vol. 1, front.; Life of Johnson, ed. Alexander Napier, 4 vols. (London, 1884), vol. 3, front.; and The R. B. Adam Library Relating to Dr Samuel Johnson and his Era, 3 vols. (London and New York, 1929), 1: facing dedicatory page. 36. See Christie's Catalogue of Fine English Pictures (21 March 1969), lot 8, p. 7. 37. Oil painting by an unknown artist, 453/4 x 29 in., sold Sotheby's Book Sale, 10-11 February 1964 (207).

APPENDIX A

Transcript of "The Descriptive Leaf" from Richard Owen Cambridge, Works (1803), between 368 and 369.

THAT readiness at quotation, which distinguished the AUTHOR, furnished the passage from Congreve's admirable comedy, upon which the humour of this Pic- TURE is founded. It occurred to him, at a time when the press was daily issuing fresh anecdotes relative to Dr. Johnson; in which, not only the moral wisdom and critical sagacity of that distinguished writer are displayed, but every trifling or un- guarded expression that had fallen from him in the lisping of childhood, or in the feebleness of age; and even under the influence of a morbid depression of mind, are not less industriously circulated. So unjustifiable an indulgence of the public curi- osity may well be supposed to excite the displeasure of the Doctor, whose Ghost is here represented as appearing to his Biographer, to remonstrate with him upon the indiscretion of such a proceeding. The alarm expressed by the historian at being discovered by his old friend in the midst of this employment, may serve as a useful hint to others who are daily manufacturing their pincushions out of every scrap and remnant of anecdote they can pick up and patch together. Happening to have an artist in his house, he employed him to execute the humorous ideas which had thus struck his fancy, and which affords a specimen of his inventive genius in the sister art to poetry.

It may be right to add, that the Author's delicacy upon the subject of all person- ality, made him embrace the earliest opportunity of shewing it to Mr. Boswell, who was so much delighted with the humour of the design and the justness of the criticism, that he strongly solicited to have it engraved. The Editor considers this as sufficient authority for the present publication of it; and it is here given as an apposite frontispiece to these Essays, from its partaking of the same good humoured satire with which they abound. It will be more acceptable, as being a striking likeness of Dr. Johnson's figure, and the only whole length of him ever published.

(To face the Engraving of Dr. Johnson's Ghost.)


Article Contentsp. 339[unnumbered]p. 340p. 341p. 342p. 343p. 344p. 345p. 346p. 347p. 348p. [349]p. 350p. 351p. 352p. 353p. 354p. 355p. 356p. 357

Issue Table of ContentsThe Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 339-419Front Matter"Dr. Johnson's Ghost": Genesis of a Satirical Engraving [pp. 339-357]"The Cause of My Sex": Mary Scott and the Female Literary Tradition [pp. 359-377]Fielding and the Licensing Act [pp. 379-393]Notes and DocumentsAn Unpublished Letter of Sir John Vanbrugh [pp. 395-396]Two Unpublished Letters by John Constable at the Huntington Library [pp. 397-402]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 403-408]Review: untitled [pp. 409-412]Review: untitled [pp. 412-414]

Intramuralia [pp. 415-418]Back Matter [pp. 419-419]