Johnson and the Victorians

Chapter 5 considers how Carlyle, Arnold and Birkbeck Hill engaged with Johnson. Carlyle refashioned Johnson as a heroic figure, attending to Johnson’s radical powers of self-creation, epitomised in action. Carlyle focused on emblematic moments in Johnson’s life where an authentic self is created through exemplary performative gestures, echoing Johnson’s search for a core identity in The Rambler. Arnold regarded Johnson as a writer who, like himself, turned from poetry to criticism, helping validate that choice. Arnold’s abridged version of the Lives of the Poets repackaged Johnson for the new Victorian reading public, paring it down to six notable ‘Lives’, echoing Carlyle’s distillation of Johnson’s life to exemplary episodes. Arnold contrasted the lucidity of Johnson’s style with Carlylean obscurantism. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Boswell’s biography presaged the arrival of the editor as creator. Hill, in the turbulent 1880s, sought to resurrect a more ordered civilisation and restore the intelligibility of Boswell’s text. The edition was swollen with supporting material, appearing a rival act of creation, exposing the paradox of the encyclopaedic project: the task of documenting the world is fated to be perpetually incomplete.