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19 - Augustan England and British America

from PART III - LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
William Dowling
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

In Boswell's Life of Johnson, under the year 1778, a reader comes across one of those Johnsonian outbursts that caused Boswell to compare his hero's temper to a warm West Indian climate. The context is entirely benign. Johnson has been discussing with the Quaker Mrs Knowles the nature of Christian friendship. Then, without warning, comes the explosion. ‘From this pleasing subject,’ reports Boswell, ‘he, I know not how or why, made a sudden transition to one upon which he was a violent aggressor; for he said, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American:” and his inflammable corruption bursting into horrid fire, he “breathed out threatenings and slaughter;” calling them, “Rascals – Robbers – Pirates;” and exclaiming he'd “burn and destroy them.”’ When another lady present, Anna Seward, gently reproves his vehemence, the result is another explosion: ‘He was irritated still more by this delicate and keen reproach; and roared out another tremendous volley, which one might fancy could be heard across the Atlantick.’

Yet to any one who had read Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny, the most searching analysis of American claims produced by anyone writing on the side of George III and his ministers, the explosion would have come as no surprise. For by 1778 Johnson had honestly concluded that the American colonists were simply Englishmen long permitted by mere geographical accident to escape their normal civic responsibilities. They were now, in his view, hypocrites who were trying to make that advantage permanent by mobilising an exploded vocabulary of Whig principles left over from the previous reign.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 498 - 524
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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