Abstracts of
recent and forthcoming conference papers and published essays
by Lisa
Berglund
1. “Allegory
in The Rambler,”Papers in Language and
Literature 37:2 (2001)
Johnson’s criticism of Milton, Swift and Dryden in
the Lives of the Poets offers a key to
understanding the role of formal
allegory in The Rambler. Amid the periodical’s invented
correspondence, literary criticism and moral essays, Johnson intersperses a
variety of simplified, didactic narratives that invite us to reflect upon our
conduct as readers. The Rambler’s allegorical histories use
personification to illustrate an evolving, troubled relationship among readers,
writers and texts, and its dream-visions and oriental tales further emphasize
the seductive dangers of fanciful fiction.
The allegories in Johnson’s
Rambler ultimately instruct us both to value the genre as a vehicle for
practical moral instruction and to doubt our ability to profit from its
fictions, so susceptible are we to what Rambler
89 calls “the invisible riot of the mind.”
2. “‘Look, my
Lord, it comes’: The Approach of Death in the Life of Johnson,” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and
Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 7 (2002), 239-255
In the famous account of their first meeting, Boswell
conflates Johnson with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, creating a powerful
metaphor that not only provides a dramatic structure for their relationship but
also justifies his role as Johnson’s biographer. Boswell transforms Johnson’s ghost into an “aweful” yet paternal
muse, a literary guardian who anachronistically ordains the writing of his Life.
In the final pages of the biography, as Boswell recounts Johnson’s
decline and death, imagery initially associated with the ghost reappears,
returning the narrative to its symbolic beginning and assuring the reader that
Johnson has licensed Boswell both to bury and to praise him.
3. “The Marginal Life of Hester Lynch Piozzi”: Paper presented at EC/ASECS 2000
This paper examines one element of the struggle
between Hester Lynch Piozzi and James Boswell for recognition as the true
biographer of Samuel Johnson. Piozzi privately annotated three successive
editions of The Life of Johnson,
offering comments that challenge Boswell’s accounts, question his sources,
identify people he leaves unnamed, and otherwise illustrate her continuing
engagement with Boswell’s book and with her own role as a character within the
text that her rival created. Piozzi’s choice literally to retreat to the
margins is striking, given the public role she willingly had assumed as the
author of the Anecdotes of Dr. Samuel
Johnson, published five years before Boswell’s Life appeared. Indeed, in
confining her critique to marginalia, Piozzi essentially accepts the place
assigned her by Boswell, who relegated most of his attack on her Anecdotes to footnotes. That Piozzi annotated not one but three
editions of the LIFE suggests a pattern of repeated engagement with and retreat
from the challenge of answering Boswell; the notes themselves locate their
author within an undefined space between public and private life stories. They also articulate Piozzi’s own
ambivalence about her roles as both biographer and “biographied,” subject and
object, writer and woman.
4. “Oysters for Hodge, or Gender, Johnson’s Biographers and the Cat”
(lecture presented to the Columbia University Faculty Seminar, November 1999)
In his satire of 1786, “Bozzy
and Piozzi; or, The British Biographers, a Town Eclogue,” Peter Pindar imagines
James Boswell’s contemptuous evaluation of how his rival Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson wallows
in low details of domestic life:
Who would have said a word about Sam’s wig;
Or told the story of the pease and pig?
Who would have told a tale so very flat,
Of Frank the Black, and Hodge the mangy cat?
The “flat tale” describes
the aging Hodge’s delicate digestion, and how Johnson scrupulously bought the
cat’s oysters himself so “that Francis the Black’s delicacy might not be hurt,
at seeing himself employed for the convenience of a quadruped.” Perhaps deliberately, in the Life Boswell repeats the same story; he
omits the reference to Francis Barber in a general allusion to “servants,”
however, and adds two other feline anecdotes.
Johnson himself might not have agreed that Hodge--”a very fine cat,” he
told Boswell--so little deserved inclusion in his owner’s biography. Rambler
60, after all, forcefully argues that “the business of the biographer is . . .
to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of
daily life,” and in their accounts Piozzi and Boswell use this particular “minute
detail” to emphasize Johnson’s sympathy, generosity and whimsicality. More important, however, Hodge and his
oysters help us to understand, not only Johnson, but also his biographers.
Both the Anecdotes
and the Life interpret Johnson’s
solicitude for Hodge’s health as a problematic response to hierarchies of the
household and of the larger social order, specifically those of class, race and
gender. Piozzi and Boswell are
uncomfortable with their protagonist’s insistence on personally gratifying the
desires of an animal in order to spare the feelings of a black servant. This paper examines how each biographer
constructs the tale of Hodge and his oysters to reinforce and validate their
own places in the social hierarchy and in Johnson’s private life. For Piozzi, Hodge’s oysters recall her own
labors as Johnson’s nurse and confidante, and she uses Johnson’s behavior in
the anecdote to justify and universalize the feminized, “candle-light” world of
her Anecdotes. For Boswell, by contrast, Hodge becomes a
rival; as Johnson’s pet, and therefore as a privileged intimate, he poses a
challenge for the man most anxious to claim that title for himself. In the Life,
the cat becomes the target of a series of startlingly combative, even violent
images, as if Boswell were trying to unseat a usurping Hodge from a position of
authority.
5. “‘Throwing
up a Straw’: Order and Chaos in Hester Lynch Piozzi’s British Synonymy”; paper presented at ASECS 1999
An uneasy mixture of the modesty expected of an
eighteenth‑century woman and the authority required of a lexicographer,
heated in the political crucible of the early 1790s, shapes Hester Lynch Piozzi’s
project in British Synonymy, from her
choice of words and exemplifications, to her illustrations of usage via
personal anecdote, to her remarkable essays upon contemporary European politics
and her allusions to Christian Revelation.
Piozzi initially implies that her book is feminine, erratic and
therefore random, but as the work goes on she suggests with increasing distress
and seriousness both that this lack of order in fact illustrates universal
chaos, and also that such disorder does have meaning, if we but learn to read
it correctly. As the century drew to a
close and European civilization seemed bent on self‑destruction, a devout
Christian like Piozzi could naturally see her track through the alphabet
leading to an apocalyptic vision, to “the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning
and the End, the First and the Last.”
6. “’Anecdotic Itch’”: Making a Mock of
Life-Writing in Bozzy and Piozzi”;
paper presented at ASECS 2001
“Nothing was ever more pretty, comical and
sparkling,” wrote Hester Lynch Piozzi to her friend Samuel Lysons, as she
returned thanks for a copy of Peter Pindar’s satire on Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Ironically, the letter is dated 25 March
1786, the very day on which Piozzi’s own Anecdotes
of the late Samuel Johnson was published.
Although she could not have guessed the coincidence, perhaps it is
consciousness of her new fraternity with Boswell that then leads Piozzi to an
unusually sympathetic observation:
upon my honour the World is very rigorous,
for if Boswell was Plutarch, nothing but the Sayings of Johnson could he record—like Arabella’s maid in the
Female Quixote we should all be at a Loss to keep a register of his Actions for even her ladyship’s
Smiles might be mentioned as She suggests—but dear Dr. Johnson did not afford
us many of them.
In linking these two literary allusions, Piozzi
exposes the tension at the heart of the biographer’s work. Can biography consist merely of a registry
of facts and quotations? The reference
to Charlotte Lennox’s novel reminds us that the most quotidian facts may be
misinterpreted, shaped into self-indulgent heroic narrative or outrageous
comedy. Indeed, both Boswell and Piozzi
began their books by aggrandizing their subject (Boswell compares Johnson to “Hercules
with his club,” while Piozzi evokes Trajan and Ajax); and in her wry comment to
Lysons, Piozzi seems to admit that she and Boswell are cooperating in
myth-making, just as Arabella’s maid fostered her mistress’s delusions of
greatness.
I
would like to explore the specific problem that writing the life of Johnson
posed for his first biographers, as they attempted to narrate a life at once
sublime and mundane. In this paper, however, I will examine not
the Anecdotes or the Journal, but rather a second poem by
Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), Bozzy and
Piozzi; or, The British Biographers: A Pair of Town Eclogues. Pindar
criticizes the authors for supplying “downright gibbets to [Johnson’s] fame,”
and he imagines the ghost of Johnson returning to demand vengeance from Sir
John Hawkins. Pindar’s poem
restructures and reorders the anecdotes recorded by Boswell and Piozzi; in
copiously quoting and juxtaposing material from the two lives, he exposes
self-aggrandizing agendas concealed as simple truth. Finally, I plan to examine how Pindar’s formal use of
mock-pastoral, and in particular his imitation of Gay’s imitation of Virgil,
functions as a critique of what he sees as the parasitical genre of anecdotal
biography. Of course, studying Bozzy and
Piozzi cannot substitute for reading the Journal and the Anecdotes
themselves; however, Pindar’s work repays our attention, for this superficially
“pretty, comical and sparkling” satire also supplies a thoughtful, trenchant
and perceptive analysis of the tempting genre of life-writing.
8. “‘Rust of the Soul’:
Johnson on Sorrow, Reason and Condolence”; paper presented at EC/ASECS 2001
Studies of
Johnson’s impassioned horror of death are commonplace; his conventional
responses to loss have received less attention. Using the scene of the stoic philosopher in Rasselas as a
structuring metaphor and context, this paper examines Johnson’s formal
responses to death, in the periodical essays and in his correspondence. The letter of condolence is a ritual
established by society to bring order, if not reason, to a moment of heightened
passion. The periodical essays,
especially those written when Johnson suffered personal losses, may serve the
same function. This paper examines the
series (if I may call it that) on loss and mourning carried on in Ramblers
47, 52 and 54; and actual letters of condolence that Johnson wrote,
particularly those to James Elphinstone, Lucy Porter and Hester Thrale. In
these letters Johnson responds like both the philosopher and like Rasselas to
the event of loss; he imagines himself urged by philosophy to remember the attractions of
reason, persuaded by passion to reject it.
I also will consider the ways in which highly
structured, non-spontaneous, customary genres (both the periodical essay and
the letter of condolence) might serve Johnson as a regulator of the passions.
9. “Fossil Fish: Preserving Samuel Johnson within Hester Lynch Piozzi’s
British Synonymy”; paper to be presented at DSNA 14 (May 2003)
It has been Hester Lynch
Piozzi’s fortune and misfortune ever to be linked in the public mind with her
most famous friend. Thanks to that
intimacy, the tremendous success of her first book, Anecdotes of the Late
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1786), was assured; that triumph paved the way for the
positive reception of her edition of Johnson’s correspondence (1788) and for
her travel book, Observations and Reflections (1789). Yet when she determined in 1792 to write “a
two‑Volume Book of Synonyms in English, like what the Abbé Girard has
done in French, for the use of Foreigners, and other Children of six feet high,”
Piozzi formally rejected “help from Dr. Johnson” [letter to Queeney]. For a writer who had hitched her literary
wagon to the star of Johnson’s fame, this choice seems perverse; for a
lexicographer, catastrophic.
If Piozzi wanted
to establish herself as an original philologist, her strategy was
ill-conceived; considered as a declaration of independence, British Synonymy
is a failure. Some contemporary
reviewers condemned the project as imitative, others hinted that Piozzi had plagiarized
or revised material left her by the great lexicographer. Moreover, although she did not adopt the Dictionary’s
word-list, she does quote some definitions, placing Johnson’s example directly
before those readers to whom it might not otherwise have occurred. Johnson appears in British Synonymy
just often enough to remind readers of his towering authority and even perhaps
to undermine our sense of Piozzi’s own.
At the same time, references to Johnson are too infrequent to constitute
a formal challenge to or revision of the Dictionary.
In his critical biography of Piozzi, William McCarthy
describes the Synonymy’s unsystematic use of Johnson as “a case of
self-defeating rebelliousness.” While
this is a fair characterization, in focusing on Piozzi’s response to “Dictionary
Johnson,” McCarthy does not consider the quotations from Johnson’s other works,
or the overall impact of Johnson’s representation in the thesaurus. To my mind, Piozzi is not simply negotiating
with a lexicographical precursor.
Rather, she uses British Synonymy to attack the problem that
Johnson had come to pose as she attempted to establish both a literary career
and a new private character. Johnson’s
iconic stature—built in part on her own Anecdotes and Letters and
in a fair way to being assured in 1791 with Boswell’s Life—threatened to
overpower and redefine her own life.
Hester Lynch Piozzi was beginning to face the prospect of being always “Dr.
Johnson’s Mrs. Thrale.” While Boswell
might have been content for his name to become an eponym for a biographer, Mrs.
Piozzi had chosen, in the teeth of opposition, a new name and a new
career. As I will argue, therefore, British
Synonymy inscribes an ambivalent response to her threatened historical
subordination; in her quotations from Johnson’s works, Piozzi attempts to
create a distance between herself and her friend and mentor and to recast
Johnson as merely a great author, one source among many for the synonymist.
As we know, she failed.