REFLECTION
SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE GENIUS WITH THE LOPSIDED WIG

In reading non-fiction books and essays over the past five decades, I have come across numerous references to Samuel Johnson, a brilliant writer who lived in the 18th century. While I admired his sayings, the truth is that I knew very little about the man. I had never read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a literary classic.

So recently when Anita and I were at Borders, I spotted a biography of Johnson on a table of new books which were being offered at 30% off the purchase price. I decided to buy Samuel Johnson: The Struggle authored by Jeffrey Meyers. It is a very readable, well written piece of work.

Two things struck me. One was that Johnson was often slovenly dressed and was often loud and profane. He was not the sort of person you would readily invite to dinner. Meyers says that Johnson suffered from what we now call Tourette Syndrome. Once people got beyond his physical appearance and behavior, they could appreciate his superior intellect and brilliant conversation.

The second thing that struck me was the cruelty of that age – the 18th century -- toward children, the poor, and those who had committed misdemeanors. Johnson, however, comes through as a man of compassion and modern views as this paragraph from Meyer attests:

“In his greatest essays . . . he urged charity toward prostitutes, favored mitigating the criminal code, especially concerning the imprisonment of debtors, and opposed capital punishment for minor offenses. In other essays he pitied the animals whose peaceful life was sacrificed in sport and attacked the experimental torture of helpless beasts by vivisection. He advocated the abolition of slavery and condemned the barbarity of war, the savagery of colonial ventures and the slaughter of indigenous peoples.”

This book on Johnson is a keeper. We could not agree more with Paul Thoroux’s evaluation: “This is a superb book, not only an intellectual history of one of English literature’s greatest and most restless minds, but . . . an incomparable portrait of a man who was physically an oddity and a marvel. Dr Johnson with his tics and his appetites and his lopsided wig is depicted with the full-blooded gusto he deserves.”

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