7 - The writer as performer

Summary

The word ‘performance’ has shifted its meaning over the last two hundred years. Today, if it is not used to describe the qualities of a machine, it usually means an act of display, intended to win applause. In the England of Johnson and Gibbon it was a normal word for a composition, a painting or a piece of writing. Thus Johnson's dictionary gives as its meanings: (1) completion of something designed (2) composition, work; (3) action, something done. (‘Performer’, however, is ‘generally applied to one that makes a public exhibition of his skill’.) Johnson is reported as judging books by Warburton and Whitehead as ‘poor performances’ (Tour, pp. 66, 84), Gibbon refers to Oldys's Life of Sir Walter Raleigh as ‘a very poor performance’ (p. 119), Boswell applies the word frequently to any kind of writing.

None of this necessarily implies that these writers had a particularly histrionic view of their act. Nevertheless, reading Gibbon's Autobiography and Boswell's accounts of Johnson, one is often struck by the suitability of the word ‘performance’ in its modern connotation to the literary attitudes of these two dedicated men of letters. Johnson we see as the man who makes his way in the world by pen and tongue, a man deeply attached to the affirmation of moral, religious and political standards in writing, yet at the same time very much a professional writer.