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Birch, Johnson, and Elizabeth Carter: An Episode of 1738-39

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edward Ruhe
Edward Ruhe*
Affiliation:
University or Kansas, Lawrence
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Extract

Dr. Johnson's twenty-five-year friendship with the historian, antiquary, and clubman, Thomas Birch (1705-66), is significant for several reasons. First, it covers Johnson's earliest and most obscure years in London; second, it shows him in a curious association with a man of nearly the same age whose contemporary eminence and excellent social and intellectual connections contrasted remarkably with his own during the years before the Dictionary; and third, it gave rise to a large number of little-known Johnsonian passages in Birch's various correspondences. The Birch papers in the British Museum reveal their compiler as, among many other things, a voluminous if unsystematic and usually noncommittal chronicler of Johnson's career between 1738 and 1765. As a Whig with predominant Whig connections, Birch sometimes dealt harshly with Johnson. As a weathervane of taste, he was as often content to report current gossip or the progress of Johnson's projects as he learned of them through the newspapers, or in conversation with other friends or with Johnson himself. Once, by request, he wrote a short but extremely laudatory letter concerning Johnson's Dictionary. But the few well-known documents on the Birch-Johnson friendship suggest that relations were somehow disordered. Johnson's ten known letters to Birch are peremptory, cold, and without friendly expressions; his review of Birch's History of the Royal Society, published in 1756, was distinctly unfavorable; and his rumored final verdict on Birch (“a dull writer” [Boswell, i, 159]) is perhaps more widely known than Birch's services to English historiography. Johnson was content to remember Birch for a single talent: “he had more anecdotes than any man”—they flowed “like the river Thames” (Boswell, v, 255). Sir John Hawkins quoted Johnson on Birch, and the characterization, adapted by Boswell, has been endlessly repeated at Birch's expense: “Tom is a lively rogue; he remembers a great deal, and can tell many pleasant stories; but a pen is to Tom a torpedo, the touch of it benumbs his hand and his brain: Tom can talk; but he is no writer.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 5-part1 , December 1958 , pp. 491 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

Note 1 in page 491 The principal MSS are the Birch-Hardwicke correspondence, 1740-65 (Add. MSS. 35396-35400), Birch's miscellaneous correspondence (mainly in the Sloane collection, Add. MSS. 4300-4323), and the Birch diary covering the years 1735-64 (Add. MS. 4478c). I owe my knowledge of the Birch-Hardwicke letters to Prof. James L. Clifford. The diary, unaccountably ignored in the Ayscough printed catalogue of Sloane MSS, is the principal source of new information here presented. The passages here listed mainly cover foil. 34r-44v. Individual short references to material from the diary will be included in the text, as will short-form references to other principal sources.

Note 2 in page 491 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-50), i, 285.

Note 3 in page 491 Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2nd. ed. (London, 1787), p. 209. Boswell (i, 159), repeats the anecdote; but see also i, 159, n. 4. Hawkins (pp. 206-210) presented a long invidious account of Birch emphasizing his industriousness, his neatness, his freedom from mercenary motives, his sense of decorum, etc.—all at Johnson's expense.

Note 4 in page 491 James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1955), p. 202.

Note 5 in page 492 The date of Johnson's regular employment as editorial assistant to Cave remains uncertain. Johnson himself dated it about the middle of 1738 (Clifford, p. 344, n. 28). His contributions probably began in March.

Note 6 in page 492 Clifford, pp. 186-187; Clarence R. Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (Cambridge, 1953), p. 121. The Birch-Cave association is represented by a correspondence in the Birch papers, Add. 4302, foll. 91-145.

Note 7 in page 492 viii (April 1738), 210. Monthly magazines of the period normally appeared on the first of the month following their nominal date.

Note 8 in page 492 Montagu Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter (Boston, 1809), pp. 33-34; Boswell, i, 122, n. 4.

Note 9 in page 492 Paul Dottin, Samuel Richardson (Paris, 1931), pp. 265, 297.

Note 10 in page 493 His collaborators were John Peter Bernard, John Lock-man, and the orientalist George Sale. A calendar of this project, among Birch's papers, reveals that he actually began work on the Bayle 16 Sept. 1732 (Add. 4268, fol. 25; see also Add. 4478c, fol. 6). The contract (Add. 4254, fol. 116) is dated 29 April 1734.

Note 11 in page 493 James M. Osborn, “Thomas Birch and the General Dictionary,” Modern Philology, xxxvi (Aug. 1938), 25-46. For the most part Birch's collaborators restricted their efforts to translating articles from Bayle. In the original collection only about one percent of the articles dealt with Englishmen.

Note 12 in page 493 Add. 4302, fol. 69. The original is in Latin. For the translation I am indebted to Mr. John Bateman of the Univ. of Ottawa; and to Dr. Austin Farrer of Trinity College, Oxford, for suggestions regarding the content and tone of the Latin correspondence. I am responsible for the final form of translations here presented. Birch's Latin is crude, as he knew; in the diary, a strictly private chronicle, the Latin shows considerable carelessness.

Note 13 in page 494 Add. 4320, fol. 131. Later, on 6 April 1739, Warburton responded with a terse critical opinion on some of Eliza's writings which Birch had transmitted: “The poems of Miss Carter are excellent” (Add. 4320, fol. 147). Another friend, Joseph Welby, echoed the sentiments of Warburton's earlier letter, but less flippantly: “The copy of that letter, & those Poems of Miss Carter, you were so good to give me, has not only given me all the pleasure such an elegant composition is capable of affording, but has had the same effect on all, to whom I have shewn them. I could, me thinks, be not a little pleas'd to find a nearer relation between two persons of such similar tastes & inclinations as She & You seem to have” (Add. 4321, fol. 128).

Note 14 in page 495 “Ccenatus sum cum Elizâ Carterâ & S. Johnsono” (fol. 36).

Note 15 in page 495 “The Two Samuel Johnsons,” Notes and Queries, cxcrx (Oct. 1954), 432-35; Clifford, pp. 198-201.

Note 16 in page 495 Add. 4302, fol. 72; Boswell, I, 138; Pennington, p. 38, n.

Note 17 in page 495 Boswell, i, 139; from Add. 4302, fol. 102.

Note 18 in page 496 As a matter of principle. Eliza and Lady Hertford became friends soon afterwards, perhaps through the mediation of Dalton. Pennington (pp. 42-45) prints Lady Hertford's cordial letters of 15 April and 13 May 1739.

Note 19 in page 496 Pennington (p. 39, n.) suspected that Johnson merely corrected the press for Cave.

Note 20 in page 497 The History of the Works of the Learned, Vol. I for 1739 (June 1739), 392-393. The whole review, credited to Birch by the editor, appeared on pp. 391-408. As noted above Birch had called her “Anglian Nostra Daceriam” in his letter of 19 Aug.

Note 21 in page 497 In fact she later achieved a certain additional fame when she received the dedication to William Hayley's An Essay on Old Maids (1785).

Note 22 in page 498 Add. 4302, fol. 71; Add. 4456, fol. 59; Add. 4297, foil. 49-50, 61. Add. 4297, foil. 58-59, are undated letters concerning the Algarotti translation.

Note 23 in page 498 Birch did get possession of the originals of several letters to Cave (Add. 4297, foil. 57-60). Clifford (p. 345, n. 16) mentions further Cave-Carter letters in Stowe MS. 748, foil. 169, 171, etc.

Note 24 in page 498 See also Eliza's later letters, “Margareta; suae” and “Jacobo suo” (Add. 4456, fol. 61). The circumstances under which such letters circulated remain obscure.

Note 25 in page 498 E.g., in his letter to Lord Hardwicke, 27 July 1765: “Sam. Johnson advertis'd lately his Edition of Shakespeare as ready to deliver (he meant to be deliver'd) on the l.8t of August” (Add. 35400, foil. 260-261).

Note 26 in page 499 In the Gentleman's Mag., vni (Dec. 1738), 654, and, the Latin version, ix (Jan. 1739), 4.

Note 27 in page 499 Boswell, i, 102; Clifford, pp. 170-171. Colson's earlier friendship with Birch is chronicled in the diary, foll. 17, 27, 33, etc.

Note 28 in page 499 Blackburne, Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq. (London, 1780), p. 364.

Note 29 in page 500 Clifford, pp. 213, 289. Birch was certainly a trimmer in later years. That he may have been capable of Whig passion in 1738 is to be suspected from the postscript of his 19 Aug. letter to Eliza (above, n. 12). Lord Russell and Algernon Sydney were the two great republican heroes of the later Stuart period.