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Dr Johnson on Trial: Catherine Talbot and Jemima Grey Responding to Samuel Johnson's The Rambler

2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09699082.2015.1084684

1747-5848

Jack Orchard,

Scottish History and National Identity

AbstractThis article is an analysis of contemporary critical approaches to the relationships between Dr Johnson and women, particularly with reference to The Rambler, followed by the introduction of previously unpublished letters which display a female reader of the periodical, Jemima Campbell, Marchioness Grey, choosing not to write for The Rambler and instead opting to produce a satirical attack on "Mr Rambler" within the private sphere of a familiar letter to her friend Catherine Talbot. Talbot did write an essay for Johnson's periodical, and this article looks at the two documents as different case studies in responses to Johnson's moralizing persona. Essentially, criticism on The Rambler has undergone a shift from celebratory analysis of his positive and nuanced representations of his female characters and relationships with contemporary women writers, since James Basker and Isobel Grundy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to a reappraisal of his relationships with women through looking at the responses of his readers gleaned from epistolary sources, as seen in Antony Lee's and Peter Sabor's recent essays on The Rambler. This article provides new material for that debate, as well as addressing the differences between public and private voices for eighteenth-century intellectual women. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Previous treatments of the Talbot–Grey materials primarily exist in the work of the archivists at the Bedfordshire and Luton County Archives. See the catalogue and biographical guide by James Collett-White as part of the Aristocratic Women: The Social, Political and Cultural History of Rich and Powerful Women project, . See also James Collett-White, "Yorke, Jemima, suo jure Marchioness Grey (1722–1797)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Joyce Godber, Marchioness Grey of Wrest Park (Bedford: Bedfordshire Historical Record Soc., 1968). The first academic discussions of Jemima Grey are the brief treatments of her correspondence within Leonie Hannan, "Women, Letter-Writing, and the Life of the Mind in England, c.1650–1750", PhD thesis, U of London, 2009, and "Learning across the Lifecycle", Social History Soc. Conf., U of Sussex, 3–5 Apr. 2012.2 James G. Basker, "Dancing Dogs, Women Preachers and the Myth of Johnson's Misogyny", The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 3 (1990): 63–90; Isobel Grundy, "Samuel Johnson as Patron of Women", The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 1 (1987): 59–77.3 Paul Tankard, "A Petty Writer: Johnson and The Rambler Pamphlets", The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 10 (1999): 67–87 (83).4 Eithne Henson, "Johnson and the Condition of Women", The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), pp. 67–84 (74).5 Iona Italia, "Johnson as Moralist in The Rambler", The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 14 (2003): 51–77 (58).6 Italia, p. 61.7 Sarah Morrison, "Johnson, Women and Mr Rambler", The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 14 (2003): 23–50 (31).8 Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). On conflict with Montagu over Johnson's edition of Shakespeare and her Essay on Shakespeare, see esp. 131–32.9 Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). On Johnson's early career alongside Carter, see esp. 185–92.10 Peter Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (London: Phoenix, 2008), pp. 237–38.11 Lorraine Eadie, "Johnson, the Moral Essay, and the Moral Life of Women: The Spectator, the Female Spectator and the Rambler", The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 21 (2011): 21–42.12 Antony W. Lee, "Who's Mentoring Whom? The Carter–Johnson Relationship", Mentoring in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, ed. Antony W. Lee (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 191–210 (199–201).13 Lee, p. 206.14 Lee, p. 207.15 Peter Sabor, "Women Reading and Writing for The Rambler", Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Tiffany Potter (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013), pp. 168–84 (169).16 Sabor, p. 178.17 Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht Strauss, 23 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1969), vol. 5, p. 316.18 Sabor, p. 182.19 Sylvia Harcstark-Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 65.20 Thomas Secker, The Autobiography of Thomas Secker, ed. John Macauley and R. W. Greaves (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1988), fol. 25, p. 18.21 For convenience, Jemima Campbell/Yorke, Marchioness Grey will be hereafter abbreviated to Grey.22 The original manuscript letters of Talbot's correspondence with Grey were lost at some point in the twentieth century, but fortunately selections were anonymously transcribed before their disappearance. Three volumes of typewritten transcripts of letters spanning from 1744–69 survive.23 Lucas Papers (hereafter LP) Bedfordshire and Luton County Archives, L30/9a/5, fol. 295.24 Johnson, Yale Edition, 3: xxxv.25 Samuel Johnson, The Oxford Authors: Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), p. xxviii.26 Erin Mackie, ed., The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Rambler and the Spectator (Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 1998), p. 21. See also Melvyn Bragg et al., "Politeness", In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, 30 Sept. 2004, .27 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, vol. 1 (London: Printed for J. Payne, 1752), p. ii.28 Johnson, Oxford Authors, pp. vi–vii.29 Jemima Grey to Mary Grey, 12 June 1750, LP, L30/9a/2, fol. 44.30 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 39.31 Catherine Talbot to Jemima Grey, 15 Nov. 1744, LP, L30/9a (1), fol. 70.32 Johnson, Oxford Authors, 183; Johnson, Rambler, 2.33 Addison and Steele, pp. 39–40.34 Addison and Steele, p. 25.35 Eadie, p. 37.36 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. E. W. Chapman and J. D. Fleeman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976), p. 161. Boswell and Grey's diagnoses of academical authority or pomposity appear to have been accurate, when one considers the future relationship between Johnson and Robert Chambers (1737–1803), the second Vinerian Professor at Oxford. A member of Johnson's Turk's Head Club from 1768, Chambers sought assistance from Johnson in writing the 60 lectures per year necessary to his position, which he found difficult to produce on time: "Johnson gave him considerable help in constructing and organizing the lectures, some of which were published in 1824 under the title A Treatise on Estates and Tenures. No comprehensive edition appeared until A Course of Lectures on the English Law Delivered at the University of Oxford, 1767–1773 (ed. T. M. Curley, 2 vols., 1986)". T. H. Bowers, "Chambers, Sir Robert", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, . See also Pat Rogers, The Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), p. 74.37 Grey to M. Grey, fol. 44.38 Johnson, Oxford Authors, p. 183.39 Johnson, Oxford Authors, p. 186.40 Johnson, Oxford Authors, p. 184.41 Markman Ellis, "Coffee-Women, The Spectator and the Public Sphere in the Early Eighteenth Century", Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 27–53 (31–34); Tedra Osell, "Tatling Women in the Public Sphere: Rhetorical Femininity and the English Essay Periodical", Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38.2 (2005): 283–300 (283–84).42 Jemima Grey to Catherine Talbot, 28 June 1750, LP, L30/9a/5, fol. 171.43 Grey to Talbot, fols. 171–72. Grey's diagnosis of the "plodding" Johnson following in the wake of The Spectator is remarkably similar to the later assessment of The Rambler by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, given in a letter to Lady Bute in 1755: "The Rambler is certainly a strong misnomer; he always plods in the beaten road of his predecessors, following the spectator (with the same pace a pack-horse would do a hunter) in the style that is proper to lengthen a paper". Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967), pp. 65–66.44 Grey to Talbot, fol. 172.45 John Ray, A complete collection of English proverbs: also, the most celebrated proverbs of the Scotch, Italian, French, Spanish, and other languages (London: Printed for George Cowie and Co., 1813), p. 238.46 Grey to Talbot, fol. 172.47 Grey to Talbot, fol. 170.48 Grey to Talbot, fol. 171.49 Italia, p. 58.50 Grey to Talbot, fol. 171.51 Grey to Talbot, fol. 173.52 Grey to Talbot, fol. 173.53 Grey to Talbot, fol. 174. Johnson's name was to become a byword for clubability after the formation of his famous Literary Club, which was active between 1764 and 1784. Even in 1750, however, he was the centre of the Ivy Lane Club, which met from 1748 or 1749 to between 1753 and 1756. Grey's dismissive description of the "Puffy Club" possibly stems from the identification of the Ivy Lane Club with Mr Rambler, made explicit in the alternative title of the group: The "Rambler" Club. The club also included John Payne (d. 1787), publisher of The Rambler, leading Grey to tar the whole set with Mr Rambler's pomposity, which she denotes with the term "Puffy", anticipating Johnson's own fourth definition of "Puff" in the Dictionary (1755): "To swell or elate with pride". See James Sambrook, "Ivy Lane [Rambler] Club", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, .54 Grey to Talbot, fol. 175.55 Catherine Talbot to Jemima Grey, 28 June 1750, LP, L30/9a (1), fol. 201.56 Johnson, Rambler, 242; Catherine Talbot, The Works of the Late Miss Catherine Talbot, ed. Montagu Pennington (London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, 1819), p. 148.57 Johnson, Rambler, p. 249.58 Talbot, p. 148.59 Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity : English Women's Writing, 1649–1688 (London: Virago, 1988), p. 7.60 Talbot, p. 151.61 Talbot, p. 152.62 Gary Kelly and Rhoda Zuk, eds., Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, Volume 3: Chapone and Talbot (London: Pickering, 1999), pp. 40–41.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJack OrchardJack Orchard undertook his Bachelor of Arts in English and Master of Arts in Early Modern Studies at University College London. The title of his Master's dissertation was "Reading and Epistolary Practices in Catherine Talbot and the Grey Circle's Correspondence". He is currently working, on an Arts and Humanities Research Council scholarship, for the Elizabeth Montagu's Correspondence Network whilst producing a PhD thesis on the relationships between reading practices, letter writing and conceptions of female networks in the groups surrounding Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Montagu.