London (Samuel Johnson poem)
London is a poem by
London was published anonymously and in multiple editions during 1738. It quickly received critical praise, notably from Pope. This would be the second time that Pope praised one of Johnson's poems; the first being for
Background
During March 1737, Johnson lived in London with his former pupil the actor David Garrick.[2] Garrick had connections in London, and the two stayed with his distant relative, Richard Norris, who lived in Exeter Street.[3] Johnson did not stay there long, and set out to Greenwich near the Golden Hart Tavern to finish his play, Irene.[4] Later, in October 1737, Johnson brought his wife to London; they first lived at Woodstock Street and then moved to 6 Castle Street.[5] Soon, Johnson found employment with Edward Cave, and wrote for his The Gentleman's Magazine.[6]
According to Walter Jackson Bate, his work for the magazine and other publishers "is almost unparalleled in range and variety", and "so numerous, so varied and scattered" that "Johnson himself could not make a complete list".[7] During this time, Johnson was exposed to the "imitations" of Horace composed by Pope and saw how they were used to attack contemporary political corruption.[8] Both the form and subject were popular, and Johnson decided to follow Pope's lead by creating his own imitation.[9]
In May 1738, London was published anonymously, and it went into a second edition that year.[10] This was his first major work to be published to a wide audience and one of his longest "non-dramatic public poems".[11] It was not written to be a general satire; instead, it was written to demonstrate Johnson's skill as a writer and to become popular to further his literary career.[12]
London
London is part of the eighteenth-century genre of imitation, or
The poem describes the various problems of London, including an emphasis on crime, corruption, and the squalor of the poor.[14] To emphasise his message, these various abstract problems are personified as beings that seek to destroy London.[15] Thus, the characters of Malice, Rapine, and Accident "conspire" (line 13) to attack those who live in London.[15]
The poem begins:
Though grief and fondness in my breast rebel,
When injur'd Thales bids the town farewell,
Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend,
(I praise the hermit, but regret the friend)
Resolv'd at length, from vice and London far,
To breathe in distant fields a purer air,
And, fix'd on Cambria's[16] solitary shore,
Give to St. David[17] one true Briton[18] more.[19]— lines 1–8
Who Thales represents is unknown, but it is possible that he represents Richard Savage, Johnson's friend who left London to travel to Wales.[20]
The main emphasis of the poem comes to light on line 177: "Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed".[14]
The poem is forced to cut short, and the narrator concludes:
Much could I add, but see the boat at hand,
The tide retiring calls me from the land:
Farewell!—When youth, and health, and fortune spent
Thou fly'st for refuge to the Wilds of Kent;
And tir'd like me with follies and with crimes,
In angry numbers warn'st succeeding times;
Then shall thy friend, nor thou refuse his aid,
Still foe to vice, forsake his Cambrian shade;
In virtue's cause once more exert his rage,
Thy satire point, and animate thy page.[19]— lines 254–263
Politics
The government under the
Propose your schemes, ye senatorian band,
Whose ways and means support the sinking land:
Lest ropes be wanting in the tempting spring,
To rig another convoy for the king.[19]— lines 244–247
It is through the "Ways and Means", or the Committee of Ways and Means of the House of Commons, that the king is able to tax the people, and this function is part of many that Johnson satirises.[20]
The city of London was seen as a means to attack the
With England's rivalry with Spain, Johnson included the lines "Has heaven reserved, in pity to the poor,/No pathless waste or undiscovered shore,/No secret island in the boundless main,/No peaceful desert yet unclaimed by Spain?" Modern Latin American historians have used the lines to illustrate Europeans' wonder at the sheer size of the Spanish Empire.[25]
Critical response
Johnson judged his own poem harshly; he revised it in 1748[26] and came to depreciate the genre of poetic imitations of which London was an example.[27] Another aspect of the poem that Johnson disliked in his later years was the pastoral bias of the poem, to prefer the countryside to the city.[9] However, his contemporaries did not agree with his later assessment, and Alexander Pope from the first claimed that the author "will soon be déterré",[28] although it did not immediately happen.[10] This would be the second time that Pope directly praised a work of Johnson.[29] Not everyone praised the work, as its political themes did cause controversy within the Hanoverian government and with the supporters of Walpole's administration.[22] Johnson was not to receive recognition as a major literary figure until a few years later when he began to work on his A Dictionary of the English Language.[10]
The printer and bookseller Robert Dodsley bought the copyright from Johnson for £10.[30] Later, London would be rated as his second greatest poem, as The Vanity of Human Wishes would replace it in the eyes of Walter Scott and T. S. Eliot.[14] The later critic Howard Weinbrot agreed with Scott's and Eliot's assessment, and says "London is well worth reading, but The Vanity of Human Wishes is one of the great poems in the English language."[23] Likewise, Robert Folkenflik says: "It is not Johnson's greatest poem, only because The Vanity of Human Wishes is better".[31] Some critics, like Brean Hammond, only see the poem as "no better than a somewhat mechanical updating of Juvenal's third Satire".[13] Others, like Walter Jackson Bate, consider the poem as "masterly in its versification".[32]
Notes
- ^ London: A Poem In Imitation of The Third Satire of Juvenal (2nd ed.). London: Printed for R. Dodsley at Tully's Head in Pall Mall. 1738. Retrieved 26 January 2018 – via Google Books.
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 164
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 165
- ^ Boswell 1986, pp. 168–169
- ^ Boswell 1986, pp. 169–170
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 170
- ^ Bate 1955, p. 14
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 171
- ^ a b c d Bate 1977, p. 172
- ^ a b c Johnson 2003, p. 5
- ^ a b Weinbrot 1997, p. 45
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 173
- ^ a b c Hammond 2001, p. 90
- ^ a b c Bate 1955, p. 18
- ^ a b Weinbrot 1997, p. 36
- ^ Cambria is the Latin name of Wales.
- ^ The fifth or sixth century native of Wales Saint David is the patron saint of Wales.
- aboriginal Britons. Following the creation of the modern British State, Johnson again interprets Wales as a refuge for "True Britons" from contemporary urban life.
- ^ a b c Johnson, Samuel (1909). Osgood, Charles Grosvenor (ed.). Selections from the Works of Samuel Johnson. New York: H. Holt and Company. pp. 3-9.
- ^ a b c Johnson 2000, p. 793
- ^ Folkenflik 1997, p. 106
- ^ a b Gerrard 2001, p. 50
- ^ a b c Weinbrot 1997, p. 46
- ^ Hammond 2001, p. 91
- ^ Simon Collier, "The Spanish Conquests, 1492-1580" in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2d edition. New York: Cambridge University Press 1992, p. 192.
- ^ Now the standard version. Many years later, Johnson made annotations on an edition of 1750; Johnson's copy has disappeared, but his biographer James Boswell transcribed them. (See Mason, "Samuel Johnson. "London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal", London 1738, rev. ed. 1748).
- ^ Bate 1955, p. 17
- ^ "Flushed from earth", a hunting metaphor.
- ^ Bate p. 92
- ^ Mason, "Samuel Johnson. "London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal", London 1738, rev. ed. 1748
- ^ Folkenflik 1997, p. 107
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 174
References
- ISBN 0-15-179260-7
- Bate, Walter Jackson (1955), The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, OCLC 355413
- Boswell, James (1986), Hibbert, Christopher (ed.), The Life of Samuel Johnson, New York: Penguin Classics, ISBN 0-14-043116-0
- Folkenflik, Robert (1997), "Johnson's politics", in Clingham, Greg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-55625-2
- Gerrard, Christine (2001), "Political passions", in Sitter, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-65885-3
- Hammond, Brean (2001), "The city in eighteenth-century poetry", in Sitter, John (ed.), Eighteenth Century Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-65885-3
- Johnson, Samuel (2000), Greene, Donald (ed.), Major Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-284042-8.
- Johnson, Samuel (2003), Lynch, Jack (ed.), Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, New York: Walker & Co, ISBN 0-8027-1421-8
- Weinbrot, Howard (1997), "Johnson's poetry", in Clingham, Greg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-55625-2
Further reading
- Lane, Margaret (1975), Samuel Johnson & his World, New York: Harpers & Row Publishers, ISBN 0-06-012496-2
External links
- London: A Poem In Imitation of The Third Satire of Juvenal (5th ed.). London: Printed by E. Cave at St. John's Gate and Sold by R. Dodsley in Pall Mall. 1750. Retrieved 16 January 2019 – via Google Books.