Austen's first biographer described them as "childish effusions." Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot.
Biography & Autobiography
Johnson and fiction
September 2022
|
Chapter
|
The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson
The chapter opens by considering Johnson’s seemingly hostile attitude to the eighteenth-century novel and its realistic portrayals of human life, as contrasted with that of his contemporary Henry Fielding. It places The Rambler’s theoretical strictures on such writing alongside Johnson’s views on biography and practice as a writer of fiction in Rasselas, eliciting his various contradictory opinions on representing bad characters and negative examples in literature. The chapter shows how, for Johnson, human imagination is both dangerous – competing with truth for control of the human psyche – and a positive source of creative energy. Fiction is sometimes therefore synonymous, in his mind, with falsehood and unreality. But it is also synonymous with literature of all kinds, and with the human endeavor to depict the world and other people in strikingly new and powerful ways that may, paradoxically, “awaken us to things as they are.”
Going by its definitions in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), ‘nonsense’ in the mid-eighteenth century was licensed to negate only a very limited kind of ‘sense’. In particular, it could make no inroads on the ‘sense’ that is synonymous with ‘reason’. Johnson confines nonsense to ‘Unmeaning or ungrammatical language’ and ‘Trifles; things of no importance’. Yet the examples he cites in support of those definitions (from Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and James Thomson) suggest a more unruly and invasive beast, with the potential both to create and to destroy. Nonsense is further associated, in the first group of his citations, with questionable literature—with tales that are neither true nor false (Butler); with works that do not sell (Dryden); and with editions that misrepresent their authors (Pope).
In the age of the scholarly variorum, ‘How easy it is’, as Pope observed in a letter of 1711, ‘to any one to give … a new nonsense, to what the author intended’. The laborious pedantry and combative self-regard of editors and learned commentators triggered a counter-blast of mock-scholarship from the Scriblerians. For all his attacks on Grub Street and on professional editors, Pope delighted in their waste products; he more than once described ‘nonsense’ as ‘new’ because it unleashed his creative energies. Eighteenth-century cock-and-bull stories, tales of tubs, farragoes and hodge-podges have a generic association with nonsense, a quality associated in this period not so much with the absence of rationality as with an affront to subordination and decorum—an affront which may, admittedly, make an author go mad in the end. Nonsense attacks the internal coherence of a work’s stylistic economy; it may annihilate a writer in the process.
Jane Austen, Early and Late
October 2021
|
Book
Austen’s first biographer described them as “childish effusions.” Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot.
Biography & Autobiography
Thomas Love Peacock: Crotchets rampant
November 2018
|
Journal article
|
Cambridge Quarterly
Jane Austen’s universals
April 2018
|
Journal article
|
Essays in Criticism
Eric Griffiths If not critical
March 2018
|
Edited book
If Not Critical
January 2018
|
Book
Eric Griffiths' lectures were attended by hundreds, yet the lectures were never turned into books.
Criticism
Keeping to William Hazlitt
January 2018
|
Chapter
|
Thinking Through Style
That style mattered to Hazlitt cannot be in doubt. ‘An author’s style’ he judged ‘not less a criterion of his understanding than his sentiments’; a test of character, as of sensations and ideas, it bodied forth the perpetually shifting relationships between human beings and the objects of their love, hatred, and indifference (in Hazlitt, even the absence of feeling is vehemently felt). An author who lacked style therefore lacked sympathetic involvement with other people, the greatest failing imaginable, since ‘Whatever interests, is interesting’.
Crotchet Castle
January 2017
|
Scholarly edition
Teenage Writings
January 2017
|
Book
Three notebooks of Jane Austen's teenage writings survive. The earliest pieces probably date from 1786 or 1787, around the time that Jane, aged 11 or 12, and her older sister and collaborator Cassandra left school. By this point Austen was already an indiscriminate and precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature alike; what she read, she soon began to imitate and parody.
Unlike many teenage writings then and now, these are not secret or agonized confessions entrusted to a private journal and for the writer's eyes alone. Rather, they are stories to be shared and admired by a named audience of family and friends. Devices and themes which appear subtly in Austen's later fiction run riot openly and exuberantly across the teenage page. Drunkenness, brawling, sexual misdemeanour, theft, and even murder prevail.
Alexander Pope: Unlocking the key
March 2016
|
Journal article
|
Review of English Studies
This article discusses the image and function of the key in Alexander Pope’s works, and its involvement in various attempts to understand and explain him. As a device for encrypting or decrypting a code, a ‘key’ permits either the further concealment or revelation of meaning, and sometimes both: a sense which enters the language with Francis Bacon in 1605, but which is not fully realized as a satirical opportunity until the early eighteenth century. The subgenre of the ‘key’ may be a small part of the unwholesome trade of deciphering, but it raises vital questions about originality, authority, cooperation, competition, and group identity. Keys to Pope’s, Swift’s, and Gay’s works suggest some fruitful ways in which to track rival theories about their own writing and its reception; at its ornate Scriblerian best, the key is a riddling device, furthering the obscurity rather than breaching the mysterious specificity of the original.
The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock
March 2016
|
Scholarly edition
'Medieval Graffiti': Editing Thomas Love Peacock
February 2015
|
Presentation
This paper reflects on the challenges and rewards of editing a writer whose works have routinely been described as ‘inaccessible’. Even if his comic fictions abound, like Jane Austen’s, with clever, good-looking women and with sparkling dialogue that culminates in marriage, Peacock’s repartee can be hard to follow. This is partly because he does not aspire to the portrayal of interiority. Rather, his characters, both male and female, exist primarily in order to share, voice, and test the limits of their ideas.
Byron's Johnson
January 2014
|
Chapter
|
Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century
Biography, History and Anecdote
January 2014
|
Chapter
|
The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660-1830
'Gigantic domesticity': the exaggeration of Charles Dickens
July 2013
|
Chapter
|
Dickens's Style
Johnson Personified
November 2012
|
Chapter
|
Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum
This book offers wide-ranging coverage of Samuel Johnson's life, work, and reception across fifteen thematically cohesive chapters.
Literary Criticism
Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum
November 2012
|
Book
Correspondence
January 2012
|
Chapter
|
Samuel Johnson in Context
Samuel Johnson's Classicism
January 2012
|
Chapter
|
The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol 3: 1660-1790
'To a Mouse': Burns, Power and Equality
January 2012
|
Chapter
|
Burns and Other Poets
Biography versus History in the Eighteenth Century
November 2011
|
Presentation
This paper discusses the fruitful spats between history-writing and biography throughout the eighteenth century, and the effects of such competition on the novel.
Jane Austen's Past Lives
January 2010
|
Journal article
|
The Cambridge Quarterly
Samuel Johnson
January 2010
|
Chapter
|
Great Shakespeareans: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone
Making an Entrance: Frances Burney and Samuel Johnson
October 2009
|
Chapter
|
A Celebration of Frances Burney
Literary Criticism
Johnson and Austen
January 2009
|
Chapter
|
Samuel Johnson After 300 Years
Accumulation in Johnson's Dictionary
October 2007
|
Journal article
|
Essays in Criticism
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
William Cowper, The Task
January 2006
|
Chapter
|
The Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709-1791
February 2005
|
Book
Little Lives: An Eighteenth-Century Sub-Genre
June 2003
|
Journal article
|
The Cambridge Quarterly
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Samuel Johnson and Robert Levet
January 2002
|
Journal article
|
The Modern Language Review
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4703 Language Studies, 4705 Literary Studies
Alexander Pope: Unlocking the Key
Journal article
This paper examines the satirical subgenre of the ‘Key’, asking what it might reveal about Scriblerian group identity and about how literary and political collectives interact and malfunction.
Annual Johnson Lecture
Conference paper
Belief in Henry Fielding
Conference paper
Biography versus History in the Long Eighteenth Century
Conference paper
Burns’s Dominions
Conference paper
Byron's Johnson
Conference paper
Diminutive Observations in Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
Journal article
|
Age of Johnson: a scholarly annual
Johnson's Departures
Conference paper
Jonathan Swift: Quarrelling with Nature
Conference paper
Notes and Queries
Conference paper
Peacock and the Fictions of Print
Conference paper
Re-reading and re-writing in Jane Austen's juvenilia
Conference paper
Samuel Johnson
Chapter
|
Great Shakespeareans, Vol. 1: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone
Samuel Johnson’s Classicism
Conference paper
Satires of Annotation
Conference paper
The Celebrated Jane Austen: Appearance and Performance in Volume the First
Conference paper
‘The Confidence of Nature’: Discovering Poetry in Johnson’s Life of Congreve