Dr Freya Johnston: List of publications

There is only one direct reference to William Wordsworth in all Jane Austen’s writing. This essay asks why it might be there and what it might mean, weighing up the evidence—stylistic, thematic, journalistic, biographical, naval, and historical—for and against Austen’s possible knowledge of Lyrical Ballads and its author. Their shared ground is discovered in habits of allusion and quotation; in the treatment of memory, forgetting, suffering, damage, and loss; in a commitment to noticing and praising the habitually overlooked; and in transformations of the natural world into a possession of the mind and heart. Mansfield Park, it is argued, proves the most Wordsworthian of Austen’s books.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

This book offers wide-ranging coverage of Samuel Johnson's life, work, and reception across fifteen thematically cohesive chapters.