The most irritating of recent publishing trends must be the literary self-help guide, and Henry Hitchings’s contribution to the genre will join a shelf now groaning with accounts of how Proust can change your life, how Adam Smith can change your life, what W.H. Auden can do for you, what Montaigne can tell us about how to live, what Tolstoy can teach us in troubled times, and a whole heap of nonsense about what Jane Austen has to say on the subjects of friendships, dating and getting married. The formula is simple: the workings of a vast and complex mind (the mind of Dr Johnson, said Boswell, resembled ‘the Coliseum at Rome’) are boiled down and served up, in bite-sized chunks, for a public assumed to no longer understand the purpose of literature, or how to read.
That said, Dr Johnson lends himself well to the business of moral instruction because moral instruction was his business. He was, as Samuel Beckett put it, a ‘wit and wisdom machine’, whose ‘death’, wrote Thomas Hobhouse in his elegy on the Great Cham, ‘shall teach the world to live’. Johnson’s teachings were once collected in books of aphorisms and Table Talk, and can now be found on fridge magnets: my own Hotpoint reminds me that ‘The man who is tired of London is tired of life’; ‘A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek’; and wine ‘makes a man mistake thoughts for words’. Johnsonian erudition even extends to cucumbers, which ‘should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out’.
What makes Johnson’s righteousness bearable is the fact that nothing he read himself — and he devoured more or less every word ever written — was able to guide him through the problems of his own life.
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