Experience and observation of contemporary society informed a large part of Samuel Johnson’s literary output. With regard to the poor, he was accordingly well aware of the degradations they suffered, and was concerned that other authors, lacking any such understanding of the true nature of poverty for themselves, were misusing the word. In this post, University of Birmingham Masters student Janet Neale looks at examples from Johnson’s essays and prose writing in which he addresses those authors.
Johnson had set out his view of poverty in essay number 53 for the twice-weekly periodical The Rambler. Written in 1750, it begins “There is scarcely among the evils of human life any so dreaded as poverty”. He describes it as a “species of misery”, with the poor subjected to contempt, neglect and insults. In short, “in the prospect of poverty, there is nothing but gloom and melancholy”, and “its miseries bring no alleviations”.
In 1752 Johnson was moved to write an essay for The Rambler entitled “The different acceptations of poverty”. As with all the essays for this publication, it is headed by a Latin motto and its English translation; for number 202 the first line of this motto is “From no affliction is the poor exempt”. One of the points Johnson makes here is that there is a great difference between “experience and observation”, and the “imaginations” of some poets and philosophers. According to such men, there were surprising advantages to being poor; someone “unencumbered with possessions” could enjoy “content, innocence, cheerfulness, health and safety, tranquillity and freedom”. Indeed, such were the delights of this “resignation of riches”, that as Johnson wryly comments, “kings might descend from their thrones, and generals retire from a triumph, only to slumber undisturbed in the elysium of poverty”. The point is made that those experiencing or observing true poverty knew the reality to be far removed from images of cheerfulness and contentment promoted by some writers. Instead “meanness, distress, complaint, anxiety and dependence” dominated the lives of the poor.
This benign view of poverty was also criticised by Johnson in his 1757 review of A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. The author, the wealthy Soame Jenyns, used quotes from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, in which the latter had written of poverty as “the want of riches”, which was compensated by “a greater share of health, and a more exquisite relish of the smaller enjoyments”. As with his periodical essay, Johnson points out that “Life must be seen before it can be known”; sardonically suggesting that “This author and Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be borne”. Believing oneself to be poor in comparison to those who are richer was very different to the extreme poverty in which all hope ends in “motionless despondence”.
In his periodical essays and in his criticism of Jenyns’s book, Johnson sets out clearly his view of the horrors of true poverty. Experience and observation were key to an understanding of the lives of the poor, which were very different from those imagined by some other writers in the eighteenth century.
Contributor: Janet Neale graduated from the University of Leicester in 2018 with degree in Humanities & Arts. The degree included an in-depth study of the writings of Samuel Johnson. She is now studying for a Masters in West Midlands History at the University of Birmingham.