I moved offices last week, and in the process of cleaning up and putting things away, I found a few interesting odds and ends that show how truly thorough the Hydes were as collectors.
It looks like this calendar will be right again in 2010, but don’t worry, I won’t tear off the pages.
Samuel Johnson was certainly a man who provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative, during his life. Apparently he retains that power centuries later:
(Via the Bibliothecary Blog and Philobiblos)
I had the pleasure of touring the Folger Shakespeare Library yesterday while I was in Washington for the ALA Annual Meeting. In addition to its world-famous Shakespeare holdings, it has an outstanding collection relating to Johnson’s lifelong Lichfield friend David Garrick. A very nice online exhibition and sampling of the Folger’s Garrick resources is available here.
A question from a patron led me to look through the iconography collection for the first time. It’s six boxes full of loose prints and photographs of Johnsonian interest, and I suspect I’ll find lots of interesting things to post here. These beer labels caught my eye right away.
After Henry Thrale’s death in 1781, Samuel Johnson (as executor of Henry’s will) and Hester Thrale sold his Anchor Brewery to the newly formed Barclay Perkins & Co., who would operate it until their 1955 merger with Courage Ltd., later Scottish & Newcastle. On a visit to England in 1950, the Hydes visited the Anchor Brewery, and later obtained these Barclay Perkins beer labels which pay tribute to the brewery’s connection with Samuel Johnson.
First of all, I’ve finished cataloging the books, as has Rick Stattler with the manuscripts, so the entirety of the collection is now findable through HOLLIS and OASIS. Secondly, I’ve been hired to stay on permanently as Assistant Curator. I’m grateful to Tom Horrocks, Associate Librarian for Collections and Acting Curator of the Hyde Collection, for giving me this opportunity, and I’m tremendously excited that I’ll get to continue to work with this wonderful collection. Now that I’m done cataloging, there will be fewer updates to the Catablog, but thanks to the Hydes’ generosity, we will continue to acquire new and interesting items for the collection, and when we do, I’ll be telling you about them here.
Although Google’s book digitization program is the one that gets most of the attention (and Harvard’s cooperation) an equally worthy project is also underway at the Internet Archive. They’ve already scanned in an impressive selection of Samuel Johnson books and related works, as well as books by James Boswell and Hester Thrale Piozzi. I especially like the fact that the scans can be either viewed in your browser through their “flip book” interface, or downloaded as a high-resolution, searchable PDFs (look for the entries that have a rotating series of thumbnail images next to them).
From John Wilkes’ annotated first edition copy of James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Samuel Johnson took a dim view of the complaints of the American colonists, particularly their rallying cry of “Taxation without representation is tyranny!” His 1775 pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny defended the right of the King to rule over his American subjects, and included the stinging rebuke “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
Although he published it anonymously, the pamphlet was known to be Johnson’s work, and it provoked an immediate flurry of responses from those sympathetic to the colonists’ plight (or at least opposed to King George and his government). A sampling of these replies, ranging from the analytical to the satirical, is given below.
This pocket-sized edition of Ovid’s Epistles was Boswell’s constant companion on his tour of Scotland with Johnson, and he refers to it in his journal of the tour, while waiting onboard a ship for passage from one Hebridean island to another: “I got some of Ovid’s Epistle from Penelope to Ulysses by heart, which served well to divert the tedious hours.”
This collection of poems, primarily written by John Husbands, is most notable for containing the first published work by Samuel Johnson. Johnson wrote “Messia,” a Latin translation of Alexander Pope’s “Messiah,” in 1728. It was a Christmas vacation assignment from his tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford, William Jorden, who then passed it on to his Pembroke colleague, Husbands. Although Johnson was just 19 when he wrote it, he remained sufficiently pleased with “Messia” to republish it with minor revisions in Gentleman’s Magazine in 1752.
The sale of Johnson’s library packed the auction house of James Christie in February 1785, three months after his death. This copy of the catalog belonged to Johnson’s friend, the noted translator of Italian literature, John Hoole. We know from the annotations in the Isham copy of the catalog (now at Yale) that Hoole bought several lots at the sale, including Johnson’s copy of Giuseppe Baretti’s Italian-English dictionary.
This rare broadside commemorates an even rarer occurrence— Samuel Johnson publicly caught in a mistake. The satirist and agitator John Wilkes seized upon Johnson’s remark in the Dictionary that the letter H “seldom, perhaps never, begins any but the first syllable.” Wilkes gleefully composed a letter to the Public Advertiser which employed no fewer than 27 counterexamples. Even Boswell, always Johnson’s stoutest defender, was forced to concede, “The position is undoubtedly expressed with too much latitude.”
This portrait of Dr. Johnson comes from a copy of A. Edward Newton’s A Magnificent Farce which belonged to the British artist and author Max Beerbohm. He has annotated it “Where is this portrait? Not in America, I do hope–for I’ve never seen it, and should like to, inasmuch as it’s far more convincing and telling than any of the others. This is the man that said those things. This is how he looked when he was saying them. This is intimately the dear man himself–not the legendary monster.”
Beerbohm was certainly a man who knew about a telling portrait. He was celebrated for his incisive and witty caricatures of his contemporaries. Unfortunately for him, his worst fears were correct–the portrait was indeed in America, in Newton’s own Samuel Johnson collection, many items from which later ended up in the Hyde Collection. The portrait, however, Newton left to Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where it currently resides. Diana Peterson of Haverford College Libraries Quaker and Special Collections Department informs me that a recent appraisal disproves the attribution of the portrait to Sir Joshua Reynolds, but it nonetheless remains a striking and very human image of Johnson.
As a big Trivial Pursuit fan, I really like these Instructive Conversation Cards, which I suppose were the closest thing the early 19th century had to offer. It’s unfortunate, though, that the very first fact they offer about Samuel Johnson is wrong; he was born in 1709, not 1706. (Either that or we’re way behind on the planning for the tercentenary symposium)
In the midst of one of our copies of Graphic illustrations of the life and times of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. is bound a set of 11 lovely watercolors that don’t belong there. Unusually, they have formal captions at the bottom, and some of them seem to have additional materials printed onto the sheets. Fortunately for me, the bookdealer’s description of the item from when it was purchased by Mary Hyde Eccles 20 years ago is still with the book. You can’t see it here, but there’s a small “C.J.S. 1837” in the lower left corner, meaning that it’s probably the work of Charles John Smith, who died in 1838 with his projected Historical and Literary Curiosties still unfinished. Presumably, these were the proofs for the illustrations that would have gone in that work had he lived to complete it. I don’t know who it was that bound them into this other work, but I’m glad they haven’t been lost.
I particularly liked this one, which illustrates a passage from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Boswell writes: “We walked in the evening in Greenwich Park. He asked me, I suppose, by way of trying my disposition, ‘Is not this very fine?’ Having no exquisite relish of the beauties of Nature, and being more delighted with ‘the busy hum of men,’ I answered, ‘Yes, Sir; but not equal to Fleet-street.’ JOHNSON. ‘You are right, Sir.’”
