{"id":6,"date":"2005-05-24T17:41:20","date_gmt":"2005-05-24T21:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblogbeta\/2005\/05\/24\/what-they-call-a-puppys-mother\/"},"modified":"2006-10-17T09:55:27","modified_gmt":"2006-10-17T13:55:27","slug":"what-they-call-a-puppys-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/2005\/05\/24\/what-they-call-a-puppys-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"What they call a puppy&#8217;s mother"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"a6\"><\/a>The rivalry between James Boswell&#8217;s and Hester Thrale Piozzi&#8217;s dueling Johnson biographies was a popular subject for contemporary satirists. Peter Pindar&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/lms01.harvard.edu\/F?func=find-c&amp;CCL_TERM=sys=009693599\"><em>Bozzy and Piozzi<\/em><\/a> includes a Hogarth engraving that shows them hurling accusations of impropriety at one another. Boswell asks (rhetorically) &#8220;Who, mad&#8217;ning with an anecdotic itch \/ Declar&#8217;d that Johnson call&#8217;d his mother, b-tch?&#8221; Well, I just had to know what that was about. Thanks to Harvard&#8217;s access to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gale.com\/EighteenthCentury\/\">Eighteenth Century Collctions Online<\/a>, I didn&#8217;t have to search through the whole of Mrs. Piozzi&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/lms01.harvard.edu\/F?func=find-c&amp;CCL_TERM=sys=003125109\"><em>Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson<\/em><\/a> to find the answer. It turns out that she quotes Johnson as saying &#8220;I did not respect my own mother, though I loved her: and one day when in anger she called me a puppy, I asked her if she knew what they called a puppy&#8217;s mother.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/media-cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/hydeblog\/BozzyPiozzi.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The rivalry between James Boswell&#8217;s and Hester Thrale Piozzi&#8217;s dueling Johnson biographies was a popular subject for contemporary satirists. Peter Pindar&#8217;s Bozzy and Piozzi includes a Hogarth engraving that shows them hurling accusations of impropriety at one another. Boswell asks (rhetorically) &#8220;Who, mad&#8217;ning with an anecdotic itch \/ Declar&#8217;d that Johnson call&#8217;d his mother, b-tch?&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[769],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-overholt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}