Lawrence Lipking’s Samuel Johnson is not a conventional birth-to-death biography. It is entirely focused on the writings. “The Life of an Author,” in this sense, is one in which biographical narration aids an understanding of the author’s works, and which “passes over details that do not shed light on the work.” It opens not with Johnson’s birth, but with the famous letter to Chesterfield, written in 1755 when Johnson was in his forties. The great earl, having neglected the struggling lexicographer who looked to him for patronage, was now conferring some preeningly unctuous approval on the author of the completed Dictionary, which was about to appear and which he had not yet seen. Chesterfield hailed Johnson as a commanding linguistic authority, indeed as a “dictator” to whom he surrendered “all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a free-born British subject,” but not without establishing his advantage over Johnson in point of politeness and caste. His judgment is delivered in that nicest possible way, which consists of making a more or less subtle and not altogether covert sting appear as somehow inseparable from a generously vouchsafed compliment. The (anonymous but unmistakable) earl had “a greater opinion of [Johnson’s] impartiality and severity as a judge, than of his gallantry as a fine gentleman.” Johnson was deficient in “politeness.”

Johnson replied, in a letter which was not published but which became the subject of hot gossip, that (in a text he dictated many years later) Chesterfield’s accolade was a little late. Had it come when it was needed, it would have “been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.” It is textbook Johnson, the master of the pulverizing retort. We do not have the text that Chesterfield saw, and the reply got all the mythologizing that goes with oral tradition, a tradition orchestrated by its author, and (who knows) perhaps even adorned at the edges by an embroidery of added pointedness or some wishful afterthought. Talkers for victory like Johnson must be especially vulnerable to the temptations of the esprit d’escalier. If the retort, complete with its procession of triplets and thundering closure, bears the mark of Johnson’s best triumphalist conversation, that too has come down to us, through Boswell and others, in a crafted state. Still, one witness told Boswell “he was confident from memory” that the original letter was more, not less, pointed “than in the copy which he dictated many years after it was written.”

The reply has also been mythologized as signaling the death of patronage and ushering in an era of independent authorship responsible to commercial forces. The publisher Dodsley, who had a stake in the Dictionary, “regretted the falling-out, which he thought bad for business,” but, as Lipking suggests, “Johnson’s instinct for business may have been sounder.” By making sure word of his letter got round, and not actually publishing it, “he set off a public buzz that would sell many books.” But Lipking points out that the situation of which Johnson’s letter is supposed to be the inaugural expression was already to some extent in existence. It is also a fact (as some recent scholarship suggests) that reports of the death of patronage, or for that matter of Johnson’s much asserted repudiation of patrons (he accepted a pension seven years later), have been greatly exaggerated, though his personal bitterness towards Chesterfield is clear. The historical situation was as usual more complex than the mythology, and what Chesterfield’s puff of the Dictionary boiled down to was not the demise of the patron but a local eruption of patronizing.

A marginal epiphenomenon that Lipking touches on, but I think too briefly, is the probability that Johnson might have been stung by precisely the slur on his politeness which Chesterfield signaled when he said Johnson was more of an impartial judge than a gallant gentleman. Putdowns impugning caste were powerful weapons in the eighteenth-century armory of point- scoring and created a shadow world of notional social ranking that had in many contexts as powerful an existence as that of formal distinctions of rank. The “dissertation” on high people and low people in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews or the contests of uppishness among servants in his novels are a comic demonstration of the passionate pedantry which animated the practices of social competitiveness among all gradations of rank, and a rich variety of real-life examples is on display in the writings of the period.

Johnson freely admitted that “I can hardly tell who was my own grandfather,” but Boswell’s Life offers much testimony that Johnson “liked to be sometimes taken out of the class of literary men, and to be merely genteel—un gentilhomme comme un autre”—an affectation common in authors of the period (Voltaire, in the Lettres philosophiques, contemptuously noted it in Congreve), and, according to Ford Madox Ford, rife among English, but not French, writers of all periods. Whatever his own private feelings, Johnson, commenting on Voltaire’s anecdote in the Life of Congreve, professed to share Voltaire’s opinion of Congreve’s “despicable foppery,” a measure of the awkward volatility with which this preoccupation exercised its influence even on strongly defined personalities. It is perhaps the single issue in eighteenth-century social relations on which simple consistency is least to be expected. When Johnson was once asked to compose a funeral sermon, he “naturally inquired into the character of the deceased; and being told she was remarkable for her humility and condescension to her inferiours, he observed, that those were very laudable qualities, but it might not be easy to discover who the lady’s inferiours were.”

When not enraged against Chesterfield, Johnson in later years praised Chesterfield’s controversial and posthumously published Letters as a mainly excellent guide to manners: “Take out the immorality, and it should be put in the hands of every young gentleman.” The immorality in question was Chesterfield’s recommendation of adultery with polite older women in order to improve his son’s quantum of urbanity, the quality Chesterfield liked to refer to as “the graces.” Johnson also said, “Every man of any education would rather be called a rascal, than accused of deficiency in the graces,” a clear indication of how Chesterfield’s taunt about his own lack of “gallantry as a fine gentleman” was likely to strike him. And when, in his most famous comment on Chesterfield’s Letters, he said they “taught the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master,” he was putting Chesterfield down by the very criteria of politeness and caste which Chesterfield had applied to him. That this was done in the reverse direction to that of the two men’s formal social rank, de bas en haut so to speak, is an index of the freestanding nature of such social ploys, often seemingly independent of the actual rank of the interlocutors. A deep residual attachment to a notional hierarchy is being expressed even as the social reality of the existing hierarchy is sidestepped or defied.

Lipking aptly quotes Johnson’s view, both admiring and affronted, that “Chesterfield was the politest man he ever knew, but ‘indeed he did not think it worth his while to treat me like a Gentleman.’” He rightly rejects the simple mythologies about patronage which are persistently attached to Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield, and correctly, in my view, stresses that Johnson’s purported attack on patronage takes second place to his resentment of Chesterfield’s neglect in Johnson’s hour of need. It is not clear to me how much relative importance Lipking attaches to Johnson’s wounded social sensibilities. But his “close” readings of the text of the letter don’t really throw light on nuances of social tone, and are in fact a slightly wooden interlude in an otherwise suggestive and intellectually elegant discussion. It is one of a few examples of doggedly self-enclosed verbal exposition which smack more of the classroom than of the living world.

After this useful opening, the book moves on to a more or less chronological discussion of Johnson’s writings, concerned, as in the opening chapter, to challenge or refine hindsight mythologies of Johnson’s career, and especially the antithetic scenarios of “the self-made author and the passive instrument of print culture.” Lipking seeks to convey the actual feel of the years of struggle, their uncertainties and setbacks, and the stamp of personality: restless ambition, in particular, and a “preemptive dejection” visible in Johnson’s writings long before the formal claims of having learned through experience the vanity of human wishes.

“Preemptive dejection” is a telling phrase, finely capturing an anxious restlessness of mind that not only anticipates disappointment but also is given to experiencing it in advance, partly as an antidote or preparation for experiencing it in due time. The most literal application of this phrase is to the early writings. But it is also vividly applicable to The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Johnson’s greatest poem, to which Lipking devotes an eloquent chapter. The chapter’s title, “Preferment’s Gate,” is a phrase from the poem, and obviously evocative of the theme of “ambition.” But the opening of the poem offers perhaps the most concise and comprehensive illustration of “preemptive dejection” in Johnson’s works. This is not merely because it’s the opening of a dejected poem, but because it established ab initio, as a psychological donnée evidently applicable to all humans at all times, the sheer unsatisfiability of human desire, its point being not that wishes can’t be granted, but that even when they are granted the result either isn’t worth having or at best generates new wishes ad infinitum.

This, in a sense, is the theme of the whole poem, making the “vanity” independent of circumstantial or behavioral improvement, and resting the case on a universal psychological infirmity rather than on moral deficiencies. That Johnson gave this particular spin to his Juvenalian original, defining the problem as one of apparently innate mental constitution rather than of selective human depravity or life’s wide- ranging bloody-mindedness, is evident throughout the poem. But the opening portrayal of “wav’ring man,” deluded by “treach’rous phantoms,” shunning ills that are merely “fancied,” and chasing a “good” that is “airy” and insubstantial, is massively “preemptive” in its implication that the heavy expenditure of both anxiety and aspiration is a tormented shadow-boxing, foredoomed to failure.

This view of the human condition as wholly determined by psychological factors, a congenital or radical disposition of the human mind, is a perception comparable to Swift’s, without the guilt-inducing charge carried by Swift’s satire. (It has more than once been pointed out that Johnson’s writings offer all the raw materials for satire without the satire itself, withholding the latter through a blend of compassionate sympathy and of literal-minded shrinking from the distortions of irony). In a climate of thought tenuously accustomed to the idea of a psychiatric cure, the predicament described by both authors will seem especially resistant to resolution. Their perception of the human lot is offered as more or less axiomatic and definitional. And, as also in Swift, whom Johnson temperamentally resembled and therefore disliked, Johnson’s sense of the universality of a phenomenon turns with unblinking logic to a pained self-implication. The poignancy of the dismal lapidary pronouncements of the Vanity’s opening lines is sharpened by our knowledge of how pressing, in practice, irrational fears were to Johnson throughout his life, and how attached he was to the idea that delusive hopes are better than no hope at all. Hope, even in “airy” good, is promoted, in all Johnson’s moral and introspective writings, as a necessary practical therapy, which sees us through any given present moment, but is by definition doomed to defeat the state of mind that sustains it. There is a stark pathos in the clear-eyed recognition of, and unposturing submission to, this.

These preoccupations run through Johnson’s periodical essays, especially the Rambler, and through Rasselas. The latter is a particularly systematic fictional treatment, in a cumulative series of discrete parables, of the “vanity” of pursuing “airy” good and shunning fancied ills, and of the perpetually unsatisfied “hunger” of the human imagination. Johnson’s psychological probings on the subject of dejection, solitude and the therapies of quotidian self-management are well brought out at scattered points in Lipking’s discussion of these writings. He has partially structured his account of Johnson’s character round the perception of a governing temperamental pattern of ambition and anxiety, and he gives some (though perhaps not enough) attention to Johnson’s complex sensibilities on the subject of social rank.

As a rounded interpretation of Johnson’s personality, however, the work is impeded by the self-imposed obligations of the kind of “biography” Lipking has set out to write. His justifiable concern to focus exclusively on Johnson’s writings commits him to a panoramic, and necessarily miscellaneous, analysis of the various subjects of the periodical essays, of the characteristics of Johnson’s fiction and his fiction theories, and, in due course, of his views on drama, his play Irene, his edition of Shakespeare, his political writings, the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and the Lives of the Poets.

The book offers attractive accounts of most of these texts and topics, well-written, well-informed, and readable. The theme of anxiety and “psychological crisis” is never lost sight of, even when the dejection is no longer “preemptive” in Lipking’s first and most basic sense, but appears late in life. But although the interpretative thread it provides is visible throughout, it never quite acquires the status of an informing principle, and this very estimable study does not come over as a sustained reinterpretation of its subject. Nor is it the sort of biography which provides either a full narrative of its subject’s career, or a more introductory account of the kind you would look up for quick access to a basic range of factual information: if you wanted to discover from it the chief dates of Johnson’s career, for example, you would have to search hard and probably experience some disappointment. In the last analysis, this is a critical introduction to the works, not a “life” in any real sense, and it will take its place among several others of its kind, better written than most, attractive to read, seldom wrong-headed, and not, for all its wisdom and good sense, containing many surprises.