Samuel Johnson once told James Boswell, "'Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual who is willing to leave London'" (Life, III.178). However, after Johnson was pensioned in 1762, he indulged his love of traveling. Very little scholarly attention has been given to his nearly annual visits to the places and people of his past: Oxford, Birmingham, Lichfield, and Ashbourne. Yet he spent more time in these locales than on his major tours. / Johnson enjoyed the countryside, where he could walk and drive in the fresh air and occasionally jump stiles and clamber over rocks. More important was maintaining ties with friends, especially those from his childhood and early adulthood: Thomas Warton, Robert Chambers, and William Adams at Oxford; Edmund Hector in Birmingham; Lucy Porter, Peter Garrick, and the Aston sisters in Lichfield; and John Taylor in Ashbourne. / Unlike the stimulating literary talk he had in London and at Oxford, his country conversations often dealt with such topics as Lucy's cats, Taylor's "great Bull," strawberries, oats, ill-health, and animal husbandry, unless Boswell and the Thrales joined him and enlivened the visits. His letters to Mrs. Thrale begged for news and complained of the boredom of his "exile" from London. But after she shut him out of her life, he turned to his oldest friends--Taylor, Hector, Lucy, and Adams--as he prepared for death in 1784. / These visits reveal different sides of Samuel Johnson: the convivial scholar/alumnus at Oxford, the native son comparing his youthful dreams with the reality of his life, the loyal friend enduring the "dulness" of Ashbourne. The visits also suggest some interesting things about Johnson's personality, about his intense gratitude and loyalty to old friends, the variety of his friendships and his patience with intellectual inferiors, his need for affection, his need to come to grips with his often painful past, a paradoxical necessity to escape from himself into his past, and his search for identity and peace, especially as he faced death. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-11, Section: A, page: 3391. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75220 |
| Contributors | PLY, MARY SUE., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 308 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0017 seconds