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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18771 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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the subject of the first biography

I'd just like to interject for a moment. Johnson's Life was not the first (English, I guess you mean?) biography. In fact, Johnson himself wrote the Life of Richard Savage.

a good friend put in a word with the King and said that Johnson was a renowned writer, a fierce royalist and an all-around champion of British conservatism, and that the King might honour this with a permanent stipend.

This is also incorrect. Johnson was a Tory, but also against the house of Hanover. As Boswell put it:

The accession of George the Third to the throne of these kingdoms, opened a new and brighter prospect to men of literary merit, who had been honoured with no mark of royal favour in the preceding reign. His present Majesty's education in this country, as well as his taste and beneficence, prompted him to be the patron of science and the arts; and early this year Johnson, having been represented to him as a very learned and good man, without any certain provision, his Majesty was pleased to grant him a pension of three hundred pounds a year[1105]. The Earl of Bute, who was then Prime Minister, had the honour to announce this instance of his Sovereign's bounty, concerning which, many and various stories, all equally erroneous, have been propagated: maliciously representing it as a political bribe to Johnson, to desert his avowed principles, and become the tool of a government which he held to be founded in usurpation. I have taken care to have it in my power to refute them from the most authentick information. Lord Bute told me, that Mr. Wedderburne, now Lord Loughborough, was the person who first mentioned this subject to him[1106]. Lord Loughborough told me, that the pension was granted to Johnson solely as the reward of his literary merit, without any stipulation whatever, or even tacit understanding that he should write for administration. His Lordship added, that he was confident the political tracts which Johnson afterwards did write, as they were entirely consonant with his own opinions, would have been written by him though no pension had been granted to him[1107].

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