The Politics of Dr Johnson

"Greene debunks the whole caricature of Johnson, which has been the predominant view since Thomas Babington Macaulay’s great diatribe of 1818 depicting him as a Tory reactionary doing all the things Tories are supposed to do. Macaulay, of course, ignored the fact that Johnson was an early campaigner against slavery and an open supporter of women. He described the poet Charlotte Lennox as being “superior to them all”. Johnson belonged to something called “The Club” along with Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith … It’s extraordinary to think of them all in the same room at the same time discussing literature, politics. They were not, of course, all of the same ilk politically. Greene describes Johnson as he was. He shows him as an attractive, humane and gentle chap. Boswell tells us that while Johnson was dining in Oxford with “some very grave men” he proposed a toast: “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” He was notoriously unsympathetic to the American revolution and said: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” British politics has a tradition of seeing the right as caricatured reactionaries, hard-hearted and callous, but Johnson was a self-proclaimed Tory and Greene shows him as he was – not the caricature at all."