Samuel Johnson

"Wain was a poet and novelist and he wrote this biography in the late 1960s, I think. I got him to come and speak at the Bow Group. He was not a great Tory, but he was conservative with a small “c” and he was a bit of an angry young man. Samuel Johnson was an angry young man and a Tory, a Conservative with a capital “C”. This book is wonderful for its sheer sympathy, perhaps because it is written from the point of view of a fellow poet and novelist. I knew Johnson was a Tory and I knew he had that boring old Tory caricature of being a crusty old reactionary, as all Tories do – supporting the rich against the poor and the privileged against the underprivileged. But it was a surprise to find that he was actually very bohemian. He had a strong sympathy with the poor (“Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed” – London) having grown up poor and having lived on Grub Street. He tried to set up as a schoolmaster in Lichfield and failed, so he walked to London in 1737 with his pupil, David Garrick, who, of course, became a famous actor and much richer than him. Garrick went on to make a great fortune. Wain has sympathy for Johnson as a writer and as a person and, in some ways, I think John Wain sympathises with his moral attitudes. It was out of fashion in the 1960s to be a moraliser. Johnson, of course, wrote about morals and good and evil in The Rambler (1750-52)."