Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

shared solely with Taylor. 19 From marriage to death, the experience of friendship was enmeshed in religion, including doubt as well as belief, even if the theology of the layman was what profoundly and powerfully infused that of the rural divine. The strength of the eighteenth-century Church of England assuredly owed more to the laity than it did to the clergy. Christianity taught its adherents not to expect too much from life, and this was the fulcrum of Johnson’s philosophy. Happiness as an ethical ideal was for the worldly rather than the wise, and Ritchie Robertson has extended its reach a little too optimistically in subtitling his own study of the Enlightenment, The Pursuit of Happiness ; this vaulting ambition of the Founding Fathers was used more fittingly by Jan Lewis as the title of her moving study of the not invariably happy consequences of marriage in revolutionary Virginia. 20 Systematising happiness is a fool’s errand, as the unhappy history of eighteenth century Utilitarianism, both Christian and secular, demonstrates. 21 When musing on his biography, Johnson advised Mrs Thrale to consult Taylor, ‘who is certainly … well enough acquainted with my History at Oxford, which I believe he has nearly to himself’. 22 When the widowed Mrs Thrale eventually became Mrs Piozzi, Johnson’s hopes for happiness in marrying her were lost, a becomingly unsentimental appreciation of which informs a luminous novel by Beryl Bainbridge, According to Queeny, published in 2001. There were, however, occasional moments of physical abandon in which Johnson’s awkward physicality found release, one of which he related with topographical exactness in conversation with Boswell when recalling his tutor at Pembroke College: ‘The first day after I came to college, I waited upon him, and then staid away four. On the sixth, Mr. Jorden asked me why I had not attended. I answered I had been sliding in Christ Church meadow. And this I said with as much nonchalance as I am now talking to you.’ To which Boswell admiringly responded, ‘That Sir, was great fortitude of mind’, only for Johnson to reply, ‘No, Sir; stark insensibility.’ 23

19 Thrale Piozzi, Anecdotes , p. 99. 20 Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (London, 2020); Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: family and values in Jefferson’s Virginia (Cambridge, 1983). 21 Niall O’Flaherty, Utilitarianism in the Age of Enlightenment: the moral and political thought of William Paley (Cambridge, 2019). 22 Thraliana: the Diary of Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi) 1776-1809 , ed. Katherine C. Balderston (2 vols., Oxford, 1942), I. 173. 23 Boswell, Life of Johnson , 45.

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