Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BRIAN YOUNG

Literature mattered infinitely more to Johnson than did politics; his was a clerical and conservative variety of Enlightenment, not one of secular and consciously progressive politics. He strongly disliked Gibbon and Adam Smith and fulminated against David Hume; the Shelburne circle of radicals, which included Joseph Priestley, he found beneath contempt. Consolation was to be found only in friendship, learning and the pursuit of religious virtue. Experienced in a different, more aggressively rural register, they were the consolations he shared with his lifelong friend Taylor, whom Johnson, disappointed by his tutors at Pembroke College, had steered to study under Edmund Bateman at nearby Christ Church, where he visited him every day. 34 Friendship had deepened securely in talking and walking, perhaps even occasionally in ‘sliding’, in Christ Church Meadow.

34 Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings , v. 11-12, x. 76; Boswell, Life of Johnson , p. 55; Clifford, Young Samuel Johnson , pp. 112, 122-24.

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