Deformities of Samuel Johnson, Selected from His WorksCallender, James Thomson
General
Deformities of Samuel Johnson, Selected from His Works
Callender, James Thomson
Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784 -- Criticism and interpretation
The body of the pamphlet may be divided into five unequal parts. In the
first (pp. 11-15), Callender launches a freewheeling attack on Johnson,
accusing him of "ill-nature," a revengeful spirit, peevishness, and
insolence (among other lamentable traits), and announces his chosen mode
of chastisement: "From the Doctor's volumes I am to select some
passages, illustrate them with a few observations, and submit them to
the reader's opinion." In the second (pp. 15-47), he presents a
disconnected string of quotations drawn from a number of Johnson's
works and embellished with caustic strictures on their creator's
presumed moral, intellectual, and literary shortcomings. In the third
and longest section (pp. 47-82), separated from the second by a small
printer's device, Callender, after "quoting [pp. 47-51] the remarks
already made by a judicious friend,[20] on this subject," begins a
series of disjointed, angry comments on the supposed weaknesses of "the
Doctor's English Dictionary." Thirty-one pages later, having vented his
ire on the choice and definitions of hundreds of words in the
_Dictionary_, he "take[s] leave" of the "enormous compilation,"
stigmatized as "perhaps ... the strangest farrago which pedantry ever
produced," and "return[s]" briefly, in part four (pp. 82-86; set off
from part three by another small device), "to the rest of" Johnson's
publications, extracts from which he again employs as a means of
exhibiting his subject's supposed faults. Finally, he brings the
rambling essay to a close (pp. 86-89) by recounting its origins,
repeating his principal charges against Johnson, and reasserting his
hopes for the Doctor's "reformation."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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