Dr. Johnson and the Psychiatrists

The reputation of Samuel Johnson rests on a fundamental paradox: some critics see him as a typical Englishman, embodying the virtues that come from common sense, religious piety, and an appreciation of humor; others emphasize his abnormalities, his odd gesticulations, and his unusually strong fear of death in order to portray him as one of the most eccentric creatures in literary history. The best current scholarly opinion is a compromise between the two views; George Sherburn admits that Johnson was a “psychological eccentric” but reminds us that “in thinking of him, however, as representative of his period and in some sense of his race, we must not forget to conceive of him as a man of typical mind.”(1) In spite of his quirks, Johnson's fundamental approach to life and many of his attitudes were those that most people can readily understand.

Almost everyone who has ever written on Johnson has had occasion to examine his grotesque side. Boswell provides the basis for such discussions when he shows Johnson gulping down his food, compulsively counting steps, and becoming hostile under little provocation. But passages concerning Johnson's eccentricities in Boswell's Life are comparatively few and are put in perspective by the numerous other aspects of Johnson taken up in that long work. The emphasis on Johnson the oddity actually begins with Thomas B. Macaulay in 1831, when he reviewed John Wilson Croker's edition of the Life. Although Macaulay bases his treatment of the eccentricities on Boswell, his comments amount