Augustan dogs

[AS Rounce]

On Fri, 1 Aug 1997, Niall Martin wrote:

> Taking up Heikki's Augustan riff, does anyone know of any exegesis on
> Johnson's women preaching/canine biped simile. Of all the things with which
> a woman preaching could be likened why did Johnson seize on his dog -- was
> it purely happenstance, or was there some Augustan mutt doing the rounds who
> can be identified as a putative ancestor of the LED?

Interestingly, on the manuscript version of this page of Boswell's      
*Life*, he follows Johnson's comment by musing on his father's reaction
to hearing of a blind preacher: "My father being asked what he thought
of this answered 'the learned english dog.'"

As to the source of Johnson's remark, there is little deviation between
what Boswell noted in his *London Journal*, and what he wrote up, years
later. But, the Johnson scholar Donald Greene (who died this year) wrote
to the Times Literary Supplement in May, claiming that the walking dog
quip is "almost as dubious" as another famous example of Johnson's
so-called misogyny-  "the woman's a whore and there's an end on't" (on
the divorcee Diana Beauclerk). This last remark was most definitely
_not_ what Johnson actually said; Greene's thesis was that Boswell's
stage-management and need for a good quote had led to the embellishing
of J's remarks, with the result that a more generalised (and less exact)
picture of Johnson was presented to the world- the artist as walking
sound-bite, so to speak. 

Whether or not Greene is totally right, it is a shock to find out that
instead of
 
"When a man is tired of London, he's tired of life"

Johnson actually said something like 

"You don't want to go to far from London."
 
Greene's essay 'Tis a pretty boook Mr Boswell, but...' is in a
collection called *Boswell's Life, New Questions, New Answers*, if
anyone's interested.


Best,

Adam Rounce.