‘Pointed Axioms and Acute Replies'

Although it is hardly the work of Johnson most often perused, his ‘Life of Blackmore’ is characteristic of a certain side of his literary biography, showing how artistic endeavour is confronted by satire, pointed criticism, and then indifference; it also demonstrates Johnson’s fatalistic and pithy awareness of authorial vanity and futility: ‘Contempt is a kind of gangrene’, he comments, as Blackmore keeps writing his unreadable epics, and the audience keeps ignoring them. Critical attention towards the Lives of the Poets has rarely given much time to these shorter accounts of much less achieved writers, preferring to focus within Johnson’s writings on the canonical (Pope, Dryden, and Milton) or the critically significant or controversial (Cowley, Gray, and Swift) with some attention paid to important outliers such as Savage. This chapter explores the distinctive qualities of Johnson’s least anthologised critical biographies, including their sharing of wider concerns (the workings of posterity, the significant relationship between biography and creativity, and the constant tension between human striving and limitation), and the ways in which Johnson achieves an inimitable critical effect, even in the most apparently slight of his biographical studies. These studies memorialise the otherwise forgotten and insignificant through a unique economy and precision of style and thought.