Genius Fan

When you’re a James Boswell nut, like I am, you’re always looking for references to him in any book that covers his period – the second half of the Eighteenth century. I’ve got a copy of Arthur H Cash’s Laurence Sterne: The Later Years…wait now, turn to the index…yep, there he is – a handful of references. Good. My copy of John Cannon’s Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth Century England, hang on let me look…yep there he is – three references. Nice. What about Anthony Seldon’s The Impossible Office…Turn to the index…NO! WHAT?!! But Boswell, has things to say about Bute, Rockingham, Pitt to name only three. What was Seldon thinking of? (Ahem) Not the case with Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the The Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography which I knew gives us Chapter Five: Boswell’s Colossal Hoard. Great! And that chapter kicks off with a story about Reverend Joseph Spence.

Meet Rev Joseph Spence (1699-1768). He was an anecdote collector of Alexander Pope in a similar way that James Boswell was of Samuel Johnson. Hamilton quotes Spence: “I’m in love with Mr Pope,” and describes how, upon Pope’s death in 1744, the good-natured Reverend gave up his Pope-notes to Dr William Warburton, also a friend of Pope, but a more…er, dominant, personality. “If Dr Warburton had been less proprietorial and Mr Spence less compliant, we might not have had to wait nearly fifty years for Boswell to write the first ‘major’ literary Life.” It turns out Spence’s notes, his personality for meeting writers and the like, and for researching friends and family, was on a par with Boswell, who in 1791 gave the world his Life of Samuel Johnson, seven years after Johnson’s death. (There were several Lifes of Johnson before Boswell’s, most notably Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) and John Hawkins’ The Life of Samuel Johnson (1787).) Spence’s Pope notes were used by Warburton who employed a writer Owen Ruffhead to assemble a life of Pope, giving us The Life of Alexander Pope in 1769, the year after Spence’s death and a full twenty five years after Pope’s death. Spence’s Pope notes were collected and finally published as Observations, Anecdotes and Characters, of Books and Men (1820), seventy five years after Pope’s death, a volume still consulted for information about Pope.

Notes
Laurence Sterne: The Later Years, Arthur H Cash (1986)
Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth Century England, John Cannon (1984)
The Impossible Office: The History of the British Prime Minister, Anthony Seldon (2021)
Keepers of the The Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, Ian Hamilton (1992)
Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, Hester Lynch Piozzi (1786)
The Life of Samuel Johnson, John Hawkins(1787)
The Life of Alexander Pope, Dr William Warburton (1769)
Observations, Anecdotes and Characters, of Books and Men (1820)