Genius Fan

I wrote a post a few months ago (Pick a Book, Any Book…) about the serendipity in making a casual selection from one’s bookcase. This post is a similar process, but focused on the outcome – the discovery of an important scholar: Donald Greene. I was dashing out the room to the loo (radical candour, anyone?) and passing the bookcase by the door I spotted the khaki green spine of John A Vance’s edited volume, Boswell’s Life of Johnson: New Questions, New Answers. I snatched it from the shelf and off I went, without my mobile phone, but with a book instead. (This is the same but different from the factories I used to work in back in the 1980s when every bloke would take his turn to disappear off the line for a ‘smoke break’ with a copy of the Daily Record under his arm.) Once ‘settled’ I read the Introduction in which Vance asserts: “No collection of essays on Boswell’s Life of Johnson would be complete without something from Donald Greene.” This single sentence stirs my interest and then I spot the Statistical Appendix to Greene’s chapter entitled, ‘Tis a Pretty Book, Mr Boswell, But…’. It sets out a series of calendar diagrams showing the days in which meetings between Boswell and Johnson are mentioned in Boswell’s Life and his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. If you’re into Boswell and Johnson and you’re wrestling with understanding the time they spent in one another’s company, these calendar diagrams give the perfect visual representation, for each of the years they met, from 1763 up to 1784. Brilliant.

But there’s more. It turns out Greene is a significant scholar in Johnsonian studies. He overturned the picture that Johnson was a simple Tory curmudgeon to flesh out a much more complex character. And according to Vance, Greene was a scholar who, “…first and foremost pulled down the icon (Boswell’s Life) and forced us to consider the defects of an accepted “great book” of world literature.” I haven’t read this yet, but it’s interesting to learn another episode in the fortunes and reputation of Boswell’s Life. A quick look at Wikipedia and check on Ebay and Abebooks and I see Greene was a pretty big cheese in the world of Johnsonian studies. This is one thing I love about history…learning about the scholars who’ve devoted their lives to our favourite topics.

Notes
Boswell’s Life of Johnson: New Questions, New Answers, (ed) John A Vance (1985)