Do something on Samuel Johnson, the editor urges me. Nothing political. Not “What would Samuel Johnson think of the method of tariff calculation.” Just a purely literary essay on this mighty figure of our civilization. At this, my mind goes temporarily blank, and when it restarts a figure comes into view. He is tall, big and clumsy, compulsively twitching and muttering (Tourette’s, some have diagnosed him with), wearing an 18th-century wig singed from holding a candle too close while reading.
He is seated, perhaps at a chair in a pub (“the throne of felicity”), but more likely in a cramped room in a London house, with a teapot in front of him. He is not alone—he hated to be alone—but we can’t see who is with him: a fellow author? Someone who has fallen on hard times, and who Johnson is helping out with a roof over their head? Whoever it is, he is talking to them, intensely, authoritatively, but not in that obnoxiously dogmatic way that people sometimes imagine Samuel Johnson talked. He loved people too much to talk at them like that.