deserted village : 1770

rape
london

London (the full title is London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juv
enal) is a long poem of 263 lines written in heroic couplets. Samuel Johnson s fir
st important writing and his second-greatest poem (after The Vanity of Human Wish
es ), this literary imitation of Juvenal s Satire III (part of Juvenal s Satires, from
the second century c.e.) is neither a translation nor a paraphrase of the origi
nal. It is a genuinely new and vigorous composition about corrupt eighteenth cen
tury London, part of the beauty of the performance, Johnson himself wrote in 1738,
consisting in adapting Juvenals Sentiments to modern facts and Persons. As such, t
he poem was a direct challenge to Alexander Pope, the supreme contemporary imita
tor of Horace, who supposedly welcomed the publication of London with the prophe
cy that its anonymous author will soon be deterré. Johnson s satire against an urban w
asteland did help to unearth him from literary obscurity and appropriately earne
d the praise of the great poet-critic T. S. Eliot two centuries later.
The poem opens with an unnamed narrator expressing mixed emotions about the pend
ing departure of his friend, Thales, from Greenwich, England, by boat to some rura
l retreat of primitive innocence in Wales. The narrator may regret losing Thales
to Cambria s solitary shore but fully sympathizes with his friend s abhorrence of a p
hysically and morally dangerous London.
From line 35 to the end of the poem, Thales utters a powerful diatribe against t
he city and, as Donald Greene notes in The Politics of Samuel Johnson (2d ed., 1
990), makes use of all the commonplaces of contemporary opposition propaganda ag
ainst the administration of the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Bemoaning a
city preoccupied with vice and gain, in which learning goes unrewarded, Thales pra
ys for his escape to an Edenic happier place far from pensioned politicians in the
pay of Walpole s regime. Parliament itself is a major wellspring of national corr
uption, tainting the already poison d youth of the land, spreading lies as truths, s
eeking a coward s peace with Spanish marauders of English trade who dared to cut o
ff an ear of Captain Robert Jenkins, and enriching itself by controlling the pop
ulace through the government newspaper The Daily Gazetteer and the recent Stage
Licensing Act, which was causing liberty-loving English drama to be displaced by
depraved Italian opera.
By contrast, Thales is the truth-telling good man (vir bonus) found in classical
satire, a true-blue Protestant Englishman who despises the corrupting invasion
of foreigners especially slavish Frenchmen, who win preferment by flattery, deceit
, and an unprincipled readiness to do anything for the ruling class. In a money-
hungry metropolis of topsy-turvy values, poverty is the only crime that provokes
universal ridicule and neglect, whereas wealth causes an admiring nation to hel
p rebuild rich Orgilio s mansion, gutted by fire. So widespread is urban violence
from drunkards, street gangs, and murdering burglars that the amount of rope nee
ded to hang this growing horde of criminals would use up all the reserves of hem
p needed to rig the ships for King George II s annual visits to his royal mistress
in Hanover, Germany. Consequently, Thales must bid farewell to London, and he p
romises that if his narrator-friend should ever retire to rural innocence in Ken
t, then Thales will leave Wales and join him there to help inspire the creation
of satires against the vices of the age.
Forms and Devices
At the heart of Johnson s moral artistry is a moral realism that has roots in Juve
nal s Satire III but that, influenced by a Christian-Renaissance vision of right a
nd reasonable conduct, bears comparison with other eighteenth century works: Scr
ibler satires, William Hogarth s prints, and Henry Fielding s novels. Claiming later
to have had all sixteen of Juvenal s satires stored and poetically transformed in
 his mind, Johnson may well have composed London rapidly, mostly in his head, be
fore he committed the verses to paper.
The poem was his first major bid for literary fame. It is much more of a poetica
l transformation of the Juvenalian satire than some previous commentators have r
ecognized. The changes are an early indication of Johnson s distinctive moral visi
on and poetic voice. For example, in keeping with his Christian sense of moral d
ecorum, he deleted Juvenalian references to sexual debauchery, homosexuality, sl
op basins, and wayward gods, and substituted sanitized generalizations and rever
ential references to a kind heaven protecting poor mortals.
Even more original was Johnson s creation of a political poem, replete with stock
opposition propaganda and allusions to a glorious libertarian past, from a Latin
satire relatively silent about Roman politics. Despite considerable restriction
s on the eighteenth century press, Johnson enjoyed more freedom of political exp
ression than Juvenal could assume under an imperial dictatorship. Even though Jo
hnson acknowledged the irrelevance of his adaptation (lines 182-209) of Juvenali
an verses on rebuilding burnt mansions to English manners, the rest of London wa
s of immediate topical relevance to the current political scene and to his own b
itter sense of being an outcast in the city.
Finally, Johnson s poem is far more compressed, more elegant, and more aphoristic
than those of Juvenal, the angry but casual satirist of Rome. London is almost s
ixty lines shorter than Satire III, not only because of Johnson s omission of Juve
nalian digressions and an entire section on crowded Roman streets, but also beca
use of his remarkable rhetorical conciseness, which engenders summary moral gene
ralizations. Thus, a single pithy and beautifully alliterated line, And ev ry momen
t leaves my little less, condenses almost two flaccid lines of Latin verse litera
lly translated as my means are less today than they were yesterday, and tomorrow
will rub off something from what remains. Again, the well-known Johnsonian maxim S
low rises worth,/ by poverty depress d ennobles, with its antithetical verbs, this
homely literal translation of the Latin equivalent: It is no easy matter, anywher
e, for a man to rise when poverty stands in the way of his merits.
Young Samuel Johnson in London proved himself a master of the closed pentameter
couplet better known as the heroic couplet that John Dryden had refined and Pope per
fected. In Johnson s hands, the closed couplet lines were at the magnificent servi
ce of his insistent search for moral order and rational control in a poem descri
bing urban anarchy in vivid detail and striking generalizations that sometimes b
order on allegorical abstractions ( Behold rebellious virtue quite o erthrown ). The i
ntellectual density of some of his severely compressed lines can surpass the vir
tuoso poetic wit of even Pope. For example, Thales states a compulsion To pluck a
titled poet s borrow d wing more prosaically, to expose an aristocratic poetaster s unor
iginal literary productions under the metaphorically second-hand inspiration of
a winged Pegasus, the mythological flying horse beloved of the Muses and all fir
st-rate poets. Symmetry, balance, antithesis, and paradox provide a rhetorical h
armony for the discordant subject matter: Here malice, rapine, accident conspire,
/ And now a rabble rages, now a fire.
Themes and Meanings
London is an idealistic outsider s view of England s depraved capital city, summed u
p in the poem s Juvenalian epigraph, Quis ineptae/ Tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus u
t teneat se ( For who can be so tolerant of the city, who so iron-willed as to cont
ain himself ). The theme of an idealistic or innocent youth s exposure to a corrupt
city, in a journey to or from the country, surfaces repeatedly in Johnson s fictio
n for example, in Rasselas (1759) and in the works of fellow eighteenth century Engl
ishmen: in William Hogarth s engravings of the 1730 s of a rake s or harlot s progress t
o ruin, and in Henry Fielding s great novel Tom Jones (1749). The theme has classi
cal roots in Greco-Roman myths of poetic escape to bucolic simplicity but also r
egisters the genuinely bittersweet reactions of contemporary authors, so often b
orn in the provinces, to the stunning realities of a fast-growing and fast-paced
London.
Although Johnson later became famous for his love of London, this early poem str
ikes a note of repulsion. A thirty-year-old newcomer to the city born and reared
in the provincial town of Lichfield, he surely felt neglect and endured poverty
as a journalist-editor for Edward Cave s The Gentleman s Magazine. Fame and fortune
must have seemed elusive to him as he struggled in the callous and crowded cent
er of British culture, crime, commerce, and councils of state. Even though he in
terlards his satire with stock opposition propaganda against Walpole s regime, he
also gives vent to heartfelt abhorrence of urban excesses and grinding poverty.
Part of the poem s bitterness stemmed from the encouragement of his natural rebell
iousness by his friendship with the charismatic and unstable minor poet Richard
Savage, who is sometimes, perhaps erroneously, equated with Thales. Savage, too,
was an erudite, hypersensitive, and poverty-stricken author who, like Thales, h
ad to escape to Wales, and who, unlike Johnson, died in 1743 without achieving e
nduring fame and fortune in the big city.
Allied with the central theme of exposing the moral and physical horrors of the
modern metropolis through ridicule for the reader s satiric instruction are two mo
tifs of escape. The first is the classical myth of rural retirement from the cit
y, adapted from Juvenal s Satire III to embrace British geography, including remot
e places such as Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Kent, and the banks of the rivers Sev
ern and Trent. There is even a probable allusion to the new pauper colony of Geo
rgia (lines 170-175), founded by James Oglethorpe in the early 1730 s as a philant
hropic and religious-oriented settlement in North America.
The poem s geographical escapism extends to an escapism in time. Juvenal s fleeting
hints of an ancient golden age are nothing compared to Johnson s insistent and per
iodic appeals to visions of former English greatness as a foil to the stark nati
onal decline visible everywhere in the city. Radically innovating from Juvenal s o
riginal hints, Johnson created a new, more political poem of opposition propagan
da that contrasts Robert Walpole s supposedly cowardly policies toward Spain and F
rance during a looming War of Jenkin s Ear against the Spanish (1739) with the great
ness of Queen Elizabeth I (lines 19-30), Edward III (lines 99-105), Henry V (lin
es 117-122), and Alfred the Great (lines 248-253). Indeed, Thales s very retiremen
t to Wales is a re-creation of the flight of ancient Celtic Britons from foreign
Saxon invaders (lines 7-8, 43-48). The pursuit and preservation of English libe
rty and Christian rectitude require an escape from the economic enslavement and
ethical chaos generated in the capital city.