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DYK

On 1 August, 2008, Did you know? was updated with facts from the articles Hannah (oratorio), and Abimelech (oratorio), which you created or substantially expanded. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

--Gatoclass (talk) 08:52, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Double hook DYK? nom

On 4 August, 2008, Did you know? was updated with facts from the articles Samuel Richardson, and The History of Sir Charles Grandison], which you created or substantially expanded. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

You're such a friendly chap; your inclusion of Stratford490 is commended. -- CB (ö) 04:10, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Samuel Johnson

In response to this - I would like to thank Lexo for the work on the lead. Yes, it was unwieldy.

• 1. "The first two paras of the biography section take an inordinate amount of time to sum up questions about Johnson's biography that are, although interesting, not quite as relevant as all that, and probably more relevant to the article on the Life of Johnson." This will be moved to its own page when there is a chance. Its just left over from the beginning.
• 2. "', to take a random example, is too involved and flits forward a couple of centuries to call in TS Eliot's (unsourced and unquoted) opinion, something that should really be removed to a properly cited footnote, before bouncing back to the 18th century via a quick nod to Walter Scott." You can blame Bate for that one. The citation is a summary from what Bate says. It is no longer necessary after I created a page on the poem and can be removed.
• 3. "which is a rather ugly passive" Many different writers and many different tweaks. Feel free to rewrite and blame anything improper on me. :)
• 4. "much-needed article on The Vanity of Human Wishes" I've been meaning to also. I have 11 sources on the work and title page and the rest. If you are willing to wait a few days, we can whip something up together.
• 5. I relied on Bate because his would be the most renown based on the Pulitzer. However, I do rely on multiply biographies, and I did leave out Lain because of the year. I've been wanting to add parts from Robert Demaria's The Life of Johnson (1993) and John Wiltshire's Samuel Johnson in the Medical World (1991), but the new information they provide is on the medical side, which the MoS would prefer the doctors speaking instead of the biographers. However, I do plan to incorporate them into the various "works" pages that I have slowly built. Note - there are two Bate sources used, and its a little hard to see them as different from a first glance.
• 6. Thanks once again for the help.

- Ottava Rima (talk) 14:57, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for such a prompt and polite response. I've already started on the Human Wishes article but am hampered by not owning a copy of the Yale edition of the poems, so my bibliographical data is a bit skimpy. I am not a Johnson scholar by any means, just a lifelong reader of the guy and (though I say so myself) a reasonably good editor. I look forward to working with you. BTW, you do know that the Hibbert (i.e. Penguin) edition of Boswell's Life is abridged? I have the OUP unabridged version. It seems strange to be using an abridged edition of Boswell in an article on Johnson. Lexo (talk) 15:49, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Yep. But heres the thing - the abridge version was easier to find the quotes used in the quote boxes. :D I guess I'm lazy. I will post some information on the poem here. Ottava Rima (talk) 16:10, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Vanity notes

Notes for the Vanity of Human Wishes. All citations not provided in full can be found on the Samuel Johnson page:

Bate - Samuel Johnson

• p. 277 - Written during Dictionary, imitation of Tenth Satire of Juvenal, written autumn of 1748, "told Geogre Steevens he wrote the first seventy lines 'in the course of one morning, in that small house behind the church.'" (found in Johnsonian Miscellanies Vol II 313-314, I have a copy if you need more detail of quote).
• p. 278 - VoHW "discloses the inner landscape of his mind - that is, it reveals the image of reality that was fixed in him, and to which his experience naturally assimilated itself - more completely than any other single work"
• p. 279 - VoHW "has a denser, more active texture than would be tolerable in essayistic writing. There is more activity within phrases, and therea re more interwoven strands of connection between phrases. All that is going on helps form and refine our sense of Johnson's imagination, its habitual processes and vision."
• - "deeply personal"
• - "Loosely based on a satire of Juvenal's, it adopts the closed heroic couplet of Dryden and Pope."
• - similar argument to Augustine's Confessions, Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying, and William Law's Serious Call (the argument is "the complete inability of the world and of worldly life to offer genuine or permanent satisfaction"
• - leaves out "Juvenal's coarseness of imagery, and he voices less anger and contempt", less "playful" than Dryden or Pope, more meditative
• - "formally a satire, but his irony differs essentially from that in most classical or Augustan satiric writing"
• 280 - irony is "in the world", "Johnson is closer to Hardy than to Pope"

- follows 10th satire of Juvenal, associated with stoicism

• 281 - two themes - first is "he dwells on the helpless vulnerability of the individual before the social context", second is that he "traces the inevitable 'doom of man' to inward and psychological causes", "inevitable self-deception by which human beings are led astray"
• 282 - beginning lines about "natural passions of man", "betrayal is from within"
• - "When at the end of the poem Johnson turns to religion as the only true and lasting source of hope, the turn of feeling and argument is expected, magnificently handled, and yet also raises central problems of interpretation. Ultimately, they are problems in interpreting the character of Johnson's religion, and naturally cannot be explored in the context of this poem only." Problem stems from his use of Roman satire
• 285 - "The imagery of The Vanity of Human Wishes is constant, condensed, concerely pictorial, and expressed with gusto."

Lane -Samuel Johnson and His World

• p. 113 - "This serious, sober, pessimistic work reflects clearly enough his state of mind at the time, which is one of total disenchantment with life. The statesman, soldier, scholar are alike victims of delusion and disappointment; nothing is permanent or safe; even the rich man and the virtuous are doomed, and the poet, the dedicate writer, is no expection."
• p. 114 - (important - "first to carry his name on title-page") "A theme so stoical and gloomy, so sternly expounded, was not likely to be popular with the public, and the poem, for which Dodsley paid Johnson fifteen guineas, sold less well than his London, which had run through several editions. Garrick, though anxious to praise his friend's new work, the first to carry his name on the title-page, found it heavy going: 'When Johnson lived much with the Herveys, and saw a good deal of what was passing in life, he wrote his London, which is lively and easy. When he became more retired, he gave us his Vanity of Human Wishes, which is as hard as Greek.'" (quoting Boswell's Life book I)

Howard D Weinbrot "Johnson's poetry" in Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson

• p. 36 "Each side profits from the process of questioning and asking. To be sure, as poetic narrator Johnson normally is the superior questioner, but so long as we also learn, engage various intellectual faculties, and are variously pleased, our dialogues with Johnson, with ourselves, and with our culture proceed generously - aas we shall see in the "Drury Lane Prologue" (1747) and in The Vanity of Human Wishes.
• p. 45 "London and The Vanity of Human Wishes are Johnson's longest non-dramatic public poems. Each falls into that rich eighteenth-century genre called the 'imitation,' in which an earlier or even contemporary poem is adapted to modern or different circumstances."
• p. 46 "London is well worth reading, but The Vanity of Human Wishes is one of the great poems in the English language. It follows the outline of Juvenal's tenth satire, embraces some of what Johnson thought of as its 'sublimity,' but also uses it as a touchstone rather than an argument on authority."
• p. 47 "He unifies different portraits through a common denominator of vain human wishes and through interlocking metaphors, like collapsing buildings and life as a battle."
• - "As guide, Johnson uses a plural pronoun to suggest that he shares our human weakness."
• - "When Johnson invokes the laughing philosopher Democritus (49-72) to mock eternal folly in human farce, he reminds us of the importance of continuing our search before we draw inferences: 'How just that Scorn ere yet thy Voice declare,/ Search every State, and canvass ev'ry Pray'r' (71-72)."
• - "Johnson shows his skill in human and moral psychology in several of the character portraits. Cardinal Wolsey rose so high that he seemed to threaten his monarch."
• - "The Portrait of Charles XII of Sweden (1682-1718) is deservedly famous. He was the overreaching monarch and general whose bold but finally fatal attacks terrorized much of Europe. The passage skillfully includes many of Johnson's familiar themes - repulsion with slaughter that aggrandizes one man and kills and impoverishes thousands, understanding of the human need to glorify heroes, and subtle contrast with the classical parent-poem and its inadequate moral vision."
• p. 48 "Johnson's ultimate target and audience is the human situation - hence he includes Juvenal and his parochial treatment of the North African Hannibal, Juvenal's original Swedish Charles. When reading the Vanity our response includes pity for Charles, for Europe, and for ourselves. In contrast, Juvenal enjoys the barbarian lunatic's death and miniaturization into Roman school-boy's declamation."
• - "Johnson is cosmopolitan; Juvenal is local. Johnson is sympathetic; Juvenal is vengeful. Like Democritus, Juvenal is an inadequate guide for the Christian empiricist. The conclusion to the poem further illustrates its moral and poetic grandeu, and satisfies a key expectation of formal verse satire - praise of the virtue opposed to the vice attacked."
• - "The final portrait before the Vanity's conclusion exploits that most enduring and endearing emblem of human renewal - the birth of a child. After all, what parent does not wish to have an attractive child? That child, alas, becomes a prisoner of the dangerous, cloudy, snare-encrusted world of Johnson's first paragraph, but now with the special reference to female fragility."
• p. 49 "The antidote for vain human wishes is non-vain spiritual wishes; the antidote for an unreliable monarch is a reliable God; the antidote for overreaching is trust in God's knowledge of what is best for us."

Robert Demaria, Jr The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. 1993.

• p. 130 "Johnson's greatest poem"
• - "a distilled statement of the central theme of his work of the late 1740s." "Although Johnson is in some ways an expressive writer, he was a professional writer capable of separating his personal and public lives. He continued to carry on a scholarly life that was concerned with particulars rather than the grand ends of learning, and he continued to be interested in particular political issues after he shifted his professional literary focus away from these areas."
• - Robert Dodsley helped Johnson "broaden his audience and thereby achieve greater professional independence" knew Dodsley while writing for his Preceptor
• - "Johnson called Dodsley his patron, and he frequented Dodsley's shop at Tully's Head."
• - "the Vanity also seems written with Dodsley in mind, and it eventually became a part of A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, an anthology Dodsley brought out earlier in the same year that he purchased the rights to Johnson's great poem." Note on 321 says "Johnson revised the Vanity for the fourth edition of Dodsley's Collection (1755); he contributed other poems to the first edition of 1748."
• p. 131 "In The Vanity of Human Wishes Johnson displays the moral blueprint of his Dictionary."
• - "The Vanity is a great poem, and it therefore deserves and rewards treatment as a literary phenomenon unfettered by any but aesthetic and intellectual associations. As T. S. Eliot shows in his introduction to the Haslewood Press edition, the Vanity belongs in the artistic world defined by the poetry of Juvenal, Dryden, Pope, and Horace. It ias also, however, an artefact of Johnson's professional life in the late 1740s."

The History of Sir Charles Grandison‎

In response to this - "So, that's Sabor in the CCEL, pages 149 to 113"

• 1. According to this there is no such text. However, if you hover over the thing, it tells you the page number and what ref number it links to. I assume this was a mistake on the part of the editor above to think that the "-" mark was anything more than html code linking two sections.
• 2. "Either drop the reference to Amelia or explain it exactly as Sabor does." Okay - Here is what he says: "With novels such as Tom Jones and Amelia clearly in view, Richardson writes: 'It has been said, in behalf of many modern fictious pieces...'" Looks like I summarized Sabor 100% correct.
• 3. This is improper, as verisimilitude is the act of writing as if the story was composed by the original audiences, i.e. sans writer. This extends to having a novel written as if it was an autobiography to one that is composed of a series of notes that are merely "edited", like The Woman in White.
• 4. This is not a "fib" when most literary critics and Richardson himself refered to it as Gradison in the same way Pamela is.
• 5. This is wrong. That was a woman who wrote the piece who was a friend of Scott. Not Walter Scott. And she was 100% serious.

Plenty more mistakes, but these are the major ones. Ottava Rima (talk) 14:57, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh, dear!

1. Ok, then you need to check your note 14.
2. If you are telling the truth, then Sabor is wrong and uncharacteristically tin-eared. I invite you to read Amelia (or even Sir Charles Grandison), but, more to the point, you need to explain who or what in Amelia is this vicious character that is rewarded. If Sabor does say that Amelia has a bad character rewarded, as you claim, then summarize it, because, unlike other things, this is likely to be challenged.
3. No, it isn't. You can find a critic who has stretched the word to try to create a coinage, but you cannot find a lexicographer; it certainly is not wide usage. Therefore, when given the choice between a precious usage or a licensed definition and a better explanation for the device, choose the latter. This is a question of good usage, good practice, and employing words that mean what you need them to mean.
4. Richardson can call it what he wants, but it is not "referred to" (passive voices... you seem to love them) that way. Please give some examples from current criticism. I asked some other 18th c. professionals, and they also never refer to that book as "Grandison" except in serial reference within a discussion. This is the way that someone writing on Gulliver's Travels will say "Gulliver" inside a discussion, but that book is not "referred to" as "Gulliver."
5. You are either wilfully misreading me or incapable of grasping the distinction between indirect and direct discourse. Did you get that quotation from the friend? You say that you got it from Scott, cited in another. Scott is being ironic. The friend is not. Scott quotes her to have a sly wink at the fans of the book. If you actually read the quote in situ instead of as a clip elsewhere, you'd see this, presuming that you have an ear for Scott's writing.

I don't know why you have to be immune to help, but, had you not reviewed the thing yourself, given yourself a "high" and "B," and then gone to DYK, I wouldn't have seen your new malignity. Geogre (talk) 17:57, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Geogre, I don't want to fight with you. I don't mind most of your edits. However, I do feel as if you are trying to come after me. Yes, I know that is not AGF. However, I don't feel good right now, and I wanted to make it very open and clear. If I am terse with you, then I apologize.

Lets deal with the rating system first. This is where I promoted it from "start". B class is defined as anything that is completely cited, verified, and doesn't have any major MoS problems. It is not GA class. I even disclaimed it by stating "changing ratings appropriately. If its c class, you can bump it down." Secondly, the "high" was not my choosing, but the Wikiproject's placing the importance level there themselves.

"If you are telling the truth, then Sabor is wrong and uncharacteristically tin-eared" I don't think you get what Sabor is saying. "that they have exhibted Human Nature as it is" this is the reference to Amelia, as Sabor points out. Amelia isn't as moral as Richardson would want her to be. She is, if you follow Richardson's view, "low class". And if you noticed, I wrote the page on Amelia, so yes, I know all about it.

"You can find a critic who has stretched the word to try to create a coinage, but you cannot find a lexicographer; it certainly is not wide usage." Harmon and Holmand, A Handbook to Literature - "Verisimilitude. The semblance of truth. The term indicates the degree to which a work creates the appearance of truth." The original title of the novel is The History of Sir Charles Grandison: in a Series of Letters published from the Originals. That is classic Verisimilitude.

"Richardson can call it what he wants, but it is not "referred to" " I think your statement justifies the use quite clearly in the first clause.

"You say that you got it from Scott, cited in another." Then you misread. It clearly says a friend of Scott. It was not written by Scott. It was not published by Scott. As Flynn states bluntly: "An old lady of Sir Walter Scott's acquaintance explained why she enjoyed hearing Sir Charles Grandison read aloud". The citation comes from the "'Memoir' of Richardson" which is part of the Ballantyne's Novelist's Library vol 6, 1824, p xlvi "as cited in Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson p. 389". There is nothing to suggest that Walter Scott wrote or had a part of anything. All that is suggested is that the woman is only known as an acquaintance of his, so altering in any fashion in the manner that you did cannot be justified from the sources.

"I don't know why you have to be immune to help, but, had you not reviewed the thing yourself, given yourself a "high" and "B," and then gone to DYK, I wouldn't have seen your new malignity." I think your comment speaks for itself, inaccuracies and all. Good day. Ottava Rima (talk) 20:24, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Candide's FAC

I don't mean to bug you, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd take another look at Candide. I believe I have addressed all of your objections to its being made an FA. Thanks in advance. -- Rmrfstar (talk) 15:20, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Can't do anything right now. You can tell Sandy that mine has been moved to a "comment" without any obvious opposes. I'd need to have a closer look to move one way or another, and I wont be able to do so for four more days. I hope you see this message. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:22, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

By the way, it reads cleanly, and you should be commended on the work that you've put into the page. Ottava Rima (talk) 15:26, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Will do. -- Rmrfstar (talk) 16:34, 5 August 2008 (UTC)