James Macpherson's famous hoax, publishing his own poems as the writings of the ancient Scots bard Ossian in the 1760s, remains fascinating to scholars as the most successful literary fraud in history. This study presents the fullest investigation of his deception to date, by looking at the controversy from the point of view of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dispute with Macpherson was an argument with wide implications not only for literature, but for the emerging national identities of the British nations during the Celtic revival. Thomas M. Curley offers a wealth of genuinely new information, detailing as never before Johnson's involvement in the Ossian controversy, his insistence on truth-telling, and his interaction with others in the debate. The appendix reproduces a rare pamphlet against Ossian written with the assistance of Johnson himself. This book will be an important addition to knowledge about both the Ossian controversy and Samuel Johnson.
Sir Robert Chambers (1737-1803) was a literary as well as a legal man. Friend and collaborator of Samuel Johnson, professor of English law at Oxford University, and one of the four judges on the first Supreme Court of India, Chambers was an enormously influential figure in the eighteenth-century British empire. This book is the first authoritative biography of Chambers and is also the first major contribution in decades to historical scholarship on Johnson. It demonstrates Chambers's important role in early English legal education, in Samuel Johnson's life and political thinking, and in the formation of British India during a period of active cultural exchange between East and West. The cooperation of Chambers's descendants and the discovery of all his judicial notebooks have given Curley access to a splendid archival collection of rare documents about Sir Robert's private life and public career. Curley adds important dimensions to political and legal history by recounting the establishment of the Vinerian Chair of English law at Oxford University and by documenting long-hidden activities, motives, and decisions in the stormy foundation of British India, beginning with Chambers's farsighted role in the century's most infamous criminal case, the prosecution of Maharajah Nuncomar in 1775. Sir Robert Chambers is the first analysis of Chambers's groundbreaking commingling of English law and Indian practice, as detailed in seventy-two volumes of his judicial notebooks recovered in Calcutta. As an Indian judge, Chambers founded the enduring hybrid heritage of Anglo-Indian law on which the modern constitution of the Republic of India still rests. This book also provides the first full account of Chambers's close friendship with Samuel Johnson and their collaboration on a survey of the British constitution, which profoundly influenced the later writings of both men. Curley reveals Johnson's literary and political interest in India, and his call for encyclopedic study of the East by the West, a call heeded by Chambers and Sir William Jones in founding the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Amassing the largest library of Sanskrit manuscripts in the Western World, Chambers contributed significantly to European awareness of the riches of ancient Indian literature. Lively and readable, this authoritative biography examines the relationships and activities of prominent men in eighteenth-century England, and it supplements Curley's two-volume edition of Chambers's and Johnson's A Course of Lectures on the English Law. It will interest readers curious about multiculturalism--two centuries before the term existed--as it developed under the British empire. All scholars of legal and literary history and of Asian and British studies, as well as lovers of biography, should relish this absorbing and well-researched history.
Although Samuel Johnson's famed ramblings never took him more than five hundred miles from his London home, he was an indefatigable planner of distant voyages. Sharing with his fellow Englishmen that passion for investigating the unknown which had ushered in a momentous geographical revolution, Johnson became the original armchair traveler. His writings proclaim a boundless curiosity about the globe and demonstrate a pervasive preoccupation with travel in every conceivable form. Travel represented more for him than geographical movement; it was a symbol of intellectual growth in his life, his morality, and his society. While Johnson's biographers have all emphasized his fascination with exploration and discovery, no comprehensive study of his complex relationship to the epoch-making geographical advances of his century has heretofore appeared. Thomas Curley's Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel offers new perspectives on this crucial and surprisingly little-known concern of the man and his age, when English literature brilliantly mirrored the widening frontiers of the British Empire. Drawing extensively on Johnson's entire canon, the works of his contemporaries, and a vast store of much neglected travel books, Curley places Johnson's love of travel and travel literature firmly in its literary and historical contexts. Johnson's career began with the translation of a travel book, yielded numerous articles and essays on the subject in his middle years, and culminated in the publication of his own splendid description of the Highlands in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Keenly interested in geography, Johnson studied well over two centuries of travel literature to validate his own philosophy of human nature and to promote improved literary standards in what was then the second most popular genre in England. His masterpiece, Rasselas, not only enshrined his recurring vision of man as perpetual explorer but also exemplified that fruitful interaction between travel books and belles-lettres so prevalent throughout Johnson's age. Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel sheds new light on Johnson's career ambitions, his talents in moral observation and literary creation, and his inquisitive age. Johnson emerges in Curley's study as a truly representative writer completely captivated by the romance of Georgian travel and illustrative of the cultural impact of an expanding world picture upon the minds and letter of eighteenth-century Englishmen.
In this engaging work, now available in paperback, Thomas H. O'Connor chronicles the activities, achievements, and failures of the Church's leaders and parishioners over the course of two centuries.
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