Yet Dr Johnson appreciated reading’s greater horizons, too. ‘I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards’. To be sure, ‘I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading any thing that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the case, the child will soon find it out and desist; if not, he of course gains the instruction…’.
Boswell elsewhere relates how Dr Johnson:
took occasion to enlarge on the advantages of reading, and combated the idle superficial notion, that knowledge enough may be acquired in conversation. ‘The foundation (said he) mast be laid by reading. General principles must be had from books, which, however, must be brought to the test of real life. In conversation you never get a system. What is said upon a subject is to be gathered from a hundred people. The parts of truth, which a man gets thus, are at such a distance from each other that he never attains to full view’.Of course this contradicted Socrates’s posture, who had held that truth lay only in the spoken, never in the written word. (Socrates had believed this chiefly because the early Greek script lacked clarity.) For Dr Johnson, however, reading alone imparted truth: only a reader could attain to a fuller view of the ‘system’ of things, that is, the greater picture. Indeed, the oral imperative was anathema to Dr Johnson: ‘A man must be a poor beast that should read no more in quantity than he could utter aloud’.
The 'Universal Conscience' [fragment]
uit: A history of reading - Steven Roger Fischer
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