According to conventional wisdom, most people would rather be known as a great writer than a great lawyer. Yet one of the most famous English writers regretted that he had not become a lawyer. I’m referring to Samuel Johnson. He told James Boswell that he became a writer because “I had not money to study law.”
In his twenties Johnson looked into the possibility of practicing law without a law degree, but he learned that it was impossible to do so. As a result, Boswell says, Johnson was “under the necessity of persevering in that course, into which he had been forced.”
Forty years later, after Johnson had achieved a great deal of fame as a writer, he still thought he should have become a lawyer. In April 1778, six years before Johnson died, he told Boswell: “I ought to have been a lawyer.” Boswell then repeated a remark that a friend of Johnson’s had made: “What a pity it is, Sir, that you did not follow the profession of law. You might have been Lord Chancellor of Great Britain.” Hearing this, Johnson became “much agitated,” and he said to Boswell, “Why will you vex me by suggesting this, when it is too late?”
Boswell was a lawyer who wanted to be a full-time writer, so he was puzzled that Johnson would have preferred to be a lawyer. In Boswell’s mind, the law was a dreary and tedious profession.
Though Johnson wished he had become a lawyer, he always defended the profession of writing. “No man,” Boswell says, “had a higher notion of the dignity of literature than Johnson, or was more determined in maintaining the respect which he justly considered as due to it.” Proud of being a freelance writer who managed to eke out a living without an academic appointment or help from a patron, Johnson disliked writers who belittled their profession. Though he despised Voltaire for attacking Christianity, he agreed with Voltaire’s assessment of the playwright William Congreve. In Johnson’s words, Voltaire was disgusted “by the despicable foppery of [Congreve’s] desiring to be considered not as an author but a gentleman.”
Yet Johnson thought it was not a good idea, in general, to become a writer. Writers, he often said, are more likely than other people to be deeply disappointed because their imagination tends to indulge in unrealistic dreams of success: “He that endeavors after fame by writing solicits the regard of a multitude fluctuating in pleasures, or immersed in business, without time for intellectual amusements.”
Johnson, though, didn’t praise the profession of law simply because he thought becoming a writer was foolish—or at least risky. He genuinely enjoyed wrestling with legal matters. He frequently gave Boswell advice about his legal practice. He also wrote about copyright law and about the criminal code; he attacked imprisonment for debt and opposed the death penalty for theft.
In his library, Johnson had at least twenty-five works of jurisprudence. He ghostwrote a number of lectures on jurisprudence for Robert Chambers, the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford. Chambers, whom Johnson had befriended when the former was a law student in London, had been appointed to the Oxford post at the age of twnty-nine. It was a prestigious appointment, but it required Chambers to give sixty annual lectures for two years. Overwhelmed by the task, he sought Johnson’s help, and in the late 1760s Johnson frequently journeyed from London to Oxford to work with Chambers on the lectures, which he eventually gave without acknowledging Johnson’s collaboration. To get a sense of what Johnson did for Chambers, imagine Edmund Wilson spending roughly six to nine months helping a young professor at Harvard Law School write a book.
How good was Johnson’s legal thinking? According to the literary critic Pat Rogers, “he had an extensive familiarity with many branches of the law, and had the grasp of detail and tight hold on logic which would have brought him success in practice.”
While he never did practice, what Johnson has to say about the role of a lawyer is still worth noting. Disagreeing with a man who says that an honest lawyer should never take a cause that he thinks is unjust, Johnson replies:
A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge. Consider, Sir; What is the purpose of courts of justice? It is, that every man may have his cause fairly tried, by men appointed to try causes. A lawyer is not to tell what he knows to be a lie: He is not to produce what he knows to be a false deed; but he is not to usurp the province of the jury and of the judge, and determine what shall be the effect of evidence,—what shall be the result of legal argument. As it rarely happens that a man is fit to plead his own cause, lawyers are a class of the community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of applying to the points at issue what the law has settled. A lawyer is to do for his client all that his client might fairly do for himself, if he could. . . . If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim.
Would Johnson have been a successful lawyer? It is hard to say, but his odd mannerisms—he may have suffered from Tourette’s syndrome—contributed to the failure of the school he opened in 1735. These same mannerisms would have made it difficult for him to attract clients. Even so, he had many friends, so it is possible that he would have been able to build a practice.
This reader is very happy that Johnson’s wishes were thwarted. If he had become a lawyer, it is unlikely that he would have written as much as he did, and we would be all the poorer for it. I, for one, would take Lives of the Poets over the work of a barrister any day.