Lord Marmalade

Jonathan Bate, in the TLS reviewing recent biographies of John Keats and his brother George:

It was in the Romantic period that two roads diverged in the wood of literary Life-writing. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) had no truck with the idea that biography has a duty to be comprehensive. Boswell only knew Johnson for the last twenty-one years of the great man’s long life, so on the principle that one writes best about what one knows well, his Life was heavily skewed to the later years. Equally, Boswell took the view that the biographer’s duty was not so much to deliver all the facts as to bring the character of the subject alive by narrating a series of vivid scenes. This, of course, worked wonderfully because Johnson was at his most brilliant in the art of table talk. The silent work of thinking, reading, writing and revising that fills the days of most writing lives is far less amenable to Boswellian treatment. William Hayley’s Life of Cowper (1803) accordingly offered an alternative model, proposing that letters are the richest resource for the literary Life-writer. And in the case of a quiet, introspective poet such as Cowper, he was right.

Thus the two roads diverged. If you believe that a writer’s inner life is best revealed through small details closely observed by friends (why did Dr Johnson keep his orange peelings?), then you should follow the Boswellian path. If you prefer a comprehensive, panoramic and more objectively arranged scene, then you will follow Hayley and begin with the chronological arrangement of your subject’s personal correspondence.

From the paper's Letters pages over the three issues succeeding:

Uses of orange peel 

Sir, - Jonathan Bate asks "why did Dr Johnson keep his orange peelings?" (December 7). The question has been asked many times before. The answer is: the same reason that my great uncle Harold kept his - for kindling. Since they are a component of fireworks, it's no surprise that they get a fire going very well. 

BERNARD RICHARDS
Brasenose College, Oxford.

Orange peel

Sir, - Bernard Richards thinks that Dr Johnson kept his orange peels for kindling (Letters, December 14). But why would he make a secret of using them that way? Boswell reports that Johnson's friends (including Garrick) "seemed to think that [Johnson] had a strange unwillingness to be discovered" collecting and pocketing the peels after eating Seville oranges. When Boswell importuned Johnson to know what he did with them, Johnson gracefully replied that he should write: "'he could not be prevailed upon even by his dearest friends to tell'". Johnson, however, does seem to have told at least one friend their use, in a vivid letter written twenty years earlier. There he says that dried and powdered orange peel, mixed with port or wine, helps with his digestive problems.

WILLIAM FLESCH
Department of English, Brandeis University, Massachusetts 02454.

Sir, - There may be another reason why Dr Johnson kept his orange peelings. I have recently learned that putting them in sports shoes, sea-boots and the like keeps them as sweet and fresh as the morning dew. Don't ask me how it works - but it does.

ADRIAN LLOYD-EDWARDS
Middledown Stoke, Fleming, Dartmouth. 

Orange peel 

Sir, - Dr Johnson may well have been familiar with John Wesley's Primitive Physic (1747), in which we find this remedy for A Cold in the Head (Letters, December 21 & 28, 2012): "Pare very thin the yellow rhind [sic] of an orange. Roll it up inside out, and thrust a roll into each nostril". 

BRIGID PURCELL 
Henley Road, Norwich.