Genius and geniality

I cast my Readers under two general Divisions, the Mercurial and the Saturnine. The first are the gay part of my Disciples, who require Speculations of Wit and Humour; the others are those of a more solemn and sober Turn, who find no Pleasure but in Papers of Morality and sound Sense…Were I always Grave, one half of my Readers would fall off from me: Were I always Merry, I should lose the other. I make it therefore my endeavour to find out Entertainments of both kinds.

Thus spake Joseph Addison in 1711, frustrated at the difficulty of keeping readers of The Spectator happy. Leo Damrosch, emeritus professor of literature at Harvard, appears to have taken heed when writing this detailed, gripping study of genius and geniality in 18th-century London. He oscillates between academic explanations of weighty intellectual ideas and gossipy stories on the men who spawned them. Subjects which would otherwise have been a dusty read become a joy.

That’s appropriate for a work about men who turned thought into fun. The book is ostensibly about the social circles surrounding a club which Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson set up together in 1763, to cheer Johnson up after a heavy bout of depression. Members gathered for a pint, a plate and a leisurely debate in the Turk’s Head Tavern on Gerrard Street (just behind Leicester Square) every Friday. They were selected for their intellectual acumen, the greatest minds of the age.

But it’s wrong to assume that a high-minded genius won’t have lowbrow taste. Edward Gibbon may have been the first historian to argue against divine influence in the early expansion of Christianity, but that didn’t stop him cracking jokes about being so fat he couldn’t see his own penis.