"In a man's letters, you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process."
— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Author
Work Title
Place of Publication
Lichfield
Date
w. October 27, 1777, printed 1788
Metaphor
"In a man's letters, you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process."
Metaphor in Context
In a man's letters, you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.
(II, pp. 14-15 in Thrale)
(II, pp. 14-15 in Thrale)
Categories
Provenance
Reading. Discussed in Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 191. But see Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 86. See also Joe Bray's The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 8.
Citation
See Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. To which are Added Some Poems Never Before Printed. Published from the Original MSS. in her Possession, by Hester Lynch Piozzi. 2 vols. (London: Printed for A. Strahan; and T. Cadell, 1788).
<Link to Google Books>
See also The Works of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1846).
See also The Works of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1846).
Date of Entry
03/25/2005
Date of Review
03/04/2009
