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Very recently David Fleeman came upon a work by Samuel Johnson that had eluded all previous scholars and is recorded in no bibliographies. It is a forty-line fragment 'On the Character and Duty of an Academick' published for the first and only time as an appendix to John Moir's Hospitality. A Discourse (London, 1793), and its words are appropriate for the man whose work this volume celebrates: "An academick," says Johnson, "is a man supported at the public cost, and dignified with public honours, that he may attain and impart wisdom. He is maintained by the public, that he may study at leisure; he is dignified with honours, that he may teach with weight. The great duty therefore of an academick is diligence of inquiry, and liberality of communication." If, as Johnson avers, public honours impose a duty, then David Fleeman's long-laboured duties, his "diligence of inquiry, and liberality of communication" to eighteenth-century scholars worldwide, demand to be publicly honoured. It is Johnson's implicit blessing on this volume, and perhaps a personal acknowledgement of someone who has worked with absolute devotion in his cause.
As tutor and fellow of Johnson's own college since 1965, and its librarian from 1969 to 1984, David Fleeman has been in every way at the heart of Johnsonian studies. In 1984 he brought scholars from around the world to Pembroke for the bicentenary conference, and for so many students of the eighteenth century he is a mine of expertise on Johnson and his circle. In private communication, whether by letter, telephone, or bubbling talk, he delights in the circulation of knowledge, offering new leads to anyone with a scholarly problem, putting one individual in touch with another, or supplying just the obscure fact or detail that will open up someone's work in exciting ways. He is generous to a fault with his time, and has always been conscious of the duty that scholars owe to each other and to the field of endeavour they share. It is a Johnsonian conviction. To quote the fragment again: "The great effect of society is, that by uniting multitudes in one general co-operation, it distributes to different orders of the community the several labours and occupations of life." Knowledge is held in common, and truth can best
Fleeman's contribution over more than thirty years to this enterprise deserves celebration: he is someone for whom being brought to book is no throwaway metaphor, but a due responsibility. In his published editions and studies of Johnson's writings, soon to be crowned by his massive bibliography, Fleeman has considerably increased our understanding of the great man, but not by any commanding theory or dramatic reinterpretation (these are for him a dubious combination of metaphysics and egotism). Instead, what we are offered is a scrupulous attention to the workings of Johnson's mind and the particular struggles by which his conceptions made their way into print and out to their readership. The picture is always a dynamic one: Fleeman's Johnson is not a man of monumental certainties, but a mind at work, facing practical difficulties and encountering challenges at every stage, whether in the progress of a subscription or a set of proofs. Bibliography for Fleeman never loses touch with biography. In a paper on Johnsonian Bibliography delivered to the Oxford Bibliographical Society on 17 February 1994 (as yet unpublished) he acknowledged the "biographical bias" that close attention to an author's text will inevitably give, and commented about his own project that "it was this which led me to think that an account of the emergence of Johnson's thoughts into the form in which we now meet them, might serve instead of yet another 'critical biography.'" In his work on bibliography and textual criticism Fleeman has never lost sight of Johnson's thoughts, or his principles either, and it is interesting to discover that he thinks of his body of Johnsonian scholarship in terms of an alternative intellectual biography.
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