University of Virginia Library

I

John David Fleeman is a Yorkshireman and a "Johnson" on his mother's side. He was born at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor in the old East Riding on 19 July 1932, the son of Mary (née Johnson) and Joseph Fleeman.

"Fleeman," derived from Flamanc/Flamand, or Fleming, is a scarce name, but several graveyards in the Isle of Axeholme, the district beyond the southern tip of the riding around the villages of Snaith and Rawcliffe, house generations of Fleemans who farmed the lands in the area. It was his grandfather, John William (1866-1936), who broke away from the agricultural life and by dint of self-education eventually became an Inspector in the West Riding Constabulary, and his son Joseph (1906-1983) took up schoolteaching as a career. When David Fleeman was very young the family moved to Laxton, an isolated hamlet on the flood plain of the River Ouse near the point where it becomes the tidal Humber, and here his father was the village schoolmaster and a lay preacher at the small church of St. Peter. The young Fleeman's most formative childhood experiences were as a choirboy in this church, chanting the Psalms and hearing intoned the words of Cranmer's prayerbook and the King James Bible. Later, when he read Johnson for the first time, he felt an immediate kinship with his solemn tones and measured phrases, as though he were hearing a familiar congenial voice.

In 1943 he entered Pocklington School (founded 1514), a public (i.e., "private") boarding school fifteen miles north of Laxton, where he was taught English by a man who during the First World War had taught his father before him. His methods were those that had implanted English Literature into many generations of Pocklingtonians: the pupils memorised poems, and they were made to stand up and recite them. In history, dates were learned by rote; in divinity, psalms and parables. But in this ritual of recollection and recital Fleeman excelled. He enjoyed the stirring rhythms of Bridges and Hopkins, or Tennyson's Light Brigade, and he won a prize for declaiming a passage from Shakespeare's Richard the Second. It is no surprise that a boy who relished an author's memorability, and who had an instinctive feel for pattern and cadence, would find Dr. Johnson a powerful writer.

In fact, Fleeman was hooked on Johnson before he read Boswell. What first stirred him was a copy of the selected essays, and especially the solemnity of the last Idler, number 103: "Though the Idler and his readers have contracted no close friendship they are perhaps both unwilling to part. There are few things not purely evil, of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, 'this is the last.'" Dark and sober words, and not perhaps those that an adolescent might appreciate—at least not those Rasselas meets—but they struck home "like a sledgehammer." Johnson's horror of the last was one Johnsonian's beginning.

In 1951 Fleeman went up to St. Andrews University, that venerable seat of learning on the Fife coast in Scotland, and in his freshman year studied French and German, Modern History, Philosophy, and English.

At first it seemed that modern languages were to be his speciality (th??? previous year he had applied to read French and German at St. John College Oxford, which did not then admit for English). He attende??? lectures in French on Corneille and Voltaire, and in German on Goeth and Lessing. The yearning Romanticism of Lamartine and others disgusted him (in the eighteenth-century sense), and it was Balzac, Maupassant and Zola who hit his taste. In English he came under the in fluence of Richard Logan, a lecturer who combined a contempt fo??? romanticism with a conviction that Horace was in fact an Englishman Logan's view of vernacular English Literature as an intellectually unsatisfactory offshoot of the classical tradition was never unequivocall shared by Fleeman, but it is no surprise that the Age of Pope and John son became his great love. In general he relished wit, intellect, sociarealism, and responded to doubt, difficulty, struggle ("we are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle"). He developed a conviction that would stay with him for life: that nothing easy is worth doing. Slick methods and glib answers were anathema. Already Johnson was providing the scenario for a life that embraced effort and sought firm evidence and sure results.

Having graduated in 1956 with a First in English Language and Lit erature (he won the class medal), Fleeman confronted what for many of his generation was certainly a struggle—National Service. He joined the Twentieth Foot of the Lancashire Fusiliers at Bury, and after basic training entered the Royal Army Education Corps as a Sergeant. It was a life built on order and hierarchy. He felt happily at home with army discipline, teaching everything from the writing of reports to the reading of ordnance survey maps (something he had learned at school), and he developed a relish for Pythagorean geometry. With the confidence of youth he committed himself to attainable knowledge and satisfying conclusions. Having instructed the officers on how to write clearly, he was attached to the Lifeguards at Windsor, teaching recruits to the elite Household Cavalry. During this time, in 1957, he married Isabella Macaskill from the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, whom he had known since his undergraduate days in St. Regulus' Hall, and together they moved into married quarters in Windsor.

Leaving the army the following year, he returned to Yorkshire and taught as a schoolmaster for a year at Selby, from where he applied to do graduate work at Oxford. Somewhat unconventionally he was met by Graham Midgeley, English tutor of St. Edmund Hall (a notoriously "sporty" college), at the South Door of York Minster, and the interview was conducted in Betty's tearooms. (To a fellow Yorkshireman this does

not seem incongruous: Betty's to this day has more formality than many an Oxford common room.) "Do you row?" he was asked. "I'm afraid not," was the reply. "Good!" said a relieved Midgeley. And so he gained his place at Oxford. It was All Fools Day 1959.

There was little doubt that he would settle on some Johnsonian research topic, but the choice was not easy. The immediate possibility was, predictably, a study of how Johnson's style was coloured by the Prayerbook and the Authorized Version of the Bible (the first Yale volume containing the prayers and meditations had appeared the previous year), and before coming up to Oxford Fleeman began compiling an index of phrases. But his supervisor for the first two terms, Mary Lascelles, persuaded him that the research would lead to no surprising conclusion, and so for a time his thoughts turned to a wider stylistic essay on Johnson. Things seemed to come into focus again when he found in Blackwell's second hand department a first edition copy of The Adventurer and decided that he would like to edit it. This discovery coincided with his introduction to the delights of bibliography through attending Herbert Davis's printing class, part of the course work for any probationer B. Litt. student. The fascinating detective work of investigating printing practices, type, paper etc., offered a combination of difficulty, fact, and physical detail to which he was by nature responsive, and it made a powerful impression.

It was at this moment that the discipline of bibliography came into conjunction with the powerful moral presence of Johnson, and it was a decisive combination. He was sent to talk to L. F. Powell, who was then preparing the Yale second volume, and Fleeman proudly marched in with his Adventurer under his arm. "An interesting project," remarked the great man, "but what will you do when you've finished it? Why work for three years on Hawkesworth, when Johnson can offer you a life sentence? You'd better work on him." Intriguingly Powell led him to the 1825 "Oxford" edition of Johnson's works (published by Pickering, Talboys and Wheeler): "This is still the standard edition; but nobody knows how it came to be as it is. Go and have a look at the text and make some comparisons." Fleeman found that in chapter one of Rasselas alone fifty commas had been added, and it was clear that this edition, which dominated traditional stylistic analyses of the "ponderous" Johnson, offered a thoroughly corrupt text in which some three quarters of the punctuation is unwarranted. So he began work comparing it with earlier editions, charting variant readings and listing errors in the text, until a family tree of Johnson's complete works began to take shape. It also revealed to him how significantly punctuation can affect the way

we hear the words of an author, and the revelation of lifting away those thick overlays from Johnson's sentences forever sharpened his eagerness to recover exactly what Johnson wrote.

Settled onto a Johnsonian topic, and now with L. F. Powell as his supervisor, Fleeman became a protégé of a scholar of almost mythic status in Oxford. Never having sat an academic examination in his life, or completed any thesis, Powell had retired over a decade earlier from his post as Librarian of the Taylor Institution and was finding a useful role at the age of seventy-nine supervising a few postgraduates while pursuing his own research. He was a model of capacious knowledge harnessed to diligent and disciplined inquiry, but it is clear that his influence came as much from the man as from the work. When Fleeman wrote the entry on Powell for the DNB "Missing Persons" volume, he took the opportunity of expressing his deep admiration in phrases of a Johnsonian weight and intensity:

Powell spent his final years in a nursing home in Banbury, not far from Oxford but beyond the buzz of scholarly conversation. In order to remedy this deficiency Fleeman suggested to Roger Lonsdale that each should pay him a visit on alternate Sunday afternoons for some eighteenth-century chat, and they both maintained this with only rare interruptions for several years until LFP's death in 1975.

In Oxford the Fleemans lived at 32 New Inn Hall Street, a historic house notable as a place where John Wesley preached in the 1780s (the Wesley Memorial Church was later built across the road)—but for the Anglican Fleeman a more stirring association was that Charles the First had kept the royalist silver in their cellar during the Civil War. The genuine treasure-house, however, was the Bodleian Library, and here Fleeman had a wealth of manuscript and printed material at his disposal. As he set about examining hundreds of individual Johnson items the emphasis of his work shifted from the primarily textual to the bibliographical,

and he began to identify many reprints and editions not known to Courtney or other bibliographers, besides finding that so-called "new editions" were occasionally merely reissued sheets. Fleeman's research had led him progressively from the redolence of Johnson's language, to the development of his texts, and on to the underlying bibliographical problems.

In the Autumn of 1961 Donald and Mary Hyde visited Oxford. They had asked Powell to suggest someone who might take on the task of cataloging their superb eighteenth-century collection, and a party was thrown at the Mitre attended by all L. F.'s pupils, including Roger Lonsdale, John Hardy, and Christian Deelman (Powell was proud of his eighteenth-century "chaps"). In the event Fleeman accepted an invitation for a period of two years to catalogue the library at Four Oaks Farm, and this went along with an appointment as bibliography consultant at Harvard. It was a bold move, considering that his Oxford thesis remained unfinished, but the opportunity to work on such a wonderful hoard of material was too tempting. His brief was to complete the catalogue in two years, and indeed two years later, to the day, the task was done. Twenty-eight thousand filing cards were processed, and Isabel Fleeman proved a meticulous and helpful collaborator in the later stages, herself responsible for indexing the miscellaneous manuscript correspondence.

A further year followed with Fleeman's appointment as "Hyde Fellow in Bibliography" at Harvard, and the project was extended to develop the catalogue into a bibliography. In 1964 the catalogue of printed books was privately produced in three volumes as Catalogus Bibliothecae Hydeianae. During this time he also took the opportunity to travel around the States accumulating information: the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library, Chicago, Texas, Philadelphia, all were visited and many original documents examined. His Oxford D. Phil. thesis made good use of these primary sources and was finally submitted from the U.S. and successfully defended in January 1965. "A Critical Study of the Transmission of the Texts of the Works of Dr. Samuel Johnson" (Bodleian MS D. Phil. c. 444) shows that at that early date Fleeman already had an impressive command of an extremely wide range of material. The thesis describes in detail the transmission of Johnson's texts from their first publication to their inclusion in the collected editions of 1787-89, and supplies a general view of their subsequent development through the various collected editions to the 1825 "Oxford" volumes. Every text is analysed, the stemma indicated, and the textual features of each edition recorded. This thesis, which still repays consultation by the Johnsonian scholar, provided not only the basis for an editorial assessment of any given version or reprint of a Johnsonian text,

but the textual foundation for a new bibliography of Johnson's works. The massive project was already under way.

In terms of a career Fleeman's first wish was to be a librarian, but there were no openings available. However, the sudden death of Robert Browning, the English tutor at Pembroke College, created an unexpected vacancy there. The possibility of a fellowship at Johnson's alma mater was tempting, and he was well acquainted with its Johnsonian holdings (a few years earlier Browning had allowed him to see the manuscripts and catalogue them). In spite of a feeling that teaching was not his main love, and acutely aware of the narrowness of his literary interests during the previous six years, he rose to the occasion at interview. In response to the question, "What would you expect your students to take away from your teaching?" the former army instructor gave the reply, "I hope they would learn how to write a decent English sentence." He was elected.

Along with the security of a college fellowship came the responsibility for tutoring on literature from the Renaissance to the end of the Romantic period. With an intake in English of up to ten students, Pembroke has at any one time about thirty undergraduates reading English (a tenth of the student body), and the teaching duties are shared with an English Language/Medieval tutor, and some bought-in assistance. As a teacher Fleeman is tough, tactical, interrogatory, oppositional, but fair, and it is never easy to forget the bibliographer behind the tutor. Sweeping conjectures, ingenious theories, unsupported generalizations, second-hand commonplaces—all are given short shrift. But underneath is a deep love of books and a respect for the individual writer's struggle to find the right word.

Fleeman does take pleasure in literary criticism and can enjoy tutoring undergraduates, but its relish for him lies in playing a game by the rules, with rallies of words and argument. His students need to be able to return his serve. Perhaps it is precisely because he does not see "truth" as being at issue in mere literary criticism that he is able to appreciate it as a rhetorical exercise or battle of wits. (He remains conscious of the fact that where Harvard's motto is Veritas, and Oxford's Dominus illuminatio mea, that of St Andrews is Ever to be best.) Teaching for him is an enjoyable encounter that exploits the energy of debate, but it cannot be a search for truth because it exercises itself in the play of ideas. Sometimes a student would be reminded of the rigorous argumentative powers of Ursa Major, but where Johnson's unpredictable swings from game to earnest could injure the unwary, Fleeman, like his mentor, resembles "Johnson without the danger." As a teacher he has always been conscious of working within formal rules—"then each side knows what

it's doing," he once remarked, alluding directly to the adversarial encounter of the tutorial. Until women entered the college in 1979, he would insist on academic gowns being worn, and surnames were used ("Mr Smith" in the first year, the more intimate "Smith" in the second, and "John" in the third). Placed either side of the fire, the players would begin the match.

College work kept him busy: a schedule during term of twelve hour-length tutorials a week was the norm, and administrative duties increasingly impinged on the remaining hours of the day. Like many a recently recruited fellow he found himself handed the job of Secretary to the Governing Body (1966-71), but a pleasanter task came his way in 1968 when he succeeded Douglas Gray as Pembroke's Librarian (like other college posts this brought no remission in teaching). The college's books were at that time widely scattered, having overflowed their original depository; and so his chief task was to oversee the building of a new library, opened by the Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, in 1974. One event that gave him particular personal pleasure was Pembroke's award in 1966 of an honorary fellowship to L. F. Powell, then at the ripe age of eighty-five. A devoted college man, Fleeman became its acting head during 1991-93 at a difficult time, and as Vicegerent he superintended the protracted appointment in 1992-93 of a successor to the Mastership. This was an exhaustive and exhausting process, but according to one colleague he saw the business through with an impressive combination of fairness and efficiency, integrity and good humour.

Beyond the confines of the college, the English Faculty also imposed duties. As a Lecturer he has regularly taught the M. Litt. probationer class in Bibliography and Textual Criticism, passing on to a new generation of students the intriguing delights of inner formes and cancels, and the darker tales of corruption, contamination and foul papers. Especially memorable were the classes he taught jointly with David Foxon, when they made a superb doubles pair: Fleeman striking the ball hard down the baseline, while the flamboyant genius Foxon vollied spectacularly at the net. When Foxon unexpectedly retired as the University's Reader in Bibliography, the post was frozen and Fleeman had to shoulder a considerable extra burden for several years until a replacement was appointed.

He also proved a valuable Faculty member as a postgraduate supervisor, and from his first probationer in 1966 to the present day he has seen fourteen students successfully through to their Oxford B. Litt. or D. Phil., supervising theses on a surprisingly wide range of topics—and only one of them specifically on Johnson. Subjects have included Edward Cave, Elizabeth Carter, Percy's Reliques, William Tytler, Roger

North, Sheridan's The Rivals, and McKenzie's Man of Feeling, and have extended to the sporting novels of R. S. Surtees and no less than four theses on Thomas Hardy. The experience of my own first supervision in October 1969 is probably not unique. His opening move was preemptive and a little startling: "Of course, you know there's only one writer you should be doing a thesis on. . . ." My reply, delivered with as much uncertain confidence as possible, that I was interested in working on Thomas Warton, seemed to hover invitingly in the air for ever. "That's all right. At least he was a friend of Johnson's." Immediately the practicalities were entered into: there was no discussion of Warton's milieu, his ideas, his influence, his poetic development, his theory of history. I was asked to return in two weeks' time with a card index of every item of Warton's correspondence I could trace. In the first hour I had received my own life sentence.

To have access, through Fleeman, to a store of useful information on works of reference, manuscript collections, editorial procedures, bibliographical questions, whom to write to and where to look, was a boon to any fledgling research student, and supervisions gave the impetus for many weeks of work. The talk was always buoyant and fascinating, the interest genuine, the help practical. He knew when to leave a student to get on with the job, and when immediate help was needed. I answered the telephone early one morning to hear a single word being forcefully enunciated—"Propagate!"—a startling injunction, especially at 8.30 a.m. It was, however, the solution to a hiatus in a torn letter, mentioned to him the day before, which had come to him while shaving.

Beyond the college and the Faculty, Fleeman's workload increased dramatically during 1976-77 when he was appointed one of the two University Proctors (a post dating back to the Middle Ages). Marked out by white tie and clerical bands, the two Proctors, who traditionally represent the colleges and are independent of the Vice-Chancellor, are jointly responsible for student discipline—although they and the "bulldogs" (their thick-set, bowler-hatted deputies) do not command quite the same awe among the student body as they did in Johnson's day. As a Proctor Fleeman held overall responsibility for the conduct of university examinations and was ex officio a member of every administrative committee of the university, participating in the work of over sixty bodies. Not surprisingly, the job is taken on for only a year.

In 1977 this responsibility was handed on, only for another to take its place: when J. C. Maxwell was knocked down and killed by a motorcycle while walking home to his Oxford flat, Fleeman generously took on the joint editorship of Notes & Queries (the language/medieval editor was his Pembroke colleague, Professor Eric Stanley). No single human

being could replace the indefatigable Maxwell, with his carrier-bag filing system and panoptic learning, but for the next seven years he had a worthy successor. Contributors, especially inexperienced ones, could rely on Fleeman's encouragement and practical help: a submitted note might call forth a four-page letter full of ideas for fresh lines of inquiry and a host of questions for further deliberation. It is impossible to say how many young scholars found new impetus for their researches through such editorial support. Also during this period he was General Editor of the publications of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, and as such was responsible between 1974 and 1984 for the planning and overseeing of at least one volume a year. Between them the two editorships imposed a heavy burden.

They also came at a time when Fleeman's health was giving serious cause for concern, and the physical strain was considerable. Acute kidney failure followed, which was fortunately remedied in September 1979 by a successful transplant. Although his energy returned and he was soon able to resume work, this unsettled period was especially disruptive of research and left his major project suspended for a time. But happily he was about to enter his most productive decade to date, during which a series of publications confirmed him as the leading British Johnson scholar.

As early as 1971 Fleeman's devotion to Johnson was given public recognition when he was elected President of the Johnson Society of Lichfield, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as David Nichol Smith, L. F. Powell, Mary Lascelles, Mary Hyde, James Clifford, and Helen Gardner. The Annual Supper that year was more than ever a splendid occasion: "Liveried footmen served the traditional fare in the panelled Guildhall; the City plate—candelabra, punch bowls etc.,—was much in evidence, while the churchwarden pipes, smoke curling upwards in the candlelight, created a passable reproduction of an 18th century atmosphere" (so the report in the society's Transactions reads). In his Presidential address Fleeman (who had read Handley Cross by the age of six) likened himself to R. S. Surtees's Jorrocks: "O, John Jorrocks! John Jorrocks! you are indeed a most fortunate man! a most lucky dog! O dear! —O dear! was ever anything so truly delightful!" But instead of continuing in this vein with an after-dinner talk of Johnsonian anecdote and reminiscence, the Presidential Address soon became an informative lecture on Johnsonian bibliography. Fleeman has always been uneasy about what he referred to in a 1988 review as the "hoary old business" of "The Great Cham" whose main claim to greatness is his talk. For him Johnson is primarily a writer, a maker of books, not the anecdotal Johnson of dinner-table delight; his Johnson is more the man of the essays,

prefaces and poems, speaking directly in his own words and not dependent on the note-taking of others. It is as though Fleeman wants to discover Johnson from within, not as caught in performance by his friends. This uneasiness with the Johnson of many Johnsonians has worked to sharpen the rigour of his scholarship and the image of Johnson that it conveys.

As past President of both the Lichfield Society and the Johnson Club (1972-73), and a governor of Johnson's House since 1980, he was invited by the Johnson Society of London to lay the commemorative wreath in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, on 19 December 1981. On this occasion he chose to speak Johnson's haunting words on Iona: "To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings." In this powerful passage, memory and imagination, recollection and hope, relieve momentarily the struggle of the present, and Johnson in that spot senses a kind of eternity. But the next day he is busy again with practicalities: "In the morning we rose and surveyed the place. . . . I brought away rude measures of the buildings, such as I cannot much trust myself, inaccurately taken, and obscurely noted." The diurnal, self-deprecating human endeavour in a way brings us closer to Fleeman's Johnson; and it is this man, the brilliant master of words who recognised (to quote Fleeman's 1984 "Valediction") that "language is a mysterious and ultimately devious medium," who has been the focus of his scholarly research for over thirty years.