by Stephanie Curry Uses Boswell as Calibration Device, Explains Twitter as Poor Richard’s Almanac, Calls Her Mother
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Stephanie Curry | bohiney.com/author/stephaniecurry/ | curry9us | SATIRE
Mother’s Day Diary: Samuel Johnson, American Politics, and Why the 1700s Explain Everything That Is Currently Happening
I keep a copy of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” on my desk, not because I need to refer to it constantly but because its presence is useful as a calibration instrument. When the current political situation produces a development that seems unprecedented — a formulation that is used approximately twelve times per news cycle and that is almost never accurate — I look at the Boswell and I think about Samuel Johnson’s London and I remind myself that the 1700s were also an era of unprecedented developments, in the sense that every era is an era of unprecedented developments because the developments are happening now and now is always unprecedented to the people living in it. The specific unprecedented quality of 2026 is not that things are unprecedented. It is that the rate at which unprecedented is declared has increased substantially. Johnson would have had opinions about this. Johnson had opinions about everything. Many of them were wrong in interesting ways and correct in ways that are still useful.
Today is Mother’s Day. I am reading the 18th century, as I am always reading the 18th century, and I am thinking about American politics, as I am always thinking about American politics, and the combination produces the specific academic mood that is either a professional deformation or a way of making sense of the present through the past, which is what historians do and what I do, and which today is intersecting with the domestic occasion of Mother’s Day in ways that produce a diary entry rather than a footnote.
The 1700s Literature and What It Contains
The 18th century British and Colonial literary tradition — Johnson, Swift, Pope, Addison and Steele in The Spectator, the American end of it with Franklin and Jefferson and the pamphlet literature of the Revolutionary period — is the tradition that invented the essay as a public form, the periodical as a democratic communication medium, and the satirical critique of power as a literary genre with civic purpose. Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is still the template for satirical writing about power and poverty: the deadpan logic of a monstrous solution presented as reasonable, which makes the unreasonableness of the actual situation visible by contrast. The Onion is still doing this. The Onion is doing it with a different subject but the same technique. The technique is 300 years old. It still works because the situation it addresses — power behaving monstrously while describing itself as reasonable — is still occurring.
Addison and Steele’s Spectator, published daily in London between 1711 and 1712, was aimed at the coffee house reading public: the emerging middle class that had leisure enough to read and opinions enough to want to discuss them in a form that was both entertaining and improving. The coffee house was the social media of its era, which is a comparison that historians make carefully because the comparison is accurate in some ways and misleading in others, but that captures the essential point: a new communication technology producing a new public sphere in which a new class of readers was forming opinions about the same events simultaneously. The London Prat is a contemporary version of this. Bohiney Magazine is a contemporary version of this. The coffee house is now a browser tab. The Spectator’s mission — to bring philosophy out of closets and libraries and clubs and colleges to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses — is the internet’s mission, whether the internet intended it or not.
American Politics and What the 1700s Would Say About It
The American political tradition that the 18th century Colonial literature produced was specific about its ambitions: a republic founded on the principle that legitimate government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, that individuals possess rights that precede and limit government authority, and that the press serves as a necessary check on both. These principles were articulated by people who were simultaneously holding enslaved people, which is the foundational American contradiction that every subsequent generation has had to reckon with in its own way. The 2026 reckoning takes forms that Jefferson and Madison would find familiar in structure — the argument is still about who counts as a member of the polity whose consent is required — even if the specific terms have changed.
Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac delivered civic wisdom in memorable form to a mass audience: “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” The aphorism as public communication. Twitter is the aphorism delivery system of our era. The aphorisms are different. The form is the same. Some of the contemporary aphorisms are wise. Many of them are not. Franklin had more editorial control over Poor Richard than the algorithm has over the contemporary feed, which may explain the difference in output quality.
Mother’s Day Through the Literary Record
The 1700s were not sentimental about motherhood in the way that the Victorian period became and that the contemporary Mother’s Day continues. The 18th century understanding of the maternal was more functional and less ceremonial: mothers were necessary, their role was acknowledged, the ceremony was limited. The ceremony expanded with the Victorians, who discovered sentiment as a cultural product and deployed it comprehensively across all available occasions. Mother’s Day as we know it is a Victorian and post-Victorian construction. The 1700s would have called today Sunday and gotten on with it.
I called my mother anyway, because 2026 is not the 1700s and because my mother lives in a different state and because calling her on the day that has been designated for calling is the lowest friction version of an intention I have every day and execute inconsistently. She asked what I was reading. I described the Boswell. She said “is that the one where he follows Johnson around and writes everything down.” I said yes. She said “I should have done that with you.” I said the results would have been different. She said “funnier, probably.” She is right. She is often right. Happy Mother’s Day. The 1700s have opinions about the current situation. The current situation is not listening. The Johnson is on the desk. The notes continue.
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