The Cock Lane Ghost and the Spectacle of Samuel Johnson's Body

This essay focuses on a relatively minor mid-eighteenth-century poet, Charles Churchill (1731-1764), and his mostly forgotten satirical poem 'The Ghost'. The idea for this essay arose out of a disability-studies re-reading of Charles Churchill’s poem 'The Ghost'. I am deeply fascinated by the mutually informing histories of satiric representation on the one hand and cultural ideas about disability on the other. In the case of 'The Ghost', Book II, Samuel Johnson’s disabled embodiment provides the satiric material basis for a poem whose subject is otherwise spectral and immaterial. The reader of The Ghost is presented with two bodies writ large: Johnson’s debilitated body, tangible and factual, and the ghostly body that remains intangible and fictional. As the ghostly body is rendered airily fraudulent within the movement of the poem the fakery of Johnson’s defective body is conversely made solidly ‘factual’. Thinking through Churchill’s use of Johnson’s perceived debilitated embodiment in 'The Ghost' requires some context about the Cock Lane Ghost (the subject of the satire) as well as some careful consideration of the use of the word ‘disability’ in an eighteenth-century anglophone context.