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

Kavanagh, Declan (2024) The Cock Lane Ghost and the Spectacle of Samuel Johnson's Body. The New Rambler: Journal of the Johnson Society of London, 22-23 (GV). pp. 83-99. ISSN 0028-6540. (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:106343)

Abstract

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.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled keywords: Samuel Johnson; Cock Lane Ghost; Charles Churchill; Disability; Satire; Poetry
Subjects: P Language and Literature
P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Funders: University of Kent (https://ror.org/00xkeyj56)
Depositing User: Declan Kavanagh
Date Deposited: 19 Jun 2024 14:45 UTC
Last Modified: 06 Aug 2024 18:28 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/106343 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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