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The Pride of Independence: Anaphora in Samuel Johnson's Letter to Chesterfield
In February 1755, as his monumental Dictionary of the English Language neared completion after seven years of solitary toil, Samuel Johnson received an overture from Lord Chesterfield. Seven years earlier, Chesterfield had accepted Johnson's initial dedication with polite indifference, subsequently ignoring the impoverished scholar during years of grueling labor. When the dictionary's imminent success became evident, Chesterfield published two effusive essays claiming patronly credit. Johnson responded with a masterpiece of epistolary defiance: a letter that dismantled the aristocratic patronage system forever. The letter achieved its devastating effect through a combination of icy aristocratic register and relentless syntactic anaphora.
Anaphora - the repetition of an initial word or phrase across successive clauses - operates in Johnson's letter as an engine of suppressed moral outrage. Rebutting Chesterfield's belated flattery, Johnson marshaled symmetrical clauses beginning with identical syntactic markers: