Selected Essays (Penguin Classics)

SAMUEL JOHNSON SELECTED ESSAYS

SAMUEL JOHNSON was born in Lichfield in 1709, the son of a bookseller, and was educated at Lichfield Grammar School and, for a short time at Pembroke College, Oxford. He taught for a while, after which he worked for a Birmingham printer, for whom he translated Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia. In 1735 he married Elizabeth Jervis Porter and with her money opened a boarding academy. The school was a failure and in 1737 Johnson left for London. There, he became a regular contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine and struggled to earn a living from writing. But it was not until the award of a government pension in 1762 that Johnson gained financial security. His London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal was published anonymously in 1738 and attracted some attention. The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated appeared under his own name in 1749. From 1750 to 1752 he issued the Rambler, a periodical written almost entirely by himself, and consolidated his position as a notable moral essayist with some twenty-five essays in the Adventurer. The Idler essays, lighter in tone, appeared weekly between 1758 and 1760. When his Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, Johnson took on the proportions of a literary monarch in the London of his day. In need of money to visit his sick mother, he wrote Rasselas (1759) reportedly in the evenings of one week, finishing a couple of days after his mother’s death. In 1763 Boswell became his faithful follower and it is mainly to his Life that we owe our intimate knowledge of Johnson. Founded in 1764, ‘The Club’ (of literary men) was the perfect forum for the exercise of Johnson’s great conversational art. His edition of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in 1765. From August to November 1773 he and Boswell toured Scotland and in 1775 his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared. His last major work was Lives of the Poets. He died in December 1784.

DAVID WOMERSLEY is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. His book The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published by Cambridge University Press in 1988. He has also edited Augustan Critical Writing, a three-volume complete edition of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, all for Penguin Classics.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Selected Essays

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID WOMERSLEY

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Essays published 1739–61

This selection first published 2003

10

Selection, Introduction and Notes copyright © David Womersley, 2003

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196054-8

Contents

Chronology

Introduction

Further Reading

A Note on the Texts

THE RAMBLER (1750–52)

1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 47, 49, 60, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 85, 87, 90, 93, 101, 106, 108, 113, 114, 115, 121, 129, 134, 135, 137, 142, 145, 146, 148, 151, 156, 158, 159, 161, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 176, 181, 183, 184, 188, 191, 196, 207, 208.

THE ADVENTURER (1753–54)

39, 45, 50, 67, 69, 84, 85, 95, 99, 102, 107, 111, 119, 126, 137, 138.

THE IDLER (1758–60)

1, 5, 10, 17, [22], 22, 23, 27, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 72, 81, 84, 88, 94, 100, 103.

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS

‘A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage’ (1739)

‘An Essay on Epitaphs’ (1740)

‘Introduction’ to the Harleian Miscellany (1744)

‘Observations on the present State of Affairs’ (1756)

‘Of the Duty of a Journalist’ (1758)

‘The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers’ (1760)

Appendix I: Johnson’s prayer on beginning The Rambler

Appendix II: Parallel texts of the original and revised states of The Rambler No. 1

Appendix III: Bonnell Thornton’s parody of The Rambler

Notes

A Chronology of Samuel Johnson

1709 Born on 18 September in Lichfield; son of Michael and Sarah Johnson.

1712 Touched for the king’s evil (scrofula) by Queen Anne.

1717–25 Attends Lichfield Grammar School.

1728 Enters Pembroke College, Oxford, in October.

1729 Leaves Oxford in December.

1731 Death of his father, Michael Johnson.

1732 Works as an usher at Market Bosworth school.

1733 Translates Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia; contributes essays to the Birmingham Journal.

1735 Marries Elizabeth Porter; takes out lease on school at Edial.

1737 Leaves for London in March, accompanied by one of his pupils, David Garrick; begins working for the publisher Edward Cave, and contributes to The Gentleman’s Magazine.

1738 Publication of London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.

1739 Publication of A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage.

1744 Publication of Life of Mr. Richard Savage, and Harleian Miscellany.

1746 Contract signed for Dictionary.

1747 Publication of the ‘Plan’ of the Dictionary.

1749 Publication of The Vanity of Human Wishes; Garrick produces Irene.

1750 Begins The Rambler.

1752 Death of Elizabeth Johnson; The Rambler concludes.

1753 Begins contributing to The Adventurer in March.

1754 Ceases to contribute to The Adventurer in March; publishes biography of Cave.

1755 Publication of the Dictionary; awarded honorary MA, Oxford.

1758 Begins The Idler, published in The Universal Chronicle.

1759 Death of his mother, Sarah Johnson; publication of Rasselas: The Prince of Abyssinia.

1760 The Idler concludes.

1762 Receives pension of £300 per annum from George III.

1763 Meets James Boswell.

1764 Founding of ‘The Club’ (an informal group founded at suggestion of Joshua Reynolds).

1765 Awarded LL D, Dublin; publication of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (8 vols.). Meets Henry and Hester Thrale.

1770 Publication of The False Alarm.

1771 Publication of Thoughts on the late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands.

1773 Tour of the highlands of Scotland and the Hebrides.

1774 Publication of The Patriot; tour of Wales with the Thrales.

1775 Awarded DCL, Oxford; visits Paris with the Thrales; publication of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Taxation No Tyranny.

1777 Begins work on the Lives of the Poets.

1779 Publication of first instalment of the Lives of the Poets.

1781 Publication of second instalment of the Lives of the Poets.

1783 Founding of the Essex Head Club.

1784 Dies on 13 December.

Introduction

When Samuel Johnson died in 1784, William Hamilton saw the event as an irreparable calamity: ‘He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. – Johnson is dead. – Let us go to the next best: – there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.’1 This is not just testimony to the warmth of Johnson’s friendships, for his death had also made a rent in the literary life of the nation. Ever since 1759, when the novelist and man of letters Tobias Smollett had referred to Johnson as ‘that great CHAM of literature’, Johnson had contended for a station at the centre of English literature.2 His claims were not everywhere acknowledged – in 1770, for instance, Gilbert Cowper had dismissed him as ‘the Caliban of literature’.3 But Joseph Towers, writing in 1786, two years after Johnson’s death, believed that he had in the end prevailed:

His works, with all their defects, are a most valuable and important accession to the literature of England … his Dictionary, his moral essays, and his productions in polite literature, will convey useful instruction, and elegant entertainment, as long as the language in which they are written shall be understood; and give him a just claim to a distinguished rank among the best and ablest writers that England has produced.4

For the quarter of a century before he died, Johnson’s output as a poet, a novelist, a critic, a lexicographer, a biographer, an editor and (as we shall see) perhaps primarily as an essayist had made him a dominant figure in English literary life.

However, no one is born to such a position. It has to be attained. And Johnson seems to have taken the first, crucial steps towards that position in the early 1750s, when he composed a series of periodical essays published twice weekly as The Rambler. It was here that he created the literary character, identified the distinctive preoccupations, and forged the prose style, which established him in the mind of the reading public. As Johnson’s friend, Arthur Murphy, said in his Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (1792), The Rambler ‘may be considered as Johnson’s great work.