It was the basis of that high reputation which went on increasing to the end of his days.’5 Therefore this selection from Johnson’s journalism includes a generous proportion of essays from The Rambler, and a conscious attempt has been made to include examples of all the different kinds of essay Johnson composed for that paper. Furthermore, and to throw into relief how marked an innovation The Rambler was for Johnson, a number of his earlier essays and short pamphlets are also included. Finally, also included is the best of Johnson’s later journalism, whether published as separate items or in the two successors to The Rambler, namely The Idler and The Adventurer. Aside from their intrinsic interest, in these later works we can see Johnson at moments struggling within and even against the persona and literary style which he had so successfully created for himself in The Rambler.

What was that persona, and what was the style Johnson forged in order to express and give body to it? In his Life of Johnson, James Boswell records a conversation with Johnson on the subject of death which is of help here. Boswell had deliberately introduced this subject, and had provocatively cited instances of those who professed to be untroubled by their mortality, in order to draw Johnson out. It was a ploy which later caused him some remorse:

Here I am sensible I was in the wrong, to bring before his view what he ever looked upon with horrour; for although when in a celestial frame, in his ‘Vanity of human Wishes’, he has supposed death to be ‘kind Nature’s signal for retreat,’ from this state of being to ‘a happier seat’, his thoughts upon this aweful change were in general full of dismal apprehensions. His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.6

This image of Johnson’s mind as a place of interminable, endlessly renewed and never concluded struggle helps us to appreciate his prose style. In conversation Johnson tended to the simple and vigorous: ‘He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis.’7 But on paper his prose was marked by the ebb and flow of contrary qualities, as satire succeeded compassion, and inspiration was checked by reflection. In his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) William Hazlitt was sensitive to this quality in Johnson’s style, although he did not care for it:

Dr. Johnson was also a complete balance-master in the topics of morality. He never encourages hope, but he counteracts it by fear; he never elicits a truth, but he suggests some objection in answer to it. He seizes and alternately quits the clue of reason, lest it should involve him in the labyrinths of endless error: he wants confidence in himself and his fellows.8

A more sympathetic analysis of the dynamics of Johnson’s style will be offered below. The restlessness of Johnson’s prose is the signature of a moral wisdom which is always alert to the vanity of dogmatizing, and which therefore speaks to us most powerfully, not so much in what it says as in what it implies. Arthur Murphy sensed in Johnson’s essays the powerful presence of what is either left unsaid or unable to be said, when he reflected on how in The Rambler the powers of language seem to be exhausted: ‘the language seems to fall short of his ideas’.9 This falling short is not a defect, still less (as Hazlitt seems to imply) a case of fence-sitting. It is instead a means of dispelling what George Gleig, writing in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1793), referred to as ‘that inattention by which known truths are suffered to lie neglected’.10 As we attend to it, we discover a Johnson who can speak to our condition with a surprising directness, either when writing about, for instance, lotteries,11 or when reflecting with more sombreness on the permanent features of our moral existence.

One of the moments in Johnson’s life which still has the power to move the sympathetic reader of today arose out of his composition of The Rambler. In the Life of Johnson Boswell records Johnson’s memory that, some time early in 1750 and after the publication of a few Ramblers, his wife Tetty had confessed that these most recent writings had transformed her understanding of her husband. They had revealed in him unsuspected powers: ‘I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written any thing equal to this.’12 Some two years later, on 13 March 1752, Johnson presented his wife with the four duodecimo volumes of the collected Rambler. A few days later she was dead. As Allen Reddick has said with compassionate insight of this episode: ‘The timing of her epiphanic comment – the discovery of the extent of her husband’s genius just as her own decline began to hasten – and Johnson’s touching and desperate attempt to reach her through a gift of his own work that she had valued are simply further sad and ironical elements characteristic of the Johnsons’ marriage.’ 13 The common view of Tetty – that she was a slothful woman of unleavenable ordinariness, who took no interest in the work of the literary genius to whom she was married, and who killed herself with drink and opium14 – might encourage us to see her surprise at The Rambler as just another instance of her inability to understand her own experience. But would anyone have guessed in the early months of 1750 that Johnson would be able to write, not only anything as good as The Rambler, but even anything like it?

Even those who in 1750 knew Johnson well might have seen few clues. He had been born on 18 September 1709, the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller in Lichfield. In 1717 he entered Lichfield Grammar School, proceeding in 1728 to Pembroke College, Oxford. However, Johnson remained in Oxford for barely a year, leaving in December 1729. After the death of his father in 1731 he spent the early 1730s teaching and pursuing a literary career in the Midlands; for instance, in 1733 he had translated Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, a work eventually published in 1735. This was also the year in which Johnson married Elizabeth (or Tetty) Jervis, a widow with three children. In the following year he opened his own school at Edial near Lichfield, and began work on Irene, a moral tragedy set in Constantinople after its fall to the Turks (although the play was not to be performed until January 1749). Meanwhile, the school at Edial seems never to have flourished. It closed in 1737, and in March of that year Johnson, accompanied by David Garrick, moved to London and committed himself to a career as a man of letters.