The late 1730s and early 1740s were accordingly for Johnson a period of Grub-Street hackery,15 interspersed with some brighter triumphs, such as the publication in 1738 of his Juvenalian imitation, London.16 He began writing for The Gentleman’s Magazine, contributing the ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ which, in a period when it was forbidden to report the debates in the House of Commons directly, were a mock-Swiftian vehicle for disseminating awareness of what was happening in Parliament. It was at this time, too, that Johnson composed two anti-government pamphlets, the anti-Walpolean Marmor Nor-folciense and A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (the second of which is reprinted below, pp. 495–509); in both these works he revealed his antipathy to Whiggism, as well as a streak of literary inventiveness.

The other literary form Johnson pursued during these years was biography. He composed lives of his friend the poet Richard Savage, of the historian Paolo Sarpi and of the physician Herman Boerhaave, as well as a series of shorter biographical sketches which he contributed to The Gentleman’s Magazine. Now, too, he began to frame larger literary projects. He contributed to the Harleian Miscellany (writing the ‘Introduction’, which is reprinted below on pp. 517–23), and compiled the catalogue of the Harleian library. He proposed an edition of Shakespeare, and in 1746 signed the contract for the Dictionary (finally to be published in 1755). In 1747 he published the Plan of an English Dictionary, dedicated to Lord Chesterfield, and in 1749 there appeared a second Juvenalian imitation, The Vanity of Human Wishes. So when the first Rambler appeared anonymously in 1750, even had its readers known that the author was Samuel Johnson, that name would have identified a jobbing journalist and political pamphleteer, who was also an accomplished if not prolific poet, and who had recently branched out into lexicography, textual editing and antiquarianism. It would not have suggested a master of moral wisdom. Yet in a few years, it would be these moral essays which formed Johnson’s surest claim to regard. When in 1755 the Earl of Arran wrote to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford to request that the degree of MA be conferred on Johnson, he emphasized that Johnson had ‘very eminently distinguished himself by the publication of a series of essays, excellently calculated to form the manners of the people, and in which the cause of religion and morality is every where maintained by the strongest powers of argument and language’.17 It was a judgement endorsed towards the end of the century by Arthur Murphy: ‘In this collection [The Rambler] Johnson is the great moral teacher of his countrymen; his essays form a body of ethics; the observations on life and manners are acute and instructive; and the essays, professedly critical, serve to promote the cause of literature.’18

The periodical essay was a well-established form before Johnson wrote The Rambler, and towards the end of his life, when writing on Addison, he explained what he saw as its particular strengths. In his view, the periodical essay derived from conduct books such as Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galatheo, Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano and La Bruyère’s Les caractères, ou les moeurs de ce siècle. These works, according to Johnson, had set themselves to ‘teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation’.19 But, in Johnson’s opinion, before the publication of The Tatler and The Spectator in 1709–11 and 1711–12 respectively, ‘England had no masters of common life’:

No writers had yet undertaken to reform either the savageness of neglect or the impertinence of civility; to shew when to speak, or to be silent; how to refuse, or how to comply. We had many books to teach us our more important duties, and to settle opinions in philosophy or politicks; but an Arbiter elegantiarum, a judge of propriety, was yet wanting, who should survey the track of daily conversation and free it from thorns and prickles, which teaze the passer, though they do not wound him.20

Yet this important function is discharged by nothing so well as ‘the frequent publication of short papers, which we read not as study, but amusement. If the subject be slight, the treatise is short. The busy may find time, and the idle may find patience.’21 Johnson was, in fact, wrong when he suggested that The Tatler and The Spectator had been first in the field. The periodical format went back as far as the 1660s and Henry Muddiman’s Oxford Gazette, while (as Angus Ross has pointed out) ‘it is no exaggeration to say that every form of writing, every topic of discussion or method of circulation (save the issue of collected papers by subscription) characteristic of The Tatler and The Spectator had been seen in some periodical or other before they appeared’.22 Moreover, when Johnson came to write The Rambler, he aspired to a much graver character than that of an arbiter elegantiarum’. Instead, he chose to move the periodical form back towards those ‘more important duties’ which in the ‘Life of Addison’ he considered were already adequately covered. Johnson wished ‘to reach the same audience the Spectator had so successfully entertained, but to encourage in it a more rigorously critical kind of thinking’.23 What nudged him in this direction?

It was perhaps the work on the Dictionary of the English Language, on which Johnson had embarked during the later 1740s, which both made the periodical essay an attractive form, and impelled him to give that form a graver moral turn. At one level, the composition of brief essays must have seemed a relief after the unremitting reading required by the Dictionary. At the same time, that very reading may have suggested to Johnson both the perennial moral topics which form the heart of The Rambler, and how to treat them. In part, that was because work on the Dictionary was gradually equipping Johnson with a philosophical vocabulary in which he could give weighty expression to his judgements on the topics of common life.24 The programme of reading which Johnson had set himself in order to assemble his illustrative quotations was in itself an education, involving as it did ‘incessant reading’ of ‘the best authors in our language’.25 Johnson fortified himself for his labours by drinking deeply from what in the Preface to the Dictionary he called ‘the wells of English undefiled… the pure sources of genuine diction’: namely, the best English writers between the last years of Elizabeth I and the Restoration, when the language had purged itself of barbarity, but before it had succumbed to the French influence which had entered the kingdom with Charles II.26 Even if those draughts were drained for lexicographical ends, it is inconceivable that Johnson’s mind would not have received from them a wider irrigation.

But there was perhaps another way in which the effort of compiling the Dictionary fertilized Johnson’s other writings. The broad consideration which compiling the Dictionary obliged Johnson to give to questions of language and grammar also alerted him to the possibility that the affective strengths of the English language might be found in what at a first and formal glance might look like its deficiencies. If we consider some of Johnson’s pronouncements on language, and then compare them with a poem he wrote towards the end of his life – the verses ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’ – we will be in a better position to appreciate how his grapplings with language in the making of the Dictionary may have influenced his ideas about the possibilities and pitfalls involved in what he was undertaking in The Rambler: that is, imbuing language with moral content.

Just as Johnson was politically an internal exile (a stubborn Tory obliged to live under Hanoverian monarchs and in a world of which the politics, irrespective of which particular party happened to be in or out, were fundamentally shaped by the Revolution Principles of 1688) so, too, he was estranged from the most fashionable ethical theories of his time, the spokesman for a conscious ethics of the will at a time when a contrary theory of morals was dominant. The two positions were elegantly formulated by David Hume, in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751):

There has been a controversy started of late… concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgement of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.27

Johnson, of course, was, in the terms of this opposition, an opponent of affective theories of ethics; that is to say, theories which located the origin of moral discriminations in involuntary sentiments, rather than conscious and reasoned judgements. The very holders of such views were probably enough to blacken them irredeemably in Johnson’s eyes: Shaftesbury, the arch-Whig and free-thinker; Hume, the religious sceptic against whom Johnson repeatedly ranged and defined himself; Adam Smith, leading figure of that Scottish Enlightenment which Johnson emphatically slighted in his Journey to the Western Islands.

In conversation with Boswell, however, Johnson expanded on his opposition to the ethical theories of Shaftesbury, Hume and Smith, and made clear that his suspicion of those theories was not simply transferred suspicion of the men who disseminated them:

We can have no dependence upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded upon principle. I grant you that such a man may be a very amiable member of society.