Scholarship

Apart from the works listed under Introductions and the more specific critical works listed under each of Johnson's major works, some of the important general scholarly articles and monographs are worth pointing out. Note that this section of my little guidelet is less satisfactory than any of the others; I'm just trying to point out some major titles.

Collections

A number of collections of essays are worth knowing:

F. W. Hilles, ed., New Light on Dr. Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959). A collection — uneven, as all collections are — of Johnsonian goodies.
Donald J. Greene, ed., Samuel Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1965). A handy collection of major essays from the forties and fifties.
Paul J. Korshin, ed., Johnson after Two Hundred Years (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).

I'll also mention The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, ed. Paul J. Korshin and Jack Lynch, which I think publishes some of the best recent Johnson scholarship — but then, I'm biased, since I'm on the payroll.

Oldies But Goodies

Much of the important scholarship on Johnson is pretty old — not to say old-fashioned. Even without going back to the almost antiquarian titles (like Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. [London: Smith, 1876], and Walter Raleigh's Six Essays on Johnson [Oxford: Clarendon, 1910]), a serious student should read a number of volumes from before 1970, including:

W. K. Wimsatt, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1941).
W. K. Wimsatt, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and the Dictionary of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948).
Bertrand H. Bronson, "The Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson," ELH, 18 (June 1951), 90-106; reprinted in Clifford's Eighteenth-Century Literature.
Maurice Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1964).
Jean H. Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967). The first edition appeared in 1952.
Chester Chapin, The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1968).

More Recent Studies

Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976).
Alvin Kernan, Printing, Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987); reissued in paperback in 1989 as Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print. A thought-provoking book, but one which sometimes shows — how should one put this? — inadequate regard to facticity.
Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). The title promises more than the book delivers, but with a title like that, it's probably inevitable. Hudson examines Johnson's opinions on many of the philosophical and (especially) theological disputes of the eighteenth century.
Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson's Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Reddick had access to materials Sledd and Kolb couldn't see, and meticulously pieces together the story of how Johnson assembled his Dictionary, both the first and fourth editions.

One other title worth mentioning is Edward Tomarken's Commentary on the Selected Works of Samuel Johnson, which, though not a comprehensive bibliography of criticism, does a pretty good job of pointing out the major trends and milestone works.

This is part of a Guide to Samuel Johnson by Jack Lynch. Comments are welcome.