A Bibliography of
Johnsonian Studies,
1986–

Not seen.

Abstract: In some ways the English literary pair that most resembles al-Ḥārith and Abū Zayd is James Boswell (d. 1795) and Samuel Johnson (d. 1784). In both cases we have a narrator eager to learn from, and to impress, an older contemporary famous for his command of language. The senior member of the pair does not disappoint when it comes to eloquence, though in both cases he occasionally exploits his admirer or treats him with contempt. This Imposture, which is Englished after Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, involves a game similar to one played in Johnson’s literary circle . . .

Not seen.

Abstract: Puesto que toda «guerra de ideas» suele llevar aparejada una «guerra de palabras», nada más previsible que la conversión de un objeto aparentemente inocente y práctico, el diccionario, en arma arrojadiza.Subvirtiendo de modo radical el principio de objetividad y asepsia que debe presidir el cometido del diccionarista (el repertorio de voces y definiciones que nos brinde no debe traslucir sus ideas ni sus creencias), los autores de una serie de (pequeños) diccionarios de combate basarían su eficacia en la redacción de entradas lexicográficas burlescas у/o polémicas, merced, sobre todo, a la inclusión de definiciones cínica o irónicamente disparatadas y antifrásticas, o jocosas (en la línea de algunas de las del célebre diccionario de Samuel Johnson). (Hubo, por cierto, voces que alertaban del peligro de que el público conociera ideas «disolventes» justamente por medio de sus contradictores, a los que estaría con ello saliendo el tiro por la culata). En un fundamental estudio de 1996, Germán Ramírez Aledón desveló quién era el autor de la obra: cierto Justo Pastor Pérez sobre el que Cantos Casenave ha reunido copiosa información, incluida la que se refiere a su segundo apellido, Santesteban (pues Pastor es, lo mismo que Justo, nombre de pila).

Not seen.

SJ was addicted to medicinal opium, which produced rather than alleviated many of his symptoms.

A classicist’s challenge to Greene’s interpretation of the M in Johnson’s diaries as a reference to masturbation.

Miscellaneous observations on Johnson’s knowledge of the classics.

A correction to Lonsdale’s note in the Life of J. Philips on Jonson’s quotation of Cicero on Lucretius.

On Boswell’s attribution of a free translation of “The Jests of Hierocles,” in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1741, to Johnson. G. B. Hill rejected the attribution; Baldwin argues in its favor.

A note on Hester Thrale Piozzi’s knowledge of classical literature, especially as expressed in Thraliana and The Piozzi Letters.

A response to Freeman’s “Affection’s Eye,” arguing that the Dictionary definitions of patron “are quite unexceptionable.”

A speculative mystery novel about James Boswell and his murderous brother John, set in 1763, when they come to know Johnson.

A survey of Johnson’s importance in Colonial American libraries and booksellers’ catalogues.

Abstract: 本书讲述塞缪尔·约翰生的生平,性格和作品.展现出这位伟人的优点与缺点,他内心的动荡与叛逆,他内心中独立与依赖,敌意与内疚的分裂,刻画出约翰生强烈的痛苦与勇气.Ben shu jiang shu sai mou er·Yue han sheng de sheng ping,Xing ge he zuo pin.Zhan xian chu zhei wei wei ren de you dian yu que dian,Ta nei xin de dong dang yu pan ni,Ta nei xin zhong du li yu yi lai,Di yi yu nei jiu de fen lie,Ke hua chu yue han sheng qiang lie de tong ku yu yong qi.

On orthodox critiques of religious heresies in a number of 18th-c. authors.

Not seen.

A study of the influence of the Ge’ez literatures of Ethiopia on Samuel Johnson.

A comic song to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Paradox Trio.”

Berglund teases out the Johnsonian themes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories.

Although he developed many of the principles of critical editing, Johnson did not use them in his Shakespeare edition, depending instead on Theobald’s text.

Abstract: It seems that at least two remarkable personalities, Dr. Samuel Johnson, a man of letters and the first person to compile an English dictionary, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, arguably the most creative musical composer of all time, were possibly afflicted with this condition.

Not seen.

Russian translation of Boswell’s Life (abridged). Not seen.

The first volume of the Yale Research Series of Boswell’s journals, corresponding to Pottle’s edition of Boswell on the Grand Tour.

Publisher’s blurb: “This new edition collates and corrects the textual inaccuracies of previous versions, returning to the original manuscript in order to present a definitive edition of this landmark text.” Not seen.

Abstract: 本书记述了十八世纪著名英国诗人,散文家,批评家和英语词典编纂家约翰生的一生,并介绍了其代表作等.Ben shu ji shu le shi ba shi ji zhu ming ying guo shi ren,San wen jia,Pi ping jia he ying yu ci dian bian zuan jia yue han sheng de yi sheng,Bing jie shao le qi dai biao zuo deng.

SJ made substantive revisions to the debate in the House of Lords of 4 Dec. 1741, enough text to fill four galley sheets, as it went through reprints in the Gentleman’s Magazine.

Not seen???

A short overview of three milestone English dictionaries.

Contains Johnson’s Journey into North Wales in the Year 1774 and Hester Thrale’s Journal of a Tour in Wales with Dr. Johnson. With illustrations and maps.

Abstract: This paper investigates the distribution of words and clusters within a single corpus and across a pair of related corpora. With a corpus containing Samuel Johnson’s periodical essays as the target corpus and a corpus of Addison’s essays as the reference corpus, it is shown how standard techniques for identifying keywords can be extended to identifying distributional tendencies within texts at the levels of sentence, paragraph and whole section/essay. Supplementing the investigation with collocational and concordance data, the main keywords, including TO at sentence, AND at paragraph, BY at essay level, and the main three-word clusters at the various levels, are discussed. It is argued that the methods described are useful additions to the corpus stylistic researcher’s arsenal of techniques.

A brief introduction to Johnson’s life, works, and character, with extracts from the Lives of Swift, Pope, and Gray

Abstract: The “Poems of Doubtful Authorship” in modern editions of Samuel Johnson’s poetry include three Latin poems that were first associated with Johnson in 1856. This article reveals the weakness of this alleged “attribution” and discusses the arguments for and against Johnson’s authorship of each poem in turn. While certainty is impossible, it concludes that he possibly wrote the translation Ex cantico Solomonis but that Venus in Armour and The Logical Warehouse are unlikely to be his.

Abstract: This is the first known publication of some Latin verses written by Samuel Johnson on the last page of his Welsh Diary. The left column lists the dates of various historical events. The right column contains dactylic hexameters that versify the dates of eleven of these events. The article supplies a text and translation of the verses, together with annotations and a discussion of their content.

Abstract: The epigram In Locupletissimum ornatissimumque SYL. URB. Thesaurum (On the most opulent and ornate treasury of Sylvanus Urban), signed by “Rusticus,” which appears after the title-page in volume 6 of the Gentleman’s Magazine (1736), was attributed to Samuel Johnson by John Nichols in 1821. This article disputes the attribution on two main grounds: (i) A contribution by Rusticus follows Johnson’s ode Ad Urbanum (GM, vol. 8, 1738, 156) which, according to Boswell, was his first contribution to the Gentleman’s Magazine. (ii) This Rusticus can be linked to the Rusticus who was a regular contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1735–36 (vols. 5–6). At least twenty of the twenty-five poems signed by Rusticus in 1735–36 (excluding In Locupletissimum) can be shown to be by the same author, and a case can be made for his having composed them all. The combination of these points makes it highly probable that he was also the author of In Locupletissimum, and that Johnson’s ode Ad Urbanum was ...

Johnson “strongly supported political liberties, as long as they liberty asserted was ordered liberty and not license.” Includes readings especially of the Lives and Boswell.

Abstract: This thesis is about the influence of the periodical essay on the novel — and vice versa — in the early years of the eighteenth century. Focusing on the period 1700–1760, it addresses the interchange between essay-periodicals and longer form prose writing and, in so doing, begins to close the distance between the two separate fields of periodical studies and histories of the novel. The thesis engages these two areas to challenge, at the same time as taking seriously, the divisions that result from subsuming other print media into a broader narrative of the “rise” of the novel. I argue that fiction, and more specifically fictionality, is not synonymous with the novel (as is often assumed to be the case), but is a mode of literary expression that resulted from the cross-fertilization of periodical and long form prose writing. Yet while attention has been paid to the relationship between the essay-periodical and dramatic writing, there is no current study of the relationship between the essay-periodical and the novel in this period; the significance of the concomitant emergence of these two forms within the complex print ecology of the early eighteenth century has received comparatively little attention. Chapter One explores the emergence of the essay-periodical as a new genre of writing and argues that this form belongs squarely to the eighteenth century. Chapters Two through Five offer four author studies: Daniel Defoe; Eliza Haywood; Henry Fielding; Samuel Johnson. These demonstrate how the terminology of novel studies intersects with periodical studies. Each chapter addresses a specific trait that emerges as a key feature of that author’s periodicals and novels: conversability and inclusivity; witness testimony and credibility; taste and self-conscious innovation; and anxieties over different literary forms.

On Peter Martin and Nicholas Cambridge’s waslk from Lichfield to London in March 2009 and the celebratory dinner at the House of Lords, 14 May 2009.

Abstract: The story of the extraordinary relationship between a former slave and England’s most distinguished man of letters This compelling book chronicles a young boy’s journey from the horrors of Jamaican slavery to the heart of London’s literary world, and reveals the unlikely friendship that changed his life. Francis Barber, born in Jamaica, was brought to London by his owner in 1750 and became a servant in the household of the renowned Dr. Samuel Johnson. Although Barber left London for a time and served in the British navy during the Seven Years’ War, he later returned to Johnson’s employ. A fascinating reversal took place in the relationship between the two men as Johnson’s health declined and the older man came to rely more and more upon his now educated and devoted companion. When Johnson died he left the bulk of his estate to Barber, a generous (and at the time scandalous) legacy, and a testament to the depth of their friendship. There were thousands of black Britons in the eighteenth century, but few accounts of their lives exist. In uncovering Francis Barber’s story, this book not only provides insights into his life and Samuel Johnson’s but also opens a window onto London when slaves had yet to win their freedom.

Abstract: Bundock cites that in the house in Gough Square where Samuel Johnson once lived there hangs an engraving of a well-known painting of the great man of letters. Seated at dinner with Johnson are some of the most celebrated figures of the day: David Garrick, the actor and theatre manager, Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal Academy, the statesman Edmund Burke, the playwright Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, Johnson’s biographer, and others too. It forms a sort of eighteenth-century Who’s Who. This is a familiar image of Johnson: the focal point of a group of accomplished men, declaiming, arguing and contradicting. But there was another Johnson, the domestic figure, living at the center of a very different group. One of them can be glimpsed in the portrait, the black servant at the back of the scene, fetching something for the gathering to drink. This is probably intended to represent Francis Barber, once a slave, and now one of Johnson’s dependants.

Abstract: This chapter, written by Michael Bundock, describes competing portrayals of Francis Barber, the Jamaican manservant and friend of writer Samuel Johnson who worked in his household for the better part of three decades and became his heir. The incompatible depictions are found in separate biographies of Johnson written by lawyers John Hawkins and James Boswell as well as in other writings and letters. Hawkins’ biography, published first, is openly hostile to Barber. His disdain for Barber’s interracial marriage and criticism of Johnson’s indulgent financial and emotional support of Barber is tinged with racism. Bundock supposes that Boswell’s own biography of Johnson was, in part, a response and rebuke to Hawkins’—especially so in his favourable characterization of Barber, his wife and their closeness with Johnson. Comparing these rival biographies, Bundock attempts to evaluate the authors’ motivations as well as their attitudes to race.

Not seen.

Not seen.

A keepsake on Byrne’s acquisition of Johnson’s brief Latin translation from the Greek Anthology, completed 28 Jan. 1784, with a facsimile.

Abstract: 本书汇集作者十余篇文论,分别介绍和约翰生小说,约翰生与启蒙运动,约翰生的诗学观及其政治,宗教,哲学和全球化思想.国外约翰生学研究概况,呈现英美澳的研究进展和学习活动常态.Ben shu hui ji zuo zhe shi yu pian wen lun,Fen bie jie shao yue han sheng chuan he yue han sheng xiao shuo xing fu gu, Yue han sheng yu qi meng yun dong, Yue han sheng de shi xue guan ji qi zheng zhi, Zong jiao, Zhe xue he quan qiu hua si xiang.Guo wai yue han sheng xue yan jiu gai kuang, Cheng xian ying mei ao de yan jiu jin zhan he xue xi huo dong chang tai.

Abstract: 本书采纳十余种流行且有影响的约翰生传记资源,分阶段叙述介绍约翰生一生及各位传记作者对其人其思想的评价,极力反映出不同时期尤其当代的约翰生传记写作和研究现况,提供较为完整的理解约翰生著书立说,知行同一的智慧人生画面,试图揭示约翰生何以成为谈不完的话题.Ben shu cai na shi yu zhong liu xing qie you ying xiang de yue han sheng chuan ji zi yuan,Fen jie duan xu shu jie shao yue han sheng yi sheng ji ge wei chuan ji zuo zhe dui qi ren qi si xiang de ping jia,Ji li fan ying chu bu tong shi qi you qi dang dai de yue han sheng chuan ji xie zuo he yan jiu xian kuang,Ti gong jiao wei wan zheng de li jie yue han sheng zhu shu li shuo,Zhi xing tong yi de zhi hui ren sheng hua mian,Shi tu jie shi yue han sheng he yi cheng wei tan bu wan de hua ti.

Abstract: This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels—in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762)—are portrayed as perfect models or as complex humans. The first method asks them to engage with definitions of the term “heroine,” and the second method uses word clouds to extend their thinking about the complexity of embodying a mid-eighteenth-century female identity.

Not seen.

On Boswell’s “protective deletion” of episodes in the MS of the Life. When SJ kicks the stone to refute Berkeley, it was originally a foundation stone of a church building; Boswell revised it before publication to portray SJ’s devotion.

A short notice observing the 250th anniversary of the Dictionary.

“While Johnson may have been linked arm-in-arm with Boswell on the road, he was really ‘strolling’ with Pennant in his writing. . . . Pennant’s ambition to write an exhaustive and definitive study of Scotland if anything facilitates rather than inhibits Johnson’s own composition, fostering its distinct subjective voice.”

The first edition of Chambers’s Lectures, secretly co-authored by Johnson. Curley’s editorial material makes the case for Johnson’s involvement.

Not seen.

Not seen.

An early salvo in the arguments over Johnson’s attitudes toward Jacobitism.

A further consideration of Johnson’s take on Jacobitism, placed in a larger cultural context.

Clark responds to Weinbrot’s letter of 28 March 2014.

A collection of scholarly essays, especially on Johnson’s politics. His putative Jacobitism is discussed in many of the contributions.

Abstract: Of the libraries of Club members, none have been the subject of so much study in proportion to their inherent bibliographical importance as that of Samuel Johnson himself. The Johnson Club in 1892 printed a facsimile of an unpriced copy, but two surviving copies that list both prices and purchasers have also been reproduced in facsimile. Club members, however, were buying relics of their friend, and in the subsequent two and half centuries Johnson’s own copies of books have been treated as just that, treasured for their associational value. Books from Johnson’s library are extremely scarce in trade. Of the books marked up by Johnson for quotations in the Dictionary, Graham Nicholls recorded in 1990 that only thirteen marked-up copies had been found, despite quarter of a million quotations the Dictionary containing about a from about 640 authors.

On recent Johnsonian publications from Bucknell Univ. Press, of which Clingham is the Director.

A transcription of Thomas Percy’s notes in a copy of Williams now in the Hyde Collection. Percy provides brief biographical background on Williams and attributesseveral works to Johnson.

Not seen???

An account of Clingham’s lectures to Japanese universities and the Johnson Society of Japan, with a discussion of Johnsonian publications in Japan.

Abstract: Clingham talks about John Opie’s portraits of Samuel Johnson, one of the most painted individuals in English literary history. Given the advanced state of the scholarship, one assumes that all lifetime paintings of Johnson have been identified, cataloged, and discussed. Contrary to common assumption, Opie produced three and not one portrait of Johnson. One might assume that one of the paintings came from the live sittings and that the others were studio work, and thus derivative.

A collection of fourteen original essays to mark Johnson’s tercentenary. See the separate entries by Fred Parker, Greg Clingham, Howard Weinbrot, Clement Hawes, David Venturo, J. T. Scanlan, Jack Lynch, David Fairer, Philip Smallwood, Adam Rounce, Isobel Grundy, Freya Johnston, O M Brack, Jr., and David Ferry.

“This book analyses the structure and function of each literary allusion identified in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). Johnson’s familiarity with the classics and other literatures is thereby manifested in a variety of ways, with a powerful personal voice and, no less important, looking for reader involvement. Allusion, as contended in this monograph, is indeed an integral part of the formal artistry and intellectual depth of the Journey, thus contributing to making Johnson’s Scottish travelogue what it is — a major exponent of Travel Literature.” Not seen.

Abstract: Samuel Johnson stands today as one of the most commonly quoted of ail literary figures in the English-speaking world. In my Collins Dictionary of Quotations, he gets about nine pages. Shakespeare gets about sixty and the Bible gets seventeen. Just as there are Shakespeare societies all over the world, so too are there Samuel Johnson societies.

A boy, his dog, and their struggle to escape the wrath of demons. Young Samuel Johnson foiled the invasion of Earth by the forces of evil; now they want to get their claws on Samuel and his faithful dachshund, Boswell.

Abstract: Continuação da série Samuel Johnson iniciada com Os PortõesSamuel Johnson está em apuros. Sua visão ruim o faz passar o maior vexame, e o demônio sra. Abernathy está com sede de vingança desde que seus planos de invadir a Terra foram frustrados pelo jovem. Ela planeja aprisioná-lo e, quando o Grande Colisor de Hádrons é religado, a oportunidade bate à porta. Samuel e seu fiel bassê, Boswell, são arrastados para as profundezas do Inferno, onde serão caçados pela sra. Abernathy e seus lacaios infernais.Mas apanhar Samuel não será nada fácil para o demônio, que já testemunhou de perto a bravura e a inteligência do garoto e seu cão, além da leal amizade entre Samuel e o infeliz demônio Nurd. Ela também não conta com a presença de dois incompetentes policiais e de um azarado — no sentido mais otimista da palavra — sorveteiro.Tampouco poderia esperar a intervenção de um grupo de pequenos seres que confirmam que Samuel e Boswell não são os únicos habitantes da Terra a pararem de uma hora para outra no Inferno.Se você pensava que demônios eram assustadores, espere até encontrar Os Elfos do Sr. Merryweather.

An account of Johnson’s composition of the Dictionary, against the background of academic dictionaries, including the Italian Vocabolario and the Dictionnaire de l’Académie fran&ccdeil;oise. “From the first sentence of the ‘Scheme’ to the editions which closed the Plan, Johnson had dictionaries in the academy tradition in mind.&lquo;

Abstract: Early responses to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language included manuscript annotations, sometimes very extensive, in copies of the dictionary. This article surveys twenty-one copies of eighteenth-century editions of the dictionary with critical or informative annotations, bearing on etymology or usage, adding new words or senses, or improving the supply and referencing of quotations. Some of these copies are extant in institutional or private collections, and others are unlocated. The annotators include Johnson himself; members of his circle including Edmund Burke, Samuel Dyer, Edmond Malone, Hester Piozzi, and George Steevens; and other readers including Leigh Hunt, Horne Tooke, Noah Webster, and John Wilkes.

A letter to the editor on David Nokes’s biography, arguing for the importance of Hester Thrale in that book.

Abstract: This book is the first to assess Johnson’s diverse insights into friendship-that is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of it-over the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnson’s understanding of friendship in the private and public spheres-in particular, friendship’s therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends, and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship, across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnson’s writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth century British culture.

A meditation on Johnson’s use of “interruption,” which explores his own relationship with realistic fiction. Crane argues that “here was a novelist, if a reluctant one, in Johnson.”

A response to Clark and Erskine-Hill, arguing that Johnson was not a Jacobite.

A continuation of Curley’s argument against Johnson’s putative Jacobitism.

A monograph-length survey of Johnson’s interest in and knowledge of Irish culture.

An extensive investigation of Macpherson’s manipulation of traditional material in the Ossianic poems.

A comprehensive review of Johnson’s involvement in the Ossian affair and an extended look at his relationship with Irish culture.

A survey of reviews of the recent biographies by Peter Martin and Jeffrey Meyers, drawn from the New York Times, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, and the Johnsonian News Letter.

“In a talk of this kind, the usual gambit would be to say that Rousseau and Johnson may look different superficially, but deep down they turn out to be alike. Well, they don’t. They’re 180 degrees apart on pretty much everything.”

Abstract: In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.

Abstract: This essay considers the interdependence of formal and ethical questions about the appropriate use of particular detail by juxtaposing eighteenth-century fiction to contemporary practices of life-writing, especially the use of detail by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets and Boswell in his Life of Johnson. After laying out some premises about what constitutes novelistic detail during this period, the essay explores a productive tension between an ethical argument against “being particular” when writing about real historical figures and an increasingly strong preference for specificity in both fiction and nonfiction.

Not seen.

Abstract: This chapter focuses on the periodical essays written for The Rambler and The Idler, which demonstrate what have been termed the “peculiarities” that “distinguish the prose of Johnson’s maturity.” Johnson asserts that the contemplation of death is necessary for a virtuous life. A number of The Rambler essays reveal Johnson’s awareness of both the necessity of attending to the passing of time and his horror at the thought of its destructive action. There are clearly grounds on which to align this mode of representation with what has been identified as Johnson’s “emphasis on the common and the general” and to a universalizing tendency in his work. The frequency of Johnson’s repetition of the adverbs in conjunction with the progressive construction, therefore, can also be construed as a representation of his personal experience of this state of “permanent imminence” as well as his insistent determination to attend to what horrifies him.

Abstract: This chapter explores Johnson’s attempts, through the narrative construction of the Lives, to negotiate challenges and to acknowledge if not resolve the moral, theological, and existential questions that they raise. A useful starting point for such an analysis is Johnson’s own Dictionary definition of coherence: The texture of a discourse, by which one part follows another regularly and naturally. The “Life of William Collins” is organized around his poverty, mental “disorder,” and the twists of fortune and misfortune that befell him. Johnson was famously the subject of numerous anecdotes, but read, recommended, and collected them himself. In historiographical studies the anecdote “has always stood in close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history, sometimes in supportive role, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a challenging role, as the repressed of history — “la petite histoire.” Incomplete, it consists only of a scene set at Bolt Court in which the characters reflect on the nature and meaning of death.

A scholarly investigation of SJ’s involvement in a religious dispute.

On Johnson’s treatment of Shakespeare in the Dictionary in light of his comments on the Germanic origins of the English language.

Abstract: Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), the great lexicographer and essayist, suffered from melancholy all his life. He believed that the disorder was congenital and that it afflicted his mind. To some degree, he saw the problem as arising in his abnormally large and partially disabled body. Locating the source of melancholy in his body, gave Johnson a way to deal with it, and it partially relieved him of the guilt and shame he felt concerning the disease. Johnson’s greatest fear concerning his condition was that it touched not only his mind but also his soul. In the form of scruples and spiritual torpor, melancholy weighed Johnson down and stimulated his fears of death and damnation. As a physical body, Johnson was perhaps deformed, but he was courageous. No physical danger frightened him, but he trembled for the life of his soul, and his melancholy, even if it was psycho-somatic (avant la lettre), was his greatest threat.

Abstract: DeMaria offers information on the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 1958–2018. The twenty-third and last volume of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson was officially published on January 8, 2019. The date on the last volume, however, is 2018, so for me that is the terminus ad quem. Besides, 2018 makes it an even six decades between the publication of the first volume and the last. Six decades is not just a number. The length of time that it took to complete the Yale Edition and the changes in personnel that took place over those six decades are a big part of the story of how the Edition came to be what it now is — and, unless some hearty soul undertakes to revise it, how it always will be, at least in its printed form.

Abstract: The two great literary events of 1721 were the death of Matthew Prior and the publication of the Works of Joseph Addison, the beloved public figure who had died in 1719. These events are representative of a turning point in the history of authorship in Britain, which was accompanied by a change in the nature of poetry. Authors became more professional and specialised, less dependent on patrons and social connections. At the same time the genres of panegyric and epic were largely abandoned in favour of satire and mock-epic. The history of these changes is complicated, however, as this essay shows in an examination of Addison’s celebration of the Battle of Blenheim, The Campaign (1705), and Prior’s celebration of the Battle of Ramilies, An Ode, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Queen on the Glorious Success of Her Majesty’s Arms, 1706.

Abstract: This book gives a full but concise introduction to Samuel Johnson’s life and works. For literature students, it will be a useful survey of Johnson’s work; for the general reader, a readable overview of this legendary figure of English literature and history.

On scholarly and popular fascination with SJ as a man, including interest in his body.

Abstract: Recognizing the simultaneous rise of the English standardization movement and the British Empire, this article addresses how eighteenth-century attempts at “correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English tongue” can be read as political and social allegories offering insight into the expanding empire’s emerging self-image. With close readings of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Hugh Blair, this article focuses in particular on the many contentious resonances of English as a “copious” language, one whose hybridity seemed capable at times of both worsening and alleviating the empire’s fissures. By using language theory to locate the original articulation of copiousness as problem and solution, this article continues with a reading of a poem by Sir William Jones, a writer who saw a specific form of cultural and linguistic syncretism as a way to advance both literature and empire.

Dille examines Hill’s Johnsonian editions, paying particular attention to his politics.

The most thorough consideration of the abridged editions of the Dictionary

Dix notes three previously neglected brief mentions of Johnson in unpublished sources.

Abstract: Previous chapters have recounted the story of monolingual dictionaries. Samuel Johnson established English lexicology, and only minor improvements have been made since his time. Johnson combined erudition, imagination, and application. He also had a sense of perspective, according to each word a length of entry appropriate to its role in the language. Legal, medical, and agricultural terms were taken – with acknowledgement – from standard works. Highly technical terms were avoided, these being accessible in specialist manuals.Johnson’s innovations included recognising several senses for those words which have a wide range of meaning, including quotations to demonstrate how a word was used by the ‘best authors,’ plus basic grammatical information concerning word class, and transitivity value for verbs.His work has been criticised for not paying sufficient attention to usage in everyday discourse. This is only partly justified. Johnson did confine his quotations to the ‘best authors,’ but his definitions would have been informed by the conversational round in London for which he was a central figure. (The same could not be said of his predecessors and successors.) Another (justified) criticism is that the senses within a definition could have been more thoughtfully organised, around a ‘central meaning’, with extensions in different directions from this.What Johnson absolutely failed to do was make any attempt to contrast words of similar meaning, providing criteria and clues concerning the circumstances in which it would be more felicitous to use one word rather than another. Each word was regarded as an isolated entity, its definition autonomous.Johnson’s definitions were original, avoiding the ‘theft’ of unattributed plagiarism. The same applied for Charles Richardson in 1835–7, but his huge tome lies a little outside the mainstream. The OED worked in its own way, although it sometimes did utilise elegant portions of Johnson, shown by ‘(J)’. For example, how could the meaning of swift be better characterised than by ‘moving far in a short time (J)’? Leaving aside these two exceptions we can return to the self-description of how a lexicographer works with ‘a row of dictionaries’ propped on the desk. It is worth revisiting quotations already given in chapter 10.

Abstract: Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 argues that between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries manual writing was a dynamic technology. It examines script in relation to becoming a writer; in constructions of the author; and in emerging ideas of the human. Revising views of print as displacing script, Work in Hand argues that print reproduced script, print generated script, and print shaped understandings of script. In this, the double nature of print, as both moveable type and rolling press, is crucial. During this period, the shapes of letters changed as the multiple hands of the early modern period gave way to English round hand; the denial of writing to the labouring classes was slowly replaced by acceptance of the desirability of universal writing; understandings of script in relation to copying and discipline came to be accompanied by ideas of the autograph. The work begins by surveying representations of script in letterpress and engraving. It discusses initiation into writing in relation to the copybooks of English writing masters, and in the context of colonial pedagogy in Ireland and India. The middle chapters discuss the physical work of writing, the material dimensions of script, and the autograph, in constructions of the author in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in relation to Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, William Blake, Isaac D’Israeli, and Maria Edgeworth. The final chapter considers the emerging association of script with ideas of the human in the work of the Methodist preacher Joseph Barker.

Abstract: In the Preface to Shakespeare Johnson attacks Thomas Edwards and Benjamin Heath as William Warburton’s most relentless critics, who are allegedly not even worthy of comparison with the bishop. Yet Johnson’s contemporaries and some modern scholars alike have remarked his unacknowledged debt to these two critics in his 1765 edition. Immediately after Johnson’s edition appeared in 1765 William Kenrick, a learned but libelous journalist, reviewed it at length and demonstrated some of the many lapses in giving credit to Edwards’s commentary. For the revisions of 1773 and 1778, George Steevens even cited Kenrick favorably for some readings and also made a point of including not only Edwards’s relevant commentary from the Canons of Criticism but also new Edwards manuscript material he had acquired in time for the revisions. It was not until the twentieth century that fresh allegations of plagiarism were leveled against the 1765 Shakespeare. This essay reviews the charges presented ...

Abstract: This essay makes the controversial claim that it has finally solved Twelfth Night’s “fustian riddle”, the riddle Maria devises to entrap Malvolio. Paying close attention to First Folio spellings, Elizabethan pronunciation, and uncommon meanings of key words and phrases, it uncovers essential hints and clues that have been obscured by the passage of time but would have been readily accessible to Twelfth Night’s original audiences. The most helpful of these, it turns out, are embedded in Fabian’s quip – made as Malvolio is trying to discover the correct “alphabetical position” of the letters M.O.A.I. – “And O shall end, I hope”. As Samuel Johnson long ago proposed, this remark alludes to the subject of hanging: the “O” makes a visual pun on the hangman’s noose, with “end” of course being a reference to the fate of the person being hanged. In addition to this figurative meaning, Fabian’s comment provides literal clues about the correct ordering of the four letters...

A contribution to the argument over Johnson’s Jacobite sympathies.

Abstract: A delightful and essential compendium of words, new, old or abused through Brexit.

Not seen???

Abstract: Através da comparação entre o Preface to a Shakespeare, do crítico inglês Samuel Johnson e as concepções balizadoras da modernidade na poesia promovidas pelo poeta Wiliam Wordsworth, no célebre prefácio ao Lyrical Ballads, se entrevê, no raiar do século XIX, uma curiosa coincidência: um e outro, embora por modos distintos, depõem o ruir das concepções clássicas e neoclássicas da feitura da arte poética. Através do instrumental teórico de M. H. Abrams, em O espelho e a lâmpada: teoria romântica e tradição crítica, este artigo pretende discutir as concepções de arte, literatura e poesia para Johnson e Wordsworth. O enfoque do presente texto, portanto, é a modificação de consciência que se deu entre o fim do século XVIII e início do XIX, na tentativa de compreensão da sensibilidade poética romântica, autônoma e avessa a quaisquer regras que não a do próprio sentimento do poeta, que irrompe sob as ruínas das práticas letradas seiscentistas e setecentistas.

Letter to the editor, suggesting one reason Johnson left Oxford may have been that he “knew he was superior in both intelligence and learning to his tutors.”

Not seen???

[Author’s abstract:] The handwritten note of the post-mortem examination of Dr Samuel Johnson resides in the library of the Royal College of Physicians of London. Headed “asthma” it suggests that he had only one functioning kidney, probably had hypertension, left ventricular hypertrophy and congestive heart failure. This article describes an imaginary presentation by Dr James Wilson, who did the autopsy, and alludes to Johnson’s life, and medical history, including impaired vision and hearing, scrofula, abnormal limb movement, gout, abdominal cramps, melancholia and episodes of “asthma” which were, more than likely to have been episodes of left ventricular failure. Johnson’s personality as a demanding patient who took things into his own hands are described based upon reports from his physicians. Not seen.

A reply to Greene’s argument about the leter M in Johnson’s diaries.

A monumental bibliography of Johnson’s works, a project to which Fleeman devoted much of his career. McLaverty completed the bibliography upon Fleeman’s death, and maintains a running list of corrections and additions on the Web.

Abstract: At each nomination of a United States Supreme Court justice, a discussion is renewed about textual interpretation and legal reasoning. This Article will show — by analyzing a classic estate planning problem considered by two eighteenth-century giants, Samuel Johnson and his amanuensis, James Boswell — that the principles giving rise to these questions are mostly unchanged.

Freeman suggests a death notice of Robert Levet in the Gentleman’s Magazine for Jan. 1782 was by SJ and had escaped Fleeman’s notice in his Bibliography.

Abstract: A “conversation” with the late, great author, lexicographer and letters writer Samuel Johnson. Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with the great Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) — or rather with his books — to see what he had to say about lawyers, their profession and their writing...

A brief biographical overview, with an argument that SJ’s attempts to ward off his melancholy anticipated modern cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Abstract: While in Samuel Johnson and others James Boswell chases men of distinguished accomplishments, in the journals and letters of his 1764 tour of German Courts his imagination is fired by the idea of hierarchical greatness in itself. Among the petty princes of Germany he fantasizes about a sense of importance that transcends not only the judgment of the observer but also anything anyone might write about them in the public sphere of print. Yet in his writings he can only imagine that greatness through a critical consciousness shaped by print culture. This article explores publicness as an aesthetic category in Boswell’s writing.

A long review essay prompted by the Johnson biographies by Peter Martin and Jeffrey Meyers, with a glance at Ian McIntyre’s Hester. It develops into a wide-ranging essay on Johnson’s life and friendships.

On Johnson’s friendship with the famous medical doctor.

Abstract: This chapter deals with her marriage to George Macaulay, his connections with elements in the Scottish Enlightenment, and the political situation in Great Britain immediately after the accession of George III, during which period the first three volumes of the history were written. This chapter provides an account of the content of those volumes, her exchanges with David Hume and Samuel Johnson, and the contemporary reception of her work more broadly. This chapter deals with Catharine Macaulay’s marriage to George Macaulay, his connections with elements in the Scottish Enlightenment, and the political situation in Great Britain immediately after the accession of George III, during which period the first three volumes of the history were written. It provides an account of content of those volumes, her exchanges with David Hume and Samuel Johnson, and the contemporary reception of her work more broadly. The marriage of George and Catharine would, presumably, have been equally approved of by Austen, had it not been before her time, being likewise based on friendship and mutual respect. Catharine was fortunate to find a husband who had developed rather different ideas of women’s appropriate activities to those that were then still predominant, and he has been called “a feminist” by his biographers. His sympathy for his wife’s determination to become an historian is evident in fact that he showed no opposition to her publishing under her own name.

Greene, reviewing the evidence offered by Katherine C. Balderston in “Johnson’s Vile Melancholy” (1949), argues that the “mysterious letter M” in Johnson’s diaries alludes to masturbation.

Greene’s feisty reply to Clark and Erskine-Hill’s suggestion that Johnson was a Jacobite.

Further arguments against the thesis that Johnson was sympathetic to Jacobitism.

Thirteen previously published essays, ranging from 1952 to 1990, many on Johnsonian topics. Essays on Johnson are listed separately.

Abstract: James Boswell has generally been regarded as a key figure in the evolution of the biography via his work on Samuel Johnson. Ranging over his public, published writing, his private-public unpublished journal writing (read by his friend John Johnston), and his private-private unpublished writing (his personal journals) this thesis sets out to address how he should also be seen as a travelogue writer of note. The most important contention is that the rise of Boswell as a travel writer is key to understanding his prowess as an auto/biographical writer – with the topography of the man-monument central. The principal aim is to stress that he was ‘Corsica Boswell’ long before he was ‘Johnson Boswell’.

A survey of Stephen’s and Woolf’s interest in Johnson.

Groom responds to Curley’s “Samuel Johnson and Truth,” suggesting that Curley’s evidence is familiar, and that notions of “forgery” have to be reconsidered.

A survey of Johnson’s influence on Jane Austen, developed into a book-length work with the same title.

The most thorough survey of Johnson’s influence on Jane Austen.

Grundy’s address to the Johnsonians in Sept. 2006, on his fondness for raising shocking or uncomfortable topics in conversation.

Not seen???

On the theory and practice of Johnsonian biography, set in the context of the history of biographical writing. “Life of Savage leaves a memorable trace in the history of biography as well as in the progress of Johnson’s own literary achievement.” Describes Johnson’s techniques of research and his fondness for dichotomies. In a special issue on “Tradition and Transition: Literature and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain.”

On portraits of Johnson by Reynolds and Opie, with a discussion of contemporary portraits by other major artists. In a special issue on “Tradition and Transition: Literature and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Includes small black-and-white images.

Not seen.

Not seen???

The first scholarly edition of Hawkins’s Life, first published in 1787. Brack’s annotations are extensive.

Abstract: The article considers some stylistic aspects of the Russian and English language systems based on A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson, and A Dictionary of the Russian Academy (‘Slovar Academii Rossiyskoy’), 18th c., that laid a foundation of the British and Russian national lexicography. A comparison of major literary sources of the dictionaries and approaches applied in these lexicographic traditions reveals significant differences between the styles of the two language systems, which has an impact on the national mentalities, ways of perception of a mother tongue and а foreign language, as well as methods of teaching the two languages.

Brief letter to the Editor, challenging A. N. Wilson’s claim that Johnson dismissed monastic retirement.

Abstract: Much has been written about Samuel Johnson as a Christian, and much about him as an author; this study is about where the two meet, in the idea of the literary vocation. Though Johnson only uses the word vocation a handful of times, it holds both the quotidian sense of a job and the more exalted notion of a divine call, a tension which informs Johnson’s thinking. I begin with Johnson’s development as a religious writer, influenced by William Law’s contention that any form of life can be devout and holy, and by Bernard Mandeville’s unsentimental candour. Johnson’s writing bears the marks of both. He revised Irene, for instance, to make it less overtly Christian: a reminder that Johnson’s religious convictions bring an invisible pressure to bear on apparently secular works. In his early years on the Gentleman’s Magazine Johnson develops the principle that authorship, being a public act, carries great responsibilities. It is, in fact, a vocation, and unpacking this concept takes up Chapter 2. Johnson sees writing as a potential form of public service, adding that a solitary writer “naturally sinks from omission to forgetfulness of social duties.” Too few commentators have grasped that Johnson sees morality in social terms — as a matter of answering the needs of others, according to one’s place in an order overseen by divine providence. But again and again he refers to the human need “to seek from one another assistance and support” (Rambler 104). Instances of mutual help “by frequent reciprocations of beneficence unite mankind in society and friendship.” Johnson’s well-known emphasis on friendship is only one expression of this deeper sense that society is held together by trust; and therefore, by the truth. Writers’ communication of truth defines their own social duties. While Johnson can sound close to Shaftesbury when he writes of mankind’s sociability, there is really a significant gap between them, because Johnson’s view of human nature is more jaded. He expects people to hurt each other for the same reasons they help each other; and he recognises a strong tendency towards pride and superiority — especially among writers, who are tempted to cut themselves off from society. Chapter 3 deals in more depth with a writer’s social role, which is simply expressed as the ability to put the truth memorably. Borrowing from a tradition which stretches back to Seneca at least, Johnson believes that a writer becomes a “benefactor of mankind” by putting the useful, but readily forgotten, principles of the good life into memorable forms. Drawing on Locke’s account of the memory, and deviating from Locke’s account of moral action, he suggests that literature has a power to move the reason and the passions at once — hence his demand that poetry be both true and pleasurable. While this resembles the Horatian formula of dulce et utile, Johnson added to it a sense of writers” and readers” experience of the text: how ‘impressions” are transferred from the world, via the writer, to the text, and so to the reader. Learning how to persuade the audience, however, necessitates first-hand acquaintance with the world. Hence the subjects of Chapters 4 and 5, which are pride and humility respectively. Pride separates the author from the social world, making them ineffectual and unable to communicate truth. The “Lives” of Swift and Milton establish this partly through their ridicule of the two subjects: though Johnson did not think ridicule established truth, it did restore a balance upset by an author’s singularity. Singularity is the word Johnson uses to encapsulate Swift’s faults: he was “fond of singularity, and desirous to make a mode of happiness for himself, different from the general course of things and order of Providence.” Milton, too, is condemned for his arrogance — but even more in order to correct the idolatry of his admirers. Johnson believes that Milton is being written about with absurd reverence, and so puts him back in his place — as just another member of society, with a role to fulfil. Accepting that place involves a measure of humility. The question of the “dignity of literature,” a contested point during the nineteenth century, was alive in Johnson’s time, and through his associations with what he himself called “Grub Street,” he lived and worked among many writers who might be thought undignified. Yet in the obscurity of the hacks Johnson found something to praise — an industrious, humble service opposed to the “letter’d arrogance” of self-satisfied authors. “[T]he humble author of journals and gazettes must be considered as a liberal dispenser of beneficial knowledge” (Rambler 145). By stooping to be merely useful, journalists become great. Particularly in the Journey to the Western Islands, Johnson divests himself of authorial dignity, drawing attention to his own mistakes and omissions. Such a humdrum view of the writer’s role, which placed the emphasis on the reader, put Johnson at odds with most of the prominent Romantics — and the scale of their revulsion from Johnson needs two chapters to be dealt with. Chapter 6 argues that their critique, especially that of Hazlitt and Coleridge, was above all about the question of the writer’s vocation: and for that reason, Shakespeare was the most contested ground — for Coleridge, Johnson’s Shakespeare criticism was impertinent “filth” aimed at “the greatest man that ever put on and put off mortality.” But that was exactly the kind of idolatrous view of authorship — what Hazlitt called approvingly “overstrained enthusiasm” — which Johnson wanted to challenge. However, many of the Romantics” criticisms misrepresented Johnson; he was a more flexible thinker than they realised. In a final chapter, I look at the aftermath of the Romantics: how their accusation that Johnson was too narrow and bigoted to understand Shakespeare is echoed in Macaulay, and even in sympathetic readers like Matthew Arnold, and has dogged Johnson all the way to the present day. And I point out that the Romantic exaltation of the author has faced its own backlash, in ways that suggest Johnson might have seen more clearly than the Romantics thought.

A popular overview of the composition of the Dictionary, contextualized in SJ’s life and the history of lexicography.

A brief notice of the 250th anniversary.

Abstract: Samuel Johnson was a critic, an essayist, a poet and a biographer. He was also, famously, the compiler of the first good English dictionary, published in 1755. A polymath and a great conversationalist, his intellectual and social curiosity were boundless. Yet he was a deeply melancholy man, haunted by dark thoughts, sickness and a diseased imagination. In his own life, both public and private, he sought to choose a virtuous and prudent path, negotiating everyday hazards and temptations. His writings and aphorisms illuminate what it means to lead a life of integrity, and his experience, abundantly documented by him and by others (such as James Boswell and Hester Thrale), is a lesson in the art of regulating the mind and the body.

“Today Johnson is not an obvious role model. . . . Yet he has a lot to say to us. . . . I offer a chronological account of Johnson’s life . . . [and] I present him as an example of how to act or think; occasionally his role is the opposite, as an illustration of how not to; and often I draw attention to something he wrote or said that perfectly condenses and important truth.”

Abstract: This chapter explores how energy has been defined and explained in early English-language dictionaries. Based on the cultural history of the term proposed in the preceding chapters, this chapter surveys the historical development of energy in the English language, as presented in the early English dictionaries and in Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary. Examining both early bilingual Latin-English and French-English dictionaries and monolingual English dictionaries (from Cawdrey to Johnson), the chapter shows that the various senses recorded in early English lexicography were derived from the basic meaning of the activity-of-being, and that the specific contexts in which these senses were used tend to cohere with a deeper and shared context, in which energy was used to speak about the inherent nature of things. Thus, whereas the original meaning and senses of energy in the English language has long been thought to have travelled from context to context in an ad hoc manner, this chapter shows that usage of the term travelled within a common context that tied all senses together in a shared reference to inherent nature.

“Performance is a recurrent issue in Johnson’s approach to Shakespeare. . . . Performance can also be for Johnson the testing-ground for emendation.”

A popular joint biography of Johnson and Savage, focusing on SJ’s early years in London.

Abstract: Since the eighteenth century, when Samuel Johnson dismissed Cowley’s desire as chimerical critics have tended to view the resolution as unfounded, deeming it either a rhetorical tactic or an idle jest. Even Cowley’s biographer, otherwise trusting of the poet, declines to read this statement as espousing a genuine desire. However, new evidence suggests that, far from chimerical, Cowley’s desire to travel to America nearly came to fruition. On 29 April 1650, while living in Paris as a member of the exiled Royalists, Cowley sent a letter to Sir Robert Long (c. 1602-73), Secretary of State to Charles II. The letter, sold at auction in 1905, remains untraced and its contents unknown. However, it has gone unnoticed until now that the sale catalogue includes a brief excerpt from the missing letter.

Abstract: This chapter investigates the presence of Chaucer in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755, 2nd edn, 1773). There are considerable difficulties in reconciling remarks in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, his plans for an edition of Chaucer, and his references to Chaucer in different parts of the Dictionary. Johnson presented Chaucer with difficulties of every kind, as a historian of the language, as a historian of the course of English poetry, and as a literary critic. His decision to confine his illustrative examples to works composed during and after the sixteenth century should have excluded Chaucer entirely. But Chaucer creeps in (often via Junius’s Etymologicon). Johnson cites lines that appear nowhere in Chaucer’s texts, and misquotes some that do. Some Chaucerian words and phrases (‘Mars armipotent’, ‘gladder’) are attributed to Dryden rather than to their source in Chaucer, and the reader of the Dictionary is offered a great many passages of Chaucer via Dryden. So frequent, indeed, is citation of Dryden’s Chaucerian versions, that some works (e.g. The Character of a Good Parson) appear piecemeal almost entire in the Dictionary.

Abstract: Samuel Johnson was one of the most interesting figures of literature in 18th c England. He founded a literary magazine The Rambler and compiled the first major dictionary of English. He is best remembered as the subject of a biography by his friend Boswell. This film by Malcolm Hossick explores his life and the influence he had on the thought and manners of his age. It is followed by an overview of his work.

A short, impressionistic introduction to Johnson, Garrick, and Goldsmith.

“Samuel Johnson’s books are unread but his life remains gripping. It’s a tale of sexual frustration, low life, spasmodic tics, drug addiction, fear of madness, disappointment in love, black depression and celebrity.”

A review of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival premiere of Johnson and Boswell — Late but Live.

Hudson seeks “to reposition Johnson within the specific and transforming historical events of his lifetime, accepting all that might make him morally uncomfortable to us as well as admirable.” He rethinks many of the commonplaces on SJ’s thoughts on politics, gender, empire, and nationalism.

“The rise of Shakespeare coincided with the creation of a new social order, . . . what is sometimes, misleadingly, called ‘the rise of the middle class.’” Hudson considers the relationship between Shakespeare and class identity, focusing on Garrick’s performance style.

Abstract: This essay addresses the following question: ‘What is the social class of the author?’ Previous scholarship on the rise of modern authorship in the eighteenth century has generally answered this question in two different ways. According to some scholars, the ‘author’ emerged during this period in order to articulate and propagate ‘bourgeois’ ideology. According to other scholars, however, capitalist society increasingly excluded the literary artist from its governing aims and values. In revisiting this issue, I trace the emergence of the modern author from the late seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Beginning with the first literary biographies or ‘lives of the poets’ after the restoration, I argue that the problem of defining the author’s social status became problematic during the debates over literary property in the eighteenth century. It was left to authors and critics of the late century to define a space for authorship separate from the emergent social hierarchy.

Abstract: Samuel Johnson advocated the building and maintenance of roads, bridges, canals and other infrastructure as the defining difference between “civilized” and “barbaric” or “feudal” societies. His promotion of infrastructure is most clearly shown in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) where he comments repeatedly on roads or their absence, implying that only improved means of transport and communication will bring the Highlands into the fold of modern civilization, exemplified by England. Johnson added something of his own in his promotion of what I call “literary infrastructure,” meaning his Dictionary and other works that he describes as roads to linguistic and scholarly progress.

Abstract: This chapter shows how belief in the autonomy and depth (or plenitude) of Shakespearean character has been inseparable from an assumption that Shakespeare’s plots are relatively informal, merely following the order of events as given in his source texts. The chapter shows how this belief has lasted from the eighteenth century (Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Lennox) to the present. It has survived the ‘unediting’ deconstruction of ‘Authentic Shakespeare’. The chapter analyses the plot of Romeo and Juliet, showing that Shakespeare does not merely follow his sources (Boaistuau and Arthur Brooke) but rather identifies a key circumstantial topic of argument — the question of Time, of whether the time is ripe for Juliet’s marriage — and goes on to build dialogue, scenes, and action around this question. A circumstantial question thus implies an offstage world and helps create our sense of Juliet’s ‘unconscious’ and of adolescent ‘sexuality’.

On the author’s fascination with Johnson’s Dictionary and Barretti’s English–Italian dictionary.

Abstract: Samuel Johnson epitomises the spirit of the eighteenth century in England. His life (1709–1784) spans three quarters of the century; his literary and critical output both embodies and shapes the taste of the day, connecting himself and his readers to other great names of the English and European literary traditions. His famous Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson 1755) provides evidence of both the linguistic usage of his world and the literary and scientific culture which lay at the heart of that world. Extraordinary as a writer, therefore; but also unique as a man, both for his personality and the

“In The Rambler, Johnson attempts to use the literary essay-periodical, which — unlike the essay tout court — was traditionally the vehicle of wit, primarily as a means of moral instruction. . . . The most important features of Johnson’s publication all shed light on Johnson’s moralism: The Rambler’s uniformity of tone; its adoption of a persona who is a representative figure, rather than an eccentric individual; its focus on the universals of human behavior rather than current affairs or the fashions and follies beloved of Richard Steele; together with its didactic tone.”

Adapted from the article above.

A consideration of literary fame and immortality. “Johnson’s concept of fame owes a great deal to classical tradition and a little to modern developments. Though for the most part he accepted and articulated the received wisdom of his time, at two or three points he took issue with it in interesting ways.”

Abstract: Printed texts in the late seventeenth century could be realised in speech: preaching to a hierarchically organised congregation; exchanging recipes in the home. But when print norms detach from speech norms, then texts can detach from these spoken contexts. Without that context, meanings can be harder to pin down and readers may resort to model contexts to resolve ambiguity. In this I suggest that eighteenth-century readers and writers converged on an implicit model context for printed texts, a model founded on the seventeenth-century rhetorical landscape. In particular, eighteenth-century readers preserved the seventeenth-century understandings of: authorship as performative; authorial intention as the arbiter for texts’ meanings; and authorial speech as the test for resolving textual ambiguities. They also developed the seventeenth-century idea of a “common reader,” nowadays associated with the criticism of Samuel Johnson. Johnson’s common reader, I will argue, combined positive features of “common” — that which is shared with stigmatised features such as “unsophisticated” or “ignorant.” The seventeenth-century critic, with his right to pass judgement on performances, acquired a new role as the gentlemanly friend and protector of the common reader. In combination the common reader and the polite critic produced, I suggest, a model context for text comprehension, one in which authors were performers to a notional, “common,” reader, while an expert critic reader observed them.

Abstract: Jarman narrates his trip to Scotland aboard the Caledonian MacBrayne. He further cites the Scottish referendum on independence. Among other things, Jarman talks about Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, an account of the trip he took with James Boswell, which increases his desire to visit these places even more.

Abstract: Through analysis of the life and writings of eighteenth-century Quaker artist and author Mary Knowles, Judith Jennings uncovers concrete but complex examples of how gender functioned in family, social, and public contexts during the Georgian Age. Knowles’s story, including her bold confrontation of Samuel Johnson and public dispute with James Boswell, serves as a lens through which to view larger connections, such as the social transformation of English Quakers, changing concepts of gender and the transmission of radical political ideology during the era of the American and French revolutions. Further, Jennings offers a more nuanced view of the participation of “middling” women in radical politics through an examination of Knowles’s theological beliefs, social networks and political opinions at a time when the American and French Revolutions reshaped political ideology. By analyzing Mary Knowles’s connections — both male and female — Jennings contributes new understanding about how sociability operated, encompassing women and men of various faiths and ethnic origins.

“Dr Johnson was a brilliant champion of the English language and the little guy. . . . He is a free-market, monarchy-loving advocate of the necessity of human inequality.”

Abstract: Scientific attempts to define life, familiarly linked to romanticism and to poetic form, had an earlier and broader impact on literary interpretation. John Milton’s Areopagitica, which metaphorically treats books as living things, rose to preeminence during the eighteenth century as readers paid increasing attention to its literary qualities. A free adaptation by Honoré de Mirabeau on the eve of the French Revolution minimized Milton’s republicanism and drew out the tendencies toward vitalism inherent in his figurative language. Together with British responses to Samuel Johnson’s critical 1779 Life of Milton, Mirabeau’s adaptation demonstrates a way of reading informed by Enlightenment vitalism.

Abstract: This chapter focuses on English in Britain during the eighteenth century. It begins by looking at the complaints of authors like Jonathan Swift about the inadequacies of the language, together with the calls that he and others made for the language to be “improved.” A section looks at how prescription and proscription were introduced as means of ameliorating the language, as well as of developing a standard form for it. Various ways in which this was done are considered, beginning with “usage guides.” The work of William Lowth is particularly focused on. Attention then turns to the most influential eighteenth-century work related to the English language: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. This is described and discussed in some detail. A description of eighteenth-century British English then follows, looking in turn at graphology, grammar, and lexis. A final section argues that although prescription was a preoccupation of the century, many linguistic works of the time, including Johnson’s Dictionary, provided valuable descriptions of the language.

A fine-press edition of The Vision of Theodore, “Conceived as a memento in connection with the Age of Johnson Prize awarded by the Fellows of St. Peter’s College, Oxford.”

A new edition in the Penguin Classics series. Not seen.

An attractive pocket-sized Spanish translation of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, with a long original introduction in four parts: “El doctor Samuel Johnson (1709–1784): vida, obra y entorno literario”; “La Escocia que conoció Johnson y sus claves históricas: de Caledonia a Culloden”; “El Viaje a las Islas Occidentales de Escocia como libro de viajes: Género, estructuración y contenido”; and “Bibliografía comentada: fuentes primarias y secundarias: Esta edición y traducción.”

A Broadview Edition, containing the full text of Rasselas along with selections from Johnson’s other writings (Lobo’s Voyage, Vanity, and Ramblers 4, 204, and 205), contemporary responses, and other examples of eighteenth-century Orientalism.

A collection of Johnson’s writings, especially selections from the periodical essays and the Lives.

Abstract: 本书分为译者序;萨维奇评传;考利评传;附录;后记五部分, 内容包括:国外约翰生学概况;约翰生家乡见闻.Ben shu fen wei yi zhe xu; sa wei qi ping chuan; kao li ping chuan; fu lu; hou ji wu bu fen, nei rong bao gua: guo wai yue han sheng xue gai kuang; yue han sheng jia xiang jian wen.

Abstract: The English critic, biographer, and poet Samuel Johnson was among the most influential figures of the eighteenth century. This twentieth and final volume of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson presents the author’s occasional writings, including prefaces, proposals, dedications, introductions, book reviews, public letters, appeals, and school exercises. Notably, it includes the letters and addresses that Johnson wrote for the convicted clergyman William Dodd.

Abstract: 年轻的阿比西尼亚王子拉赛拉斯,自幼被幽禁在可满足一切欲望的幸福谷,他厌倦了谷中岁月,设法逃离幸福谷,去外界寻找幸福的真谛。他同妹妹妮可娅、诗人因列沿尼罗河一路游历,穿越非洲,抵达亚洲,探访各个阶层的各色人群,他们见到智慧的演说家、拥有一切的总督、山中的隐士、疯癫的天文学家、年轻的智者,也经历着各种意外......

Abstract: A one-volume collection of the prose and poetry of eighteenth-century Britain’s pre-eminent lexicographer, critic, biographer, and poet Samuel JohnsonSamuel Johnson was eighteenth-century Britain’s preeminent man of letters, and his influence endures to this day. He excelled as a moral and literary critic, biographer, lexicographer, and poet. This anthology, designed to make Johnson’s essential works accessible to students and general readers, draws its texts from the definitive Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. In most cases, texts are included in full rather than excerpted. The anthology includes many essays from The Rambler and other periodicals; Rasselas; the prefaces to Johnson’s Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; the complete Lives of Cowley, Milton, Pope, Savage, and Gray, as well as generous selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Some parts are arranged thematically, allowing readers to focus on such topics as religion, marriage, war, and literature. The anthology includes a biographical introduction, and its ample annotation updates and enlarges the commentary in the Yale Edition.

Abstract: Of the extraordinary tumult in 1780, Dr. Samuel Johnson has given the following concise, lively, and just account, in his “Letters to Mrs. Thrale.” On Friday the good Protestants met in St. George’s Fields, at the summons of Lord George Gordon, and marching to Westminster, insulted the Lords and Commons, who all bore it with great tameness. At night the outrages began by the demolition of the mass-house by Lincoln’s-Inn. The soldiers are stationed so as to be everywhere within call; there is no longer any body of rioters, and the individuals are haunted to their holes, and led to prison; Lord George was last night sent to the Tower. Mr. John Wilkes was this day in the neighbourhood, to seize the publishers of a seditious paper. Several chapels have been destroyed, and several inoffensive Papists have been plundered; but the high sport was to burn the gaols.

The texts of Johnson’s Journey and Boswell’s Journal, with Rowlandson’s illustrations.

Abstract: In 1773, James Boswell made a long-planned journey across the Scottish Highlands with his English friend Samuel Johnson; the two spent more than a hundred days together. Their tour of the Hebrides resulted in two books, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), a kind of locodescriptive ethnography and Johnson’s most important work between his Shakespeare edition and his Lives of the Poets. The other, Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785), a travel narrative experimenting with biography, the first application of the techniques he would use in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). These two works form a natural pair and, owing that they cover much of the same material, are often read together, focusing on the Scottish highlands. The text presents a lightly-edited version of both works, preserving the original orthography and corrected typographical errors to fit modern grammar standards. The introduction and notes provide clear and concise explanations on Johnson and Boswell’s respective careers, their friendship and grand biographical projects. It also examines the Scottish Enlightenment, the status of England and Scotland during the Reformation through to the Union of the Crowns, and the Jacobite Rebellion.

Abstract: This definitive edition, the first since 1974, presents all the poetry of Samuel Johnson, including his play, Irene, with detailed wide-ranging commentary. It has been expertly edited with attention to the extant manuscripts and all relevant printings. The volume includes the entirety of Johnson’s verse in all its generic diversity: including satire, ode, elegy, verse drama, and verse prayer. The poems are presented in their original spelling and punctuation with extensive commentary on their literary background — biblical, classical, and modern &mndash; as well as careful explanation of unusual words, allusions to historical figures, and references to contemporary events that appear in the poems. Proceeding chronologically, this edition also situates Johnson’s verse in the context of his life from his early days in Lichfield to his career as an author in London. Unlike all earlier editions, the present offering provides full translations of all the Latin and Greek poems on which Johnson based so much of his English verse. Correspondingly, it provides the English poems which some of his Latin verse translates. Neither in the presentation of the verse nor in the commentary does this edition assume a command of foreign languages: it aims to be useful for all students of Samuel Johnson’s poetry.

On Johnson’s interest in the “little.” Later developed into a chapter of Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking.

A learned meditation on Johnson’s interest in “littleness.”

Not seen.

Abstract: The thesis examines the response of imaginative writers to Samuel Johnson; arguing that these authors’ refashioning of Johnson involved a profoundly creative process. Chapter 1 examines Johnson’s own self-accounting, revealing an instability of self-imaging, linked to the different textual forms employed by Johnson. Chapter 2 argues that James Boswell’s biography theatricalised the representation of Johnson, introducing Boswell into the drama of Johnson’s self-reflexivity. Chapter 3 focuses on the Romantics, arguing that William Hazlitt misread Johnson’s criticism as mechanical, while Lord Byron drew upon Johnson’s authority to challenge Romantic orthodoxies. Chapter 4 focuses on the Victorians, arguing that Thomas Carlyle focused on Johnson’s powers of self-creation, epitomised in action; while Matthew Arnold’s abridged version of The Lives of the English Poets helped tutor a new reading public. George Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Boswell’s biography represented a turn to the encyclopaedic. Chapter 5 explores the Modern response to Johnson. T. S. Eliot’s critical revolution enlisted Johnson to support Eliot’s anti-Romantic animus. Beckett was interested in Johnson’s obsession with madness, death and numbers; themes which dominated his own writing. Jorge Luis Borges admired Rasselas, and was fascinated by Johnson’s friendship with Boswell, which mirrored his own relationship with the writer Adolfo Bioy Casares.

On Johnson’s comment that “Torture in Holland is considered as a favour to an accused person,” which Jost says is more than talking for victory.

Not seen.

A reading of Rasselas against the background of eighteenth-century ideas about education.

The most thorough biographical account of Johnson’s early years in London.

Abstract: This essay uses Samuel Johnson’s characterization of Gaelic culture as an essentially airborne phenomenon as the starting point for a wide-ranging consideration of the links between atmospheric and Celtic discourses during the Romantic era. This period has been deemed foundational to the literary ‘appearance’ of air and the conceptual formation of Celticity, but these two cultural phenomena have rarely been considered in tandem. Beginning with a discussion of the atmospheric ideas that underpin the Poems of Ossian’s infamous mists, the essay argues that critics have largely ignored the complexity of Macpherson’s medicalized ecologies of air. The essay then moves on to consider the development of comparable cloudy symbolism during the Welsh cultural revival of the 1790s, when overcast skies became an organising metaphor used to express the cultural benightedness of Wales. The often-unexamined cliché of ‘Celtic mistiness’ is revealed as a vital metaphor for the allure and imperfection o

Abstract: What most people know of Samuel Johnson, the famous lexicographer, literary critic and essayist, comes primarily through The Life of Samuel Johnson written by James Boswell. One of the great assets of this biography is the detailed reports of conversations that took place at dinners or clubs, when Johnson was meeting with some of the leading intellectual, cultural and political figures of the second half of the eighteenth century: the politicians John Wilkes and Edmund Burke; literary figures such as Elizabeth Montagu and Francis Burney; the artist Joshua Reynolds; or the music historian Charles Burney.

On SJ as the “patron saint” of resolution makers.

A review essay on Gordeon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns’s John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, Anna Beer’s Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot, and Nigel Smith’s Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? Kermode uses Johnson’s Life of Milton to structure his own piece.

A version of Keymer’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Rasselas. On the pursuit of happiness in Rasselas, with glances at similar concerns in early America.

A brief narrative of the early days of the journal.

Korshin considers The Rambler as an example of the essay genre.

A response to essays by Clark, Griffin, Hudson, Lipking, Reddick, Weinbrot, and others in the same issue.

A revisionist consideration of Johnson’s poverty.

Korshin demolishes many of the myths and legends that have grown up around the writing of the Dictionary.

An annual journal, begun in 1987 under the editoriship of Korshin; from vol. 11 to vol. 15, co-edited by Korshin and Lynch; since vol. 16, edited by Lynch.

Abstract: The article studies the history of the notions of “patriot” and “patriotism” in the political and social life of 18th-century Britain. The methodology of research is based on the approach of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought, consisting in the analysis of certain notions in the context of the epoch. The material of the paper is pamphlets of John Wilkes, and his main opponent Samuel Johnson as well as some anonymous journalistic essays. The paper focuses on the problem of interpretation of “patriot” and “patriotism” as notions by followers of different political views. John Wilkes acted as a “patriot”, supposing that it implied opposition to power until the “natural” rights and liberties of Englishmen were restored. Another understan-ding is reflected in Doctor Johnson’s and his supporters’ pamphlets. According to them, a patriot is “he whose public conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country”. The author comes to the conclusion about Samuel Johnson’s victory in the discussion, because he took the notion of “patriot” beyond the limits of political space. Moreover, the discussion about “false” and “true” patriotism indicated the formation of the public sphere and civil society in England of the 1760s–1770s.

Abstract: This article deals with the formation of the image of the Highlands in the English intellectual space of the 18th century. The research methodology is based on the concept of the image of the “Other,” implying a concrete historical analysis of different peoples’ collective ideas about each other. More particularly, the article focuses on the study of stable ethnic and cultural stereotypes as solidified images. Referring to Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) the author describes the crucial English stereotypes about the inhabitants of the Highlands. Like many of his contemporaries, Dr. Johnson was convinced of the superiority of the English over the inhabitants of the Highlands. At the same time, his travel notes demonstrate his desire to scrupulously describe the life and customs of the Highlanders, show the peculiar features of mountaineers’ lifestyles, so different from those of Englishmen. The author comes to the conclusion about the predominance in English society of notions about the Highlands as an internal colony of Britain in need of being introduced to civilisation by means of Anglicisation. Dr. Johnson’s A Journey … is a valuable source for the study of stereotypes of English intellectual culture in the process of intercultural communication in Britain in the 18th century.

On teaching the Seven Years’ War against the background of modern wars. Includes a discussion of a board game called Friedrich.

Abstract: This chapter discusses the role of the unities in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. As the unities constrain the coherence of the fictional world, the imagination extends it. This tension is related to the brain’s “default mode network,” related to the general state of mind-wandering when thinking is not concentrated on a particular object. It is shown how the structure of Rasselas relates the wandering of the imagination (which is necessary to fiction) to the unities’ coherence of the fictional world. In Rasselas, this tension does not develop into a stringent trajectory of narrative events, but the continuation to Johnson’s narrative, Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas, changes the situational logic of the unities in such a way that a narrative trajectory and closure are achieved. Knight not only presents an alternative in situational logic but also connects it to the ways in which Western and oriental modes of narrative were imagined in the eighteenth century.

Kupersmith places London in the context of other contemporary imitations of classical satire.

Includes substantial sections on London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, placing them in the context of other classical imitations of the eighteenth century.

Rasselas offers students in a survey course “an entry into the fraught relationship between particularity and generality in the Enlightenment. . . . Drawing parallels between Newton and Johnson . . . can make Rasselas relevant to both majors and non-majors alike.”

Hundreds of short snippets on Boswell, from the 1760s until after his death, from contemporary writings. Inevitably includes many little-known comments on Johnson from periodicals, diaries, and letters.

A substantial omnibus review essay on The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 16; Jack Lynch and Anne McDermott, eds., Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s “Dictionary”; Howard D. Weinbrot, Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics; O M Brack Jr., ed., A Commentary on Mr. Pope’s Principles of Morality, or Essay on Man; David Hankins and James J. Caudle, eds., The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763; Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria Jr., eds., Johnson on the English Language; Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Lives of the Poets; Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson; and Allen Reddick, ed., Samuel Johnson’s Unpublished Revisions to the “Dictionary of the English Language”: A Facsimile Edition. This entry is also cited under the reviews of each of these books.

Lee highlights several previously unnoticed connections between Rambler 31 and the Life of Dryden, tracing both back to an anonymous seventeenth-century satire.

Abstract: To put it in different words, perceiving beings such as ourselves, inhabiting a larger body in motion — say, for instance, a car, the planet earth, or even the solar system moving within the larger universal expansion-do not feel motion maintained at a constant, uniform, or “equal” velocity, because no force is required to maintain motion. [...] we do not perceive “equal motion”; it “escapes perception.” [...] The intertextual evidence derived from Johnson’s greatest poem and his supreme scholarly accomplishment suggests that the word "equal" embedded within the phrase “equal mind” supplements and reinforces the scientific allusion and analogy in Rambler 98. Whether by way of scientific, philosophical, or literary analogies, the notion of ‘equal motion” enlarges to a metaphor applied to polite social ‘conversation” (in both senses of the word available to Johnson) in the Rambler 98 passage. In the eighteenth century, Newton would have been revered as a philosopher as well as a ‘scientist” (or ‘natural philosopher”); hence, the melding of scientific and philosophic notions found in the intertextual correlation noted above possess evidentiary solidity. In 1739 his friend Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806) translated a popularization of Newtonian philosophy, Francesco Algarotti’s (1712–64) Newtonianismo per le dame (“Newton for the Ladies,” 1737); it is possible that he assisted her in this effort, given the close relationship between the two authors in the late 1730s. Finally, at least four Newtonian books were found in Johnson’s library after his death, including the revised second edition of the Principia in 1713 and an English translation by Andrew Motte in 1729. Given Johnson’s frequent allusions to and hearty approbation of Newton, as well as his demonstrated propensity to translate philosophic words into moral discourse, it should not be at all surprising to find in his apparently obscure phrase, ‘equal motion,” a scientific allusion pressed into figurative application.

Abstract: In 1948, William and Margaret Wimsatt added sixteen examples of Samuel Johnson quoting from his own works in the Dictionary to the thirty-three previously identified. Less than a decade later, William Keast supplied three more entries, bringing to a total fifty-two self-quotations of this kind. Recently, while searching the Dictionary for quite different purposes, I detected another one, one that enlarges the list to fifty-three items.

Abstract: Both Samuel Johnson and his disciple James Boswell were masters of deploying intertextual allusions to impart greater freight to their meaning. In Rambler 8 Johnson covertly alludes to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, while in the Tour to the Hebrides Boswell alludes to Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica. In both cases, these allusions offer considerable insight into characteristic aspects of the art and minds of the two authors. They share a dedication to intertextuality as an important literary technique. However, the two examples reveal important differences: Johnson emerges as a traditional public Christian humanist, while Boswell reveals himself as a private, proto-Romantic confessionalist.

Abstract: This article proposes a definition of Johnson’s popular term, the ‘good hater’, in order to explore his ideas about malicious conversation and criticism. Good hating was a conversational and critical ideal for Johnson, in contrast to ‘bad hating’ – hatred motivated by malice or malignity – which threatened civil discourse. Johnson’s own malice and ‘roughness’ are a vexed question in biographies by James Boswell, John Hawkins and Hester Lynch Piozzi. In spite of the efforts of Boswell, who has largely influenced the popular image of Johnson, I argue that Johnson fails to meet his own standards of good hating.

An overview of the Dictionary in Lerer’s account of the history of the language. Includes comments on Johnson’s use of Locke and Milton, and the tensions he felt between prescriptive and descriptive linguistics.

Brief letter to the editor on Charles McGrath’s review of Sisman’s Boswell’s Presumptuous Task interpreting “I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.”

Abstract: Boswell (1740-1795), auteur réputé d’une imposante Vie de Samuel Johnson, mérite à bien d’autres titres d’être célébré. Ses volumineux «papiers», depuis peu accessibles, permettent de dresser le portrait d’un homme franchement étonnant, dont l’exorbitance des comportements fascine et captive. Quel avocat voulut-il jamais, comme lui — faute de pouvoir établir son innocence — ressusciter après pendaison un client malheureux ? Né en Écosse, il parcourut l’Europe, fréquenta Voltaire et Rousseau, coucha avec Thérèse, rendit visite à Paoli au moment où s’organisait la résistance corse à la France. Ardent défenseur de ceux qui, dans les «provinces», menaient leur guerre d’indépendance, il dénonça avec une paradoxale énergie les «barbares horreurs» de la Révolution française. Sa rencontre avec Johnson fit de lui un biographe. Mais son Journal est plus que la Vie: y sont consignées les humeurs changeantes d’un grand mélancolique et les affriolantes confessions qui font de lui un Casanova écossais, un Don Juan venu du froid; mais un Don Juan à scrupules: l’hypocondrie, ou la rançon du plaisir. Époux infidèle, père imprévoyant, ivrogne impénitent, ardent jouisseur sous l’œil improbateur de Calvin ... Boswell — franchement insupportable et tout à fait attachant — vaut la rencontre.

Abstract: This essay reflects on the inherently disconcerting labour of producing a literary anthology. It does so by way of the Enlightenment view of bewilderment as a legitimate epistemological position. In that view, propounded by figures as various as Bernard Mandeville, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Sarah Fielding, bewilderment stands distinct from such possible cognates as confusion or nescience and arises from the experience of immersion in a proliferation of media forms. Such an experience obviously links the print-saturated eighteenth century to our own digitizing times; anthologies are autoimmune responses to media ecologies of this nature. Enlightenment conceptualizations of bewilderment, thus, both articulate and potentially resolve the frustrations entailed in an anthology’s making.”

A facetious take on Johnson’s Jacobite sympathies, using “Here Lies Good Master Duck” as evidence.

Abstract: Samuel Johnson wrote far more than he acknowledged or than his contemporaries could identify. Modern scholars have proposed many additions to the canon. Among the most recent of these is Some Remarks on the Progress of Learning (1746), a pamphlet ostensibly written to promote a new edition of Mario di Calasio’s concordance to the Hebrew Bible, then in preparation by William Romaine. The evidence adduced for Johnson’s authorship is partly circumstantial (his connections with the book trade) and partly internal (phrases and features of style that sound Johnsonian). No external evidence connects Johnson with the pamphlet. This article questions the attribution, arguing that neither the circumstantial nor the internal evidence is convincing. Further, the substance of the pamphlet itself, its politics, its religion (especially its view of the Reformation), and most of all its enthusiastic promotion of the study of Hebrew, are quite un-Johnsonian, and indeed contradict his known views. It t

Abstract: James Boswell (1740-1795) is most famous for writing the masterly biography of his friend and mentor The Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, only a few years before his own death. However, during Boswell’s own lifetime he was far more famous for his other major work, the Account of Corsica (1768). The Account of Corsica has been rather neglected by modern scholarship. This article will attempt show its importance in the context of the mid eighteenth century. Boswell’s Account was in fact the latest in a series of British publications concerning the island of Corsica during the eighteenth century. This article will attempt to trace the evolution of the ideas of Corsica that developed in Britain; beginning with the outbreak of the Corsican revolt in 1728, and culminating with the publication of Boswell’s Account of Corsica in 1768. Corsica became an important case study for British self-reflection, concerning the type of Empire they would become. The main question raised by the case study of Corsica was whether Britain should be an empire that protects liberty across the globe, or a metropolitan commercial state?

An examination of eighteenth-century conceptions of literary progress, exemplified by Johnson’s reading of Edmund Spenser. A version of this essay appeared as a chapter in Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson.

Johnson’s Shakespeare edition was the first to introduce some of Politian’s editorial methods into the editing of vernacular texts.

A preliminary version of the AMS publication below, and the germ of this on-line resource.

An early version of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, below.

On the periodization of Milton’s major works, written in the Restoration but treated as Renaissance texts.

A printed version of an earlier draft of this bibliography.

On SJ’s involvement with literary fakers, including Macpherson, Chatterton, Psalmanazar, and Dodd.

Examines 18th-c. British notions of what is now called the Renaissance, with SJ at the center.

On SJ’s reading in Richard Hooker and his ideas on theology, church governance, and “things indifferent.”

An unscholarly lecture on the attractions of the illustrative quotations in the Dictionary.

A brief encyclopedia entry, focusing on Johnson’s knowledge of the classics.

On the boundary between dictionaries, limited to lexical information, and encyclopedias, which are more expansive, and the ways in which SJ’s Dictionary often crosses the line.

An unscholarly collection of insults and put-downs, culled from both the Dictionary and SJ’s conversation.

An Op-Ed essay on the importance of SJ’s Dictionary in early America, including SJ’s principles of selection.

On SJ’s engagement with philosophical skepticism, from Sextus Empiricus to Hume.

On Johnson’s development of the variorum form in his edition of Shakespeare, with examples from his edition of Lear.

A consideration of Johnson’s influence on later biographers, and the kinds of events he found particularly important in the various Lives of the Poets.

Abstract: Though Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) is often compared with the major vernacular dictionaries of the 17th century, a better point of comparison is the early modern lexicons of the classical languages, which Johnson knew well, and which informed his practice in his own lexicography.

Fourteen original scholarly essays on previously neglected areas of the Dictionary.

“Lexicography and textual criticism were . . . reciprocal activities and both were part of a larger project to purify the English language, to set it on a par with the languages of France and Italy as exhibited in their great national lexicons, and by a parallel to present Shakespeare as a great national writer.”

Not seen.

Abstract: Travel writings constituted a major branch of the book trade, and the dissemination of information about sophisticated global populations seemingly without writing generated interest in what we might now call oral societies. Texts by diplomats, missionaries, and others addressed oral tradition in societies from China to Peru. These texts influenced debates concerning Homeric illiteracy, and they generated new interest in the possibility of oral traditions within Britain. Meanwhile the Ossian debate inspired readers to imagine how tradition worked. The second half of this chapter reads Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland as a critique of conjectural history and a political argument pertaining to orality and literacy. Conjectural historians attempted to make sense of the diversity of human societies by placing these societies along a single evolutionary chain, but in so doing they arguably separated them further from one another. Departing from earlier interpretations, this chapter argues that the Journey exposes the implications of the elite idealization of oral tradition at a time when many Britons (including most Highlanders) could not read. Johnson’s distrust of his contemporaries’ valorization of oral tradition was tied to his sense that in the world of print, poverty and illiteracy would go together.

On “scientific viewing” in Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands, including its relation to empirical philosophy and its role in anthropology.

MacKenzie considers the Jacobite readings of “Swedish Charles” in The Vanity of Human Wishes.

Abstract: Edinburgh, 1773. A storm is coming. A storm that will shake the Age of Reason to its very foundations.When rumours spread of ghouls haunting Edinburgh’s old town, there is only one person who can help. Dr Samuel Johnson: author, lexicographer … and a genius in the occult and supernatural.With his good friend and companion, James Boswell, Dr Johnson embarks on a quest to unravel the hellish mysteries plaguing the city. But what they uncover is darker and more deadly than they could have ever suspected, an evil conspiracy which threatens not just the people of Edinburgh, but the whole of mankind.For the tunnels under Edinburgh’s Old Town hide a terrible secret ... Before Holmes & Watson, before Abraham van Helsing, there was Doctor Johnson & James Boswell: scourge of the hidden, supernatural world of the 18th century.

Abstract: What if the Coronation Stone at Westminster — the stolen relic on which the High Kings of Scotland had been crowned for over seven hundred years — was a fake? What if the true Stone of Destiny was still out there somewhere, hidden away by a Holy Order to protect it from English invaders? When Doctor Johnson turns up at his friend James Boswell’s door after an absence of almost seven years, he makes Boswell an enticing proposition: to join him on a quest to recover the true Stone of Destiny. What follows is a breathtaking journey through the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, from Edinburgh up to the furthest reaches of the northern isles. Plunged into a dizzying world of secret societies, occult mysteries and supernatural phenomena, the two friends leave no Neolithic stone unturned in their search to uncover the truth. Can Johnson and Boswell keep one step ahead of those who would try to stop them? And will they be willing to sacrifice all so that they can get all that they desire? Eighteenth-century Scotland has never been so magical — and terrifying.

A brief introduction to the Dictionary.

Abstract: Some literary biographies can be ‘literary’ without conforming to the standard conception of the genre. The way in which a biography has been written and its rhetorical features may be as significant as the details of the life or lives being told. In these instances, biography becomes a form of remembrance that portrays characteristics of both the fidelity and the adherence to the facts that were important to Samuel Johnson, as well as evocative storytelling. Twentieth-century questions about authenticity in nonfiction biography raised concerns about biography’s use of facts, what we can really know about creativity, and the move toward fiction by some writers. Some critics sought to apply theoretical approaches to encapsulate biography. In the twenty-first century, biography has embraced change, making a case for literary biography in a range of different forms in which the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction are fluid and group biographies as an antidote to single life portrayals flourish, reinforcing the social nature of the genre. The nature of fidelity in biography has become central to contemporary fiction and nonfiction forms as literary biography explores the dialogic and discursive nature of life and writing and can be understood as a type of parable.

Abstract: The article considers “The Vision of Theodore” by Samuel Johnson as an example of the cautionary tales of the English Enlightenment literature. The aim of the article is to analyze the plot in terms of refraction of the visionary tradition in it. The historical-literary commentary has made it possible to clarify the evaluations of “The Vision of Theodore” in the 18th century English criticism and the approaches of the modern English literary criticism to the essay. The study highlights the originality of Johnson’s idea in the construction of the plot of the vision, which consists in the creation of the situation of hermitage of the protagonist on the exotic island of Tenerife. A look at the travelogue essays “The Journey to the Hebrides” by Johnson has helped the author of the article to identify possible reasons for the writer’s creation of an artistic image of the island as a “plausible” space for Theodore’s spiritual experience. The effect of the authenticity of the vision is also achieved through the motif of the manuscript found in the cell and the allusion in the protagonist’s name. The protagonist’s complicated inner state (including his passionate desire to climb the mountain and the doubts about the action) becomes the starting point in the development of the plot. Johnson uses the popular visionary motif of a dream due to which Theodore gets an opportunity to see the surroundings of Tenerife in a different light and learn a moral lesson. Under the guidance of the guardian spirit, Theodore observes the mountain of Existence and explores the mountain space as an allegory of the life path. The analytical nature of the description of the human flow resembles the reasoning of R. Descartes in his treatise “Passions of the Soul” and testifies to the complex understanding of the essence of the human soul in “The Vision of Theodore” by Johnson. The writer believes that reason and faith are the only true spiritual supports in life. It is concluded that Johnson modifies the tradition of the visionary genre to implement the enlightenment program. In the spirit of the times, the writer enhances the didactic pathos, makes the narrative sound documentary and true-to-life, and brings Theodore’s experiences closer to the readers of “The Preceptor.”

Abstract: This work traces the development of a philosophical theory about causality — the volitional theory of causation — which supposes the underlying nature of causation as something revealed to us in the experience of our own will. It offers both a history of philosophy and a chance to think about the complex puzzles of both causation and human will.

Not seen. In Italian.

Not seen. Advertised as “The ‘synthetic biography’ of Johnson that Marcel Schwob always hoped for.” In Italian.

Not seen.

[Author’s abstract:] In his biographical preface on Pope, Samuel Johnson attempts to distinguish between “man” and “writer”; but the distinction was one that Pope had preemptively blurred, in both what and how he published. A conflict thus arises in the two writers’ portrayals of author vis-à-vis work, art vis-à-vis life. Ultimately, the nature of this conflict is historically determined: Johnson’s biography of Pope points toward the origins of “the author” not just as legal and economic entity, but as Cultural Icon, marking a turning-point in the history not just of “the author,” but of “the life of the author.”

Abstract: El principal objetivo del presente artículo es proponer un modelo de análisis traductológico del ensayo. Para ello, en primer lugar se destacan los rasgos que definen el ensayo en tanto que género diferenciado de los otros tres grandes géneros literarios (narrativa, teatro y poesía) y se revisan las principales contribuciones teóricas el estudio de su traducción. Las cuestiones tratadas en la bibliografía se agrupan en cuatro bloques: el contenido, las voces que se oyen en el texto y su interacción, la linealidad del texto y la dimensión cultural. Estos cuatro bloques se corresponden, respectivamente, con las tres funciones del lenguaje identificadas por la lingüística funcional-sistémica (ideacional, interpersonal y textual) y con el contexto de cultura. Finalmente, se ilustra el modelo de análisis propuesto mediante su aplicación al ensayo de Samuel Johnson y su traducción al español.

A biography, written largely for a trade audience, based on wide reading in the published sources.

A letter to the editor, responding to H. J. Jackson’s TLS review of Peter Martin’s biography of Johnson and identifying typographical, grammatical, and factual errors.

Abstract: From Victorian cat funerals to a Regency-era pony who took a ride in a hot air balloon, a collection of history’s quirkiest — and most poignant — animal tales. Meet Fortune, the Pug who bit Napoleon on his wedding night, and Looty, the Pekingese sleeve dog who was presented to Queen Victoria after the 1860 sacking of the Summer Palace in Peking. The four-legged friends of Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Prince Albert also make an appearance, as do the treasured pets of Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Charles Dickens. Less famous, but no less fascinating, are the animals that were the subject of historical lawsuits, scandals, and public curiosity. There’s Tuppy, the purloined pet donkey; Biddy, the regimental chicken; and Barnaby and Burgho, the bloodhounds hired to hunt Jack the Ripper. Wild animals also get a mention in tales that encompass everything from field mice and foxes to alligators and sharks lurking in the Thames. Using research from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books, letters, and newspapers, Mimi Matthews brings each animal’s unique history to vivid life. The details are sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, but the stories are never anything less than fascinating reading for animal lovers of all ages.

Abstract: Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) is a story about self-deception and consolatory fictions, the human tendency to wish-away difficult realities. Though Rasselas adopts the form of a timeless moral fable, it can be read as a proto-novel in its staging of the transition from a closed feudal society to a dynamic cosmopolitan world, in its attention to historical and cultural variation, and in its skeptical refusal of inherited wisdom or generalizable precept. Though Johnson has a reputation as a conservative defender of the status quo, recent criticism has shown that Rasselas gives expression to Johnson’s critical perspective on European empire, his sympathy with North African culture, and his progressive attitude toward gender.

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A substantial biography, focusing on Johnson’s struggles with adversity, including illnesses, psychological torment, and poverty.

A note on Johnson’s knowledge of the Greek historian, especially as it appears in his Debates in Parliament.

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Abstract: In an article in a 1774 issue of the London Magazine about James Bruce’s travels in Abyssinia, James Boswell introduces his subject by noting that “Abyssinia has become an object of interest and pleasing attention in Europe, since the publication of Mr. Samuel Johnson’s tale, called Rasselas Prince of Abyssinia.” He goes on to describe the generic balance of Rasselas as “a work in which that eminent writer has displayed a rich fund of moral instruction, embellished with oriental imagery, and rendered interesting by a well conducted story, in the tissue of which several real facts concerning that country are

“Priestley’s Rudiments and Johnson’s Dictionary.” Not seen.

“Johnson’s Dictionary: The Linguistic Significance of Its Citations.” Not seen.

“The Influence of Continental Language Academies on S. Johnson: His Treatment of Verbs of High Frequency.” Not seen.

An extensive comparative study of Johnson’s and Webster’s use of examples, with much of the evidence drawn from the letter L in both dictionaries.

Abstract: James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, first published from 1760 as Fragments of Ancient Poetry, were the literary sensation of the age. Attacked by Samuel Johnson and others as “forgeries,” nonetheless the poems enthralled readers around the world, attracting rapturous admiration from figures as diverse as Goethe, Diderot, Jefferson, Bonaparte and Mendelssohn. This International Companion examines the social, political and philosophical context of the poems, their disputed origins, their impact on world literature, and the various critical afterlives of Macpherson and of his literary works.

On the inclusion of Johnson’s and Boswell’s libraries in the on-line service Library Thing.

Abstract: Popular readings of Johnson as a dictionary-maker often see him as a writer who both laments and attempts to control the state of the language. Lynda Mugglestone looks at the range of Johnson’s writings on, and the complexity of his thinking about, language and lexicography. She shows how these reveal him probing problems not just of meaning and use but what he considered the related issues of control, obedience, and justice, as well as the difficulties of power when exerted over the “sea of words.” She examines his attitudes to language change, loan words, spelling, history, and authority, describing, too, the evolution of his ideas about the nature, purpose, and methods of lexicography, and shows how these reflect his own and others’ thinking about politics, culture, and society. The book offers a careful reassessment of Johnson’s prescriptive practice, examining in detail his commitment to evidence, and the uses to which this might be put

Abstract: This path-breaking study of the standardisation of English goes well beyond the traditional prescriptivism versus descriptivism debate. It argues that the way norms are established and enforced is the result of a complex network of social factors and cannot be explained simply by appeals to power and hegemony. It brings together insights from leading researchers to re-centre the discussion on linguistic communities and language users. It examines the philosophy underlying the urge to standardise language, and takes a closer look at both well-known and lesser-known historical dictionaries, grammars and usage guides, demonstrating that they cannot be simply labelled as “prescriptivist.” Drawing on rich empirical data and case studies, it shows how the norm continues to function in society, influencing and affecting language users even today.

Abstract: Books, as Samuel Johnson stated in 1754 in his Dictionary of the English Language neared completion, always exert “a secret influence on the understanding” so that the reader is informed in both overt and covert ways. Reference works, he stressed, were no exception. As this essay explores, Johnson’s precepts prove equally illuminating for his own work, and his representations of war and conflict. On one level, his Dictionary of 1755 is a source of formal exposition in which the meaning of war is anatomized across a range of entries. On another, those who consult its pages are presented with war as an ethical or socio-moral problem, freighted with meanings of a very different kind.

On Johnson’s influence on Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

Abstract: This dissertation tests the eighteenth century’s narrative of individual agency as the source of modern personal autonomy, and argues that there is a subtle but problematic conflation between agency and autonomy; rather than assume increased personal agency guarantees a corresponding surge in the experience of autonomy, I suggest that autonomy is ultimately eroded by the modern self’s dependence on social identities that must be continuously maintained, objectified, and circulated as forms of social currency. My approach is founded upon an extensive examination of nonfiction (puritan autobiographies, science writing, essays, etc.) married to close readings of eighteenth-century fictional texts by Defoe, Lennox, Johnson, and others. This nonfictional foundation provides a historical record of the individuated enterprise of self-production, the true genesis of the self-help industry, and the fiction serves as the experimental testing ground that reveals the limits and hazards of this quintessentially modern enterprise. The primary insight of this dissertation is the counter-intuitive revelation that modern selfhood is needful of comic perception to transform exertions of agency squandered within social institutions into exercises of improvisation that buoy the individual rather than burden it. My first chapter focuses on recovering the neglected comic subtext of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and by including analysis of Puritan autobiographies, I demonstrate that this form which is produced in the novel can be re-read through its comic elements to reveal the limiting nature of the process of self-production inaugurated by Puritan nonfiction. Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Johnson’s Rasselas anchor the next two chapters, and I chose two fictions not usually associated with discourse on the ‘self’ because of their unique capacity to complement the first chapter by showing first how any model of ‘self’ is inherently social and subsequently what destructive political consequences are catalyzed by western models of self-formation and self-improvement. Together these three fictions form a demonstration of how the eighteenth-century didactic impulse is transformed via the novel from a textual operation meant to produce discrete moral and social imperatives that would tend to produce uniform social self products into a more idiosyncratic cultural program that has persisted into the twenty-first century.

An original biography, drawing largely from the published sources but not always the familiar ones. Nokes works to set Johnson in his historical context, and pays particular attention to his finances.

Abstract: Dr Johnson said that he would walk to the ends of the earth to save Beauclerk. Other people who claimed to be his friends rejoiced at his early death. How did the beautiful youth of Francis Coates’ 1756 portrait become a man whose greatest claim to fame was causing an infestation of lice at Blenheim Palace through lack of personal hygiene? A great-grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwyn, he lived a privileged life thanks to fortuitously inherited wealth. He employed Robert Adam to build him a house at Muswell Hill which has almost completely disappeared from the records of Adam’s work due to a di

A comparison of two friendships. Johnson and Boswell are the subject of chapters 1 (“From Doctor Johnson to Justice Holmes to Professor Laski,” pp. 9–25), 2 (“Johnson,” pp. 27–54), and 3 (“Boswell,” pp. 55–66), though they appear throughout the book.

Abstract: The study and reception of Samuel Johnson’s work has long been embedded in Japanese literary culture. The essays in this collection reflect that history and influence, underscoring the richness of Johnson scholarship in Japan, while exploring broader conditions in Japanese academia today. In examining Johnson’s works such as the Rambler, Rasselas, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, and Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, the contributors — all members of the half-century-old Johnson Society of Japan — also engage with the work of other important English writers, namely Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Matthew Arnold, and later Japanese writers, including Natsume Soseki (1867–1916). If the state of Johnson studies in Japan is unfamiliar to Western academics, this volume offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Johnson’s centrality to Japanese education and intellectual life, and to reassess how he may be perceived in a different cultural context.

Note: The editorial board announced that this article has been retracted on May 16, 2018. If you have any further question, please contact us at: ijel@ccsenet.org

Abstract: This article is an analysis of contemporary critical approaches to the relationships between Dr Johnson and women, particularly with reference to The Rambler, followed by the introduction of previously unpublished letters which display a female reader of the periodical, Jemima Campbell, Marchioness Grey, choosing not to write for The Rambler and instead opting to produce a satirical attack on “Mr Rambler” within the private sphere of a familiar letter to her friend Catherine Talbot. Talbot did write an essay for Johnson’s periodical, and this article looks at the two documents as different case studies in responses to Johnson’s moralizing persona. Essentially, criticism on The Rambler has undergone a shift from celebratory analysis of his positive and nuanced representations of his female characters and relationships with contemporary women writers, since James Basker and Isobel Grundy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to a reappraisal of his relationships with women.

On the treatment of Lear in the eighteenth century, including Tate’s famous revision. Johnson appears only in passing.

Abstract: Durante el siglo XVIII, la tendencia en la traducción de textos ingleses al español, que no perseguían ser adaptaciones sino tender al polo de aceptabilidad, era seguir la moda francesa de las “belles infidèles” mayoritariamente imperante entonces. Se llegó incluso a decir que era mejor no ser fieles en la traducción de textos ingleses, dada la distancia ética y estética que separaba la producción de Gran Bretaña con respecto a lo que se elaboraba en el continente. Sufrieron este proceso, por mencionar los ejemplos más significativos, las tres novelas de Richardson y Tom Jones y Amelia de Fielding. Sin embargo, el Rasselas de Johnson conoció una suerte muy diferente. La finalidad de este ensayo es analizar por qué la versión de esta novela se aparta de los cánones establecidos y señalar qué tipo de versión se ofreció al lector español del dieciocho.

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Abstract: The present study analyses the reception of Samuel Johnson in Spain through the translation of his works into Spanish. Despite the immense influence Samuel Johnson has had in the English-speaking world as one of the most significant representatives of enlightened Humanism, the knowledge of his works and his figure have been rather belated in the Hispanic world. His marked “Englishness” may be considered one of the causes why his works went unnoticed among his Spanish contemporaries and the following generations at a time when political and cultural alliances linked Spain to France rather than to Great Britain. A determining factor in the process of making Samuel Johnson better-known in Spain has been the development of English Studies as an academic discipline, especially since the 1980’s. The second important factor is the availability of Spanish translations of the famous biography signed by James Boswell.

Abstract: In twenty-first-century accounts of how knowledge was transmitted at second hand in the early modern period and the eighteenth century, the idea of information has played a crucial role. “Information” refers to the content that was compiled and stored on paper and shared in reference books and periodical sheets. My thesis argues that eighteenth-century Britons understood printed information through the lens of cultural discourses that privileged engagements with books that we would now call “literary.” By re-thinking the transmission of information as a textual object in eighteenth-century Britain, I argue, we can better understand the complex ways in which information was credited, acquired, and shared. I show how the author-function played a role in the public sharing of information in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson’s rhetoric of personal sacrifice in the “Preface” and Plan of an English Dictionary (1747), I argue, should be contrasted with the methods of Johnson’s rival, Nathan Bailey. Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721–1802) offers an example of the failure of compiled information to gain cultural authority without authorial control. I argue that Jonathan Swift’s satires on textual criticism, cryptanalysis, and scientific languages can be seen as critiques of mechanical reading “devices” that extracted information from texts. A direct challenge to informational uses of language was offered at the end of the eighteenth century in the work of Johnson’s friend, Hester Lynch Piozzi. Piozzi’s English-language reference work, British Synonymy (1794), showed how direct engagement with the “redundant” material of language provided a knowledge of texts that was difficult to communicate but necessary to observe. I suggest that the mediation of public information in eighteenth-century Britain was balanced in important ways by literary discourses that argued for the importance of the specific ways in which knowledge was credited, acquired, and shared through language.

Abstract: Today, churches, political parties, trade unions, and even national sports teams are no guarantee of social solidarity. At a time when these traditional institutions of social cohesion seem increasingly ill-equipped to defend against the disintegration of sociability, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer encourages us to reflect on the cultural and literary history of social gatherings — from the ancient Athenian symposium to its successor forms throughout Western history. From medieval troubadours to Parisian salons and beyond, Pfeiffer conceptualizes the symposium as an institution of sociability with a central societal function. As such he reinforces a programmatic theoretical move in the sociology of Georg Simmel and builds on theories of social interaction and communication characterized by Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and others. To make his argument, Pfeiffer draws on the work of a range of writers, including Dr. Samuel Johnson and Diderot, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, Dorothy Sayers, Joseph Conrad, and Stieg Larsson. Ultimately, Pfeiffer concludes that if modern societies do not find ways of reinstating elements of the Athenian symposium, especially those relating to its ritualized ease, decency and style of interaction, they will have to cope with increasing violence and decreasing social cohesion.

Abstract: Early novel reading typically conjures images of rapt readers in quiet rooms, but commentators at the time described reading as a fraught activity, one occurring amidst a distracting cacophony that included sloshing chamber pots and wailing street vendors. Auditory distractions were compounded by literary ones as falling paper costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing prose fiction to compete with a dizzying array of essays, poems, sermons, and histories. In Distraction, Natalie M. Phillips argues that prominent Enlightenment authors — from Jane Austen and William Godwin to Eliza Haywood and Samuel Johnson — were deeply engaged with debates about the wandering mind, even if they were not equally concerned about the problem of distractibility. Phillips explains that some novelists in the 1700s — viewing distraction as a dangerous wandering from singular attention that could lead to sin or even madness — attempted to reform diverted readers.

Abstract: The ‘author function’, as Michel Foucault outlines it, characterises ‘the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses in society’. It does not ‘refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, several subject-positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals’. While Foucault acknowledges that ‘it would be ridiculous to deny the existence of individuals who write, and invent’, he asserts that ‘some time, at least, the individual who sits down to write a text, at the edge of which lurks a possible œuvre, resumes...

Abstract: Pooley cites that according to Samuel Johnson, Edward Cave (1691–1754), founder and first editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, “never looked out of the window but with a view to the Gentleman’s Magazine.” This view encompassed the diversity of Georgian life, politics and culture. It captivated Cave’s readers and established the magazine as the leading periodical of its day. It was the world’s first magazine as we understand the word, a monthly compendium of useful and entertaining information aimed at an increasingly literate public in Georgian Britain. Readers approached the magazine in different ways. Some turned straight to the back to scan the obituaries, while others, like “Veritas,” asked their servant to carefully cut the leaves so that they could peruse the table of contents and read the valuable parts first. In defiance of its title, the magazine was popular with women, who both read and contributed to its pages.

Abstract: This chapter explores a particular instance of mental disturbance and threatened collapse into madness from crucial period. It is the case of a man who suffered the torments of melancholy on and off all his life, who feared that his melancholy would career downhill into madness proper; a man who recorded symptoms, speculated on causes, and reported his experience of that affliction and attempted remedies in some detail. The chapter explores the course, nature, and possible explanations of Samuel Johnson’s melancholy. Johnson was thus haunted by dread that his “mind corrupted with an inveterate disease of wishing,” would eventually succumb to monomania. Christianity gave Johnson a prospect of managing mortality, a vision of triumph over the Grim Reaper, an earnest of life eternal. The chapter concludes by briefly indicating what wider conclusions Johnson’s sufferings might help us to draw about mental disturbance in Georgian England.

A personal meditation on Pritchard’s early experience with Johnson.

On Johnson’s observation that “there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man” read against contemporary miniatures, including in Swift’s Gulliver.