Selected Essays (Penguin Classics)

by Samuel Johnson

  7. Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Samuel Johnson’, in Miscellaneous Writings, 2 vols (1860), vol. ii, p. 288.

  8. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), reprinted in Johnson: The Critical Heritage, p. 88.

  9. Murphy, Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (1792), reprinted in Johnson: The Critical Heritage, p. 71.

  10. George Gleig, Encyclopedia Britannica (1793), reprinted in Johnson: The Critical Heritage, p. 73.

  11. See below, Rambler No. 181.

  12. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 149.

  13. Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary 1746–1773, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 68.

  14. See the clipped and unsympathetic judgement of Robert Levet; Thraliana, ed. K. C. Balderston, second edition, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), vol. i, p. 178.

  15. In 1739 Lord Gower, in the course of supplying a testimonial to assist Johnson in his candidacy for the headmastership of Appleby School, reported that Johnson would prefer ‘to die upon the road, than be starved to death in translating for booksellers; which has been his only subsistence for some time past’ (Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 96).

  16. For Pope’s ‘candid and liberal’ praise of the poem, see Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 92.

  17. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 199.

  18. Murphy, Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (1792), reprinted in Johnson: The Critical Heritage, p. 69.

  19. ‘Addison’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. ii, p. 92.

  20. Ibid., p. 93.

  21.Ibid.

  22. Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. A. Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 22.

  23. Leo Damrosch, ‘Johnson’s Manner of Proceeding in the Rambler’, English Literary History (ELH), 40 (1973), p. 72.

  24. W. K. Wimsatt, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948). Reddick, Making of Johnson’s Dictionary 1746–1773. See, too, the following passage from the coda to Rambler No. 208: ‘Whatever shall be the final sentence of mankind, I have at least endeavoured to deserve their kindness. I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations. Something, perhaps, I have added to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence. When common words were less pleasing to the ear, or less distinct in their signification, I have familiarized the terms of philosophy by applying them to popular ideas…’ (below, p. 325). Arthur Murphy also reflected on how The Rambler might have been influenced by the Dictionary: ‘It is remarkable, that the pomp of diction, which has been objected to Johnson, was first assumed in the Rambler. His Dictionary was going on at the same time, and, in the course of that work, as he grew familiar with technical and scholastic words he thought the bulk of his readers were equally learned…’ (Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (1792), reprinted in Johnson: The Critical Heritage, p. 70).

  25. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., second edition (London, 1787), p. 175. Although Thomas Percy dissents from Hawkins’s account of the physical process whereby the illustrative quotations for the Dictionary were assembled and collated, he endorses what Hawkins says about the trawl of reading which underpropped the whole enterprise: ‘He began his task by devoting his first care to a diligent perusal of all such English writers as were most correct in their language’ (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. ii, p. 214). For the manner in which the Dictionary was compiled, see Reddick, Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, esp. pp. 27–41.

  26. The whole passage from the ‘Preface’ bears repetition:

  So far have I been from any care to grace my pages with modern decorations, that I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction. Our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it, by making our ancient volumes the ground-work of style, admitting among the additions of later times, only such as may supply real deficiencies, such as are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with our native idioms.

  But as every language has a time of rudeness antecedent to perfection, as well as of false refinement and declension, I have been cautious lest my zeal for antiquity might drive me into times too remote, and crowd my book with words now no longer understood. I have fixed Sidney’s work for the boundary, beyond which I make few excursions. From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words, in which they might be expressed.

  This was not the period of English literature which all Johnson’s contemporaries would have selected as best representative of the language. For example, at the end of the 1750s, when Gibbon returned to England from nearly five years speaking French in Lausanne, David Mallet encouraged him to regain fluency in English by reading ‘the prose of Swift and Addison’, in which could be found ‘the purity, the grace, the idiom, of the English style’ (Edward Gibbon, The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (London, 1896), p. 251). The diverse choices made by Mallet (whom Johnson despised) and Johnson himself may flow from and reflect their ideological and religious differences.

  27. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (London, 1751), Section 1, para. 134.

  28. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 314.

  29. Ibid., pp. 392–3.

  30. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III, 1.2.

  31. Ibid., III, 5.12.

  32. Ibid., III, 11.15.

  33. Ibid., III, 11.15–16.

  34. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary, ‘Preface’.

  35. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, ed. G. J. Kolb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 88.

  36. See Rambler No. 14.

  37. Boswell, Life of Johnson, pp. 320–21.

  38. Cf. the remark of Leo Damrosch, that ‘the heart of Johnson’s mission as a moralist is to make us stop parroting the precepts of moralists and start thinking for ourselves’ (‘Johnson’s Manner of Proceeding in the Rambler’, ELH, 40 (1973), p. 81).

  39. From Rambler No. 168, below, p. 282.

  40. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 172.

  41. See ‘An Essay on Epitaphs’, below, p.515.

  42. See Idler No. 41.

  43. Boswell, Life of Johnson, pp. 50–51.

  44. See Rambler No. 2.

  45. See pp. 580–81 for the relevant quotation from South’s sermon.

  46. Murphy, Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (1792), reprinted in Johnson: The Critical Heritage, p. 72.

  47. R. M. Wiles, ‘The Contemporary Distribution of Johnson’s Rambler’, Eighteenth-Century Studies (ECS), 2 (1968), pp. 155–71.

  48. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 1369. An interesting and neglected instance of such imitation is to be found in Philip Parsons, Dialogues of the Dead with the Living (1779), in which dialogue VII is between Johnson and Addison.

  49. See Appendix III.

  50. To the Countess of Ossory, 19 January 1775; The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, vol. 32 (London: Oxford University Press, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 225.

  51. To the Countess of Ossory,
1 February 1779; Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. 33, pp. 88–9.

  52. See Rambler No. 2.

  53. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 961.

  54. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 7.

  Further Reading

  1. BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Clifford, J. L. and D. J. Greene, Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970).

  Courtney, W. P., A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915).

  Greene, D. J. and J. A. Vance, A Bibliography of Johnson Studies, 1970–1985 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, BC, 1987).

  2. BIOGRAPHY

  Bate, W. J., Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).

  Boswell, James, The Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, revised by L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–64).

  Clifford, J. L., Young Sam Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1955).

  —, Dictionary Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1979).

  De Maria, Robert, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993).

  Kaminski, T., The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  Kelly, R. E. and O. M. Brack, Samuel Johnson’s Early Biographers (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1971).

  Lipking, L., Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  3. EDITIONS

  a) Complete editions

  Works, II vols. (Oxford, 1825).

  The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958– ).

  The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992–94).

  b) Editions of the periodical essays

  The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, J. M. Bullitt and L. F. Powell (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963).

  The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss, 3 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969).

  Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler, ed. W. J. Bate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968).

  4. CRITICAL AND SCHOLARLY STUDIES

  a) General studies

  Bate, W. J., The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).

  Boulton, J. T., Johnson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).

  De Maria Jr., R., Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

  —, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

  Engell, James (ed.), Johnson and his Age (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1984).

  Fussell, P., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972).

  Greene, D. (ed.), Samuel Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965).

  Reddick, A., The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary 1746–1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; rev. edn. 1996).

  Reinert, T., Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996).

  Voitle, R., Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961).

  Wimsatt, W. K., The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1941).

  b) Studies focusing on the periodical essay

  Bond, R. P. (ed.), Contemporaries of the Tatler and Spectator (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1954).

  —, Studies in the Early English Periodical (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957).

  Graham, W., The Beginnings of the English Literary Periodicals: A Study of Periodical Literature, 1665–1715 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1926).

  —, English Literary Periodicals (New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1930).

  Habermas, J., Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962).

  Hanson, L., The Government and the Press, 1695–1763 (London: Oxford University Press, 1936).

  Marr, G. S., The Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971).

  Parks, S., ‘John Dunton and The Works of the Learned’, The Library, 23 (1968), pp. 13–24.

  Snyder, H. L., ‘The Circulation of Newspapers in the Reign of Queen Anne’, The Library, 23 (1968), pp. 206–35.

  Spector, R. D., English Literary Periodicals and the Climate of Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (The Hague: Mouton, 1966).

  Sutherland, J. R., ‘The Circulation of Newspapers and Literary Periodicals, 1700–1730’, The Library, 15 (1934), pp. 110–24.

  c) Studies focusing on Johnson’s essays

  Bloom, E. A., ‘Symbolic Names in Johnson’s Periodical Essays’, Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ), 13 (1952), pp. 333–52.

  Cunningham, J. S., ‘The Essayist, “Our Present State”, and “The Passions” ’, in Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, ed. I. Grundy (London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984), pp. 137–57.

  Damrosch, L., ‘Johnson’s Manner of Proceeding in the Rambler’, ELH, 40 (1973), pp. 70–89.

  Davis, P., In Mind of Johnson: A Study of Johnson the Rambler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989).

  Elder, A. T., ‘Thematic Patterning and Development in Johnson’s Essays’, Studies in Philology (SP), 62 (1965), pp. 610–32.

  Kenney, W., ‘Parodies and Imitations of Johnson in the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 6 (1977), pp. 157–81.

  Lynn, S., Samuel Johnson after Deconstruction (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).

  O’Flaherty, P., ‘Towards an Understanding of Johnson’s Rambler’, Studies in English Literature (SEL), 18 (1978), pp. 523–36.

  Olson, R. L., Motto, Context, Essay: The Classical Background of Samuel Johnson’s ‘Rambler’ and ‘Adventurer’ Essays (New York: University Press of America, 1984).

  Riely, J. C., ‘The Pattern of Imagery in Johnson’s Periodical Essays’, ECS, 3 (1970), pp. 384–97.

  Schwartz, R. B., ‘Johnson’s “Mr. Rambler” and the Periodical Tradition’, Genre, 7 (1974), pp. 196–204.

  Spector, R. D., Samuel Johnson and the Essay (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1997).

  Trowbridge, H., ‘The Language of Reasoned Rhetoric in The Rambler’, in Greene Centennial Studies, ed. P. J. Korshin and R. R. Allen (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984).

  Van Tassel, M. M., ‘Johnson’s Elephant: The Reader of the Rambler’, SEL, 28 (1988), pp. 461–69.

  Wiles, R. M., ‘The Contemporary Distribution of Johnson’s Rambler’, ECS, 2 (1968), pp. 155–71.

  Wimsatt, W. K., Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1948).

  A Note on the Texts

  The following texts have served as copy-texts for the works reprinted in this edition:

  The Rambler: the fourth edition of 1756.

  The Adventurer: the second edition of 1754.

  The Idler: the second edition of 1761 (except that the text for the original Idler 22 is taken from Payne’s Universal Chronicle, 23, 1758).

  A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage: first edition of 1739.

  ‘An Essay on Epitaphs’: The Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1740.

  ‘Introduction’ to the Harleian Miscellany: The Harleian Miscellany, 1744.

  ‘Observations on the Present State of Affairs’: The Literary Magazine, iv, 15 July – 15 August 1756.

  ‘Of the Duty of a Journalist’: Payne’s Universal Chronicle, 1, 1758.

  ‘The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers’: The British Magazine,I, January 1760.

  The texts as printed in this edition are unmodernized transcri
ptions of the copy-texts, save that slips have been silently corrected, and Greek quotations have been furnished with accents and breathings in line with modern scholarly editions. No attempt has been made to bring eighteenth-century printers’ conventions into line with modern usage, apart from the deletion of the use of small capitals for the initial words of paragraphs.

  THE RAMBLER (1750–52)

  No. 1. Tuesday, 20 March 1750.

  Cur tamen hoc libeat potius decurrere campo,

  Per quem magnus equos Auruncæ flexit alumnus,

  Si vacat, et placidi rationem admittitis, edam.

  JUV.1

  Why to expatiate in this beaten field,

  Why arms, oft us’d in vain, I mean to wield;

  If time permit, and candour will attend,

  Some satisfaction this essay may lend.

  ELPHINSTON.*

  The difficulty of the first address on any new occasion, is felt by every man in his transactions with the world, and confessed by the settled and regular forms of salutation which necessity has introduced into all languages. Judgment was wearied with the perplexity of being forced upon choice, where there was no motive to preference; and it was found convenient that some easy method of introduction should be established, which, if it wanted the allurement of novelty, might enjoy the security of prescription.

  Perhaps few authors have presented themselves before the public, without wishing that such ceremonial modes of entrance had been anciently established, as might have freed them from those dangers which the desire of pleasing is certain to produce, and precluded the vain expedients of softening censure by apologies, or rousing attention by abruptness.

  The epic writers have found the proemial part of the poem such an addition to their undertaking, that they have almost unanimously adopted the first lines of Homer, and the reader needs only be informed of the subject to know in what manner the poem will begin.