Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

First things first: there are better Johnson pages. The best is Jack Lynch's Johnson page at Rutgers:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/

There was also a great illustrated display on Johnson's Dictionary at the Stanford Library that is still available through the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20040617022806/http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/johnson/intro.html

But if you really want my class notes, read on! 
--Dr. K

 

Samuel Johnson is called many things: the poet who celebrates human unsuccess, the Rambler, Dictionary Johnson, a Grub Street hack--and he is all these things and more. You have him to blame for a lot of what you study in English literature classes, so come to grips with him.

Like Pope and Swift (fellow Tories), Johnson is an outsider who gained insider status with his literary genius. He was a bright youngster and made it into Oxford, but had to drop out after two years because he couldn't afford the school fees. He became an itinerant school teacher and part-time journalist, eventually marrying a well-off woman twenty years older than he was, and after several failed ventures ended up moving with her to London in 1737, where they took lodgings among the Grub Street hacks. He supported himself writing for periodicals, and in 1744 cashed in on the middle-class demand for more information about famous writers by publishing his Life of Savage, perhaps the first literary critical biography of an English writer. Johnson established three standards for literary biography that are still held today:

Building on the success of his biographies, Johnson managed to raise enough money by subscription publication to underwrite the nine-year process of writing The Dictionary of the English Language, with the help of six young assistants. The Dictionary is the first systematic effort to apply the principles of the New Science to lexicography, a science Johnson can be said to have invented. It was based on careful examination of many examples of the use of words, a collection of best examples, a selection of literature from Sidney to Pope (Johnson didn't use examples from living writers), and careful distinction between competing meanings. His etymologies are generally very accurate as well. Its Preface sets out the principles by which most good dictionaries have been written ever since (Longman p. 1391 ff.). You have a handful of definitions in your text; the calendar has links to some of the funnier ones your text is missing.

Johnson had originally sought the patronage of the Earl of Chesterfield to underwrite the Dictionary, but Chesterfield gave him the cold shoulder. Years later, when the Dictionary was about to appear, Chesterfield published two letters in periodicals praising the Dictionary and implying that he (Chesterfield) was behind the financing. In response, Johnson wrote one of the most acidic, sarcastic, and effective letters of refusal ever written, the brief yet acidic Letter to Lord Chesterfield. It's a masterful example of tone--try reading it aloud!

The success of the Dictionary made Johnson's reputation, but he had already begun publishing periodical essays, first in the Rambler and then in the Idler, which also cemented his position as the Dean of English Literary Criticism. If you only read one Rambler, make it Rambler #60 on Biography (p. 1384), which sets out the principles on which The Life of Savage was written. His followup, Rambler  4 on fiction (p. 1381), further supplements his views on life writing.

Following the Dictionary, Johnson capitalized on his fame by starting a new subscription edition of The Works of Shakespeare. His edition was much preferable to those which went before because he didn't try to "improve" Shakespeare but to look at the various early printed editions and try to establish a critical text of the plays. His edition is best known for its excellent Preface, in which he celebrates Shakespeare for his "just representations of general nature," but also identifies what he perceives as faults in Shakespeare, including the famous attack on Shakespeare's puns ('quibbles'). This essay also presents his famous demolition of the notion of dramatic unities (Remember Sidney?), pointing out that playgoers always realize they are watching fiction, not truth, and that their willing suspension of disbelief (to steal a phrase from the Romantics) makes them able to deal with one scene in Rome and the next in Athens.

A few  of the most famous passages from the Preface to Shakespeare explain why Shakespeare has attained such pre-eminence. In terms of individual/society and the 18th century ideas of order, they are particularly appropriate:

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species....

Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most frequent incidents; so that he who contemplates them in the book will not know them in the world: Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would be probably such as he has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigences, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed.

This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language; by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions....

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished unto brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals....

But the greater part of his excellence was the product of his own genius. He found the English stage in a state of the utmost rudeness; no essays either in tragedy or comedy had appeared, from which it could be discovered to what degree of delight either one or other might be carried. Neither character nor dialogue were yet understood. Shakespeare may be truly said to have introduced them both amongst us, and in some of his happier scenes to have carried them both to the utmost height.