Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson Falcon Prose Classics

by Julian Symons

Thanks to Boswell’s monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, we remember Dr. Johnson today as a great wit and conversationalist, the rationalist epitome and the sage of the Enlightenment. He is more often quoted than read, his name invoked in party conversation on such diverse topics as marriage, sleep, deceit, mental concentration, and patriotism, to generally humorous effect. But in Johnson’s own day, he was best known as an essayist, critic, and a gifted writer possessed of great force of mind and wisdom. Writing a century after Johnson, Ruskin wrote of Johnson’s He “taught me to measure life, and distrust fortune…he saved me forever from false thoughts and futile speculations.” Peter Martin here presents “the heart of Johnson,” a selection of some of Johnson’s best moral and critical essays. At the center of this collection are the periodical essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. Also included are Johnson’s great moral fable, Rasselas; the Prefaces to the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; and selections from Lives of the Poets. Together, these works―allied in their literary, social, and moral concerns―are the ones that continue to speak urgently to readers today.

Genres: Classics, Nonfiction, Essays, Poetry, Biography, Literature, Unfinished

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Julian Gustave Symons is primarily remembered as a master of the art of crime writing. However, in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and he held a distinguished reputation in each field.

His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day. It is for this that he was awarded various prizes, and, in 1982, named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America - an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. He succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain's Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writer.

Symons held a number of positions prior to becoming a full-time writer including secretary to an engineering company and advertising copywriter and executive. It was after the end of World War II that he became a free-lance writer and book reviewer and from 1946 to 1956 he wrote a weekly column entitled "Life, People - and Books" for the Manchester Evening News. During the 1950s he was also a regular contributor to Tribune, a left-wing weekly, serving as its literary editor.

He founded and edited 'Twentieth Century Verse', an important little magazine that flourished from 1937 to 1939 and he introduced many young English poets to the public. He has also published two volumes of his own poetry entitled 'Confusions about X', 1939, and 'The Second Man', 1944.

He wrote hie first detective novel, 'The Immaterial Murder Case', long before it was first published in 1945 and this was followed in 1947 by a rare volume entitled 'A Man Called Jones' that features for the first time Inspector Bland, who also appeared in Bland Beginning.

These novles were followed by a whole host of detective novels and he has also written many short stories that were regularly published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In additin there are two British paperback collections of his short stories, Murder! Murder! and Francis Quarles Investigates, which were published in 1961 and 1965 resepctively.

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

First attempt reading the big Dr, and such a weird bag of rubbish (all those awful Augustan 'imitations' of Horace or Juvenal, a lot of bloviating moralism) and brilliance (brutally intelligent essays on Shakespeare and on Scotland, unexpectedly firm anti-colonial and anti-racist convictions, prose best described as 'muscular').

[Jeff Crompton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have several anthologies of Johnson's writings; each has material not found in the others. Johnson's writing almost always rates five stars from me, so the rating is of this book as a collection. The best feature of this anthology is the excellent, informative introduction; the biggest weakness is that many of the selections are excerpts, rather than complete pieces.

But what's here is excellent. This time around, I particularly enjoyed the essays from The Idler, especially the portrait of Sober, the Idler - which is actually about Johnson himself.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is truly beautiful prose. There was a tv programme years ago - I think it was a British cop show. They talked about "an LTT folder", which you could consult when you were unsure of the "line to take". The essays in this book are like an LTT folder. Solid practical and emotional advice delivered with great wit from a true connoisseur of morals for displaced post-modern moral midgets like myself. And SO beautifully written.

[Gille Liath · Rating 4 out of 5]

The trouble with Dr Johnson is that he is as sombre and pedantic in writing as he was, apparently, entertaining and amusing in person. It is not quite right to say, as Stevenson did, that if we had not had Boswell’s biography we should have had nothing worthwhile of him: he had a capacious mind and was an astute and sympathetic observer of humanity whether in London or the Gaelic Highlands; he was also an outstanding critic of poetry. His work is sometimes witty by his own definition, which is that of saying something which had not, perhaps, previously occurred to the hearer, but of which they immediately recognise the justice; but it is rarely witty by Pope’s yardstick, which is that wit expresses familiar ideas more aptly and neatly than they have been expressed before. His writing is heavy, it misses the seasoning of levity which need not interfere with seriousness of purpose; it has none of the ‘good things’ which Boswell reports from his conversation.

There is a short passage quoted here from Lives of the English Poets in which he discusses the defect of tediousness (not content with his great analytical intelligence, he aspired to the distinction of poet too). He says it is the worst defect a writer can have, and that it is impossible for the writer by his own judgement to assure himself he is not guilty of it. Perhaps that was the voice of his own artistic conscience.

It’s not so much that without Boswell we wouldn’t have anything of him; it’s that, without Boswell, we wouldn’t *want* anything of him. As it is he remains worth reading – if you are interested in what he is writing about. But he is not one of those whom you would read, regardless of the subject, just for the sake of keeping company with an entertaining mind.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Samuel Johnson's writings are extensive and particular; as the editor of the first dictionary of the English language and a fine critic, his reputation was firmly established. An extremely quotable writer, my personal; favourite is, "Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young."