Selected Essays

by Samuel Johnson, David Womersley (Editor)

With his wit, eloquence, and shrewd perception of contemporary morals, Samuel Johnson was the most versatile writer of the English neoclassical period. His dictionary, dramas, and poetry established his reputation, but it was the essays that demonstrated the range of his talent. This new edition presents both the forcefully argued moral pieces of Johnson's middle years and the more light-hearted essays of his later work. Tackling ethical questions—such as the importance of self-knowledge, awareness of mortality, the role of the novel, and, in a lighter vein, marriage, sleep, and deceit—these brilliant and thought-provoking essays are a mirror of the time in which they were written and a testament to Johnson's stature as the leading man of letters of his age.

Genres: Essays, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Classics, Literature, 18th Century, Literary Criticism

576 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 2003

About the author

People note British writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, known as "Doctor Johnson," for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), for Lives of the Poets (1781), and for his series of essays, published under the titles The Rambler (1752) and The Idler (1758).

Samuel Johnson used the first consistent Universal Etymological English Dictionary , first published in 1721, of British lexicographer Nathan Bailey as a reference.

Beginning as a journalist on Grub street, this English author made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, and editor. People described Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history." James Boswell subjected him to Life of Samuel Johnson , one of the most celebrated biographies in English. This biography alongside other biographies, documented behavior and mannerisms of Johnson in such detail that they informed the posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome (TS), a condition unknown to 18th-century physicians. He presented a tall and robust figure, but his odd gestures and tics confused some persons on their first encounters.

Johnson attended Pembroke college, Oxford for a year before his lack of funds compelled him to leave. After working as a teacher, he moved to London, where he began to write essays for The Gentleman's Magazine. His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage and the poem " The Vanity of Human Wishes ." Christian morality permeated works of Johnson, a devout and compassionate man. He, a conservative Anglican, nevertheless respected persons of other denominations that demonstrated a commitment to teachings of Christ.

After nine years of work, people in 1755 published his preeminent Dictionary of the English Language, bringing him popularity and success until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1905, a century and a half later. In the following years, he published essays, an influential annotated edition of plays of William Shakespeare, and the well-read novel Rasselas . In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland , travel narrative of Johnson, described the journey. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets , which includes biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.

After a series of illnesses, Johnson died on the evening; people buried his body in Westminster abbey. In the years following death, people began to recognize a lasting effect of Samuel Johnson on literary criticism even as the only great critic of English literature.

Reviews

[شمس · Rating 5 out of 5]

No. 42. Wednesday, 14 March 2018.

. . . if I can be numbered among the writers who have given ardour to virtue, and confidence to truth. —Johnson

To The Author of The Rambler, Adventurer, Idler &c.

Dear Mr. Rambler,

Having read with pleasure the Essays of Misters. Montaigne, Browne, Bacon, and Burton, I thought I would write to let you know with how great a joy I welcomed picking up and reading from this selection of your most Eminent Essays from the Newspapers namedThe Rambler, The Adventurer, and The Idler.

Time, the Cultivation of the Self, the Wisdom of the Antients, and the Poetry of John Milton*; these topicks, recurring with some frequency, I found most enjoyable; being, not only those topicks most fit for Essayistick compositions, but being also among those most dear to my Heart. I also marvelled at the variance of topick and form of your Essays, and, I must say, I quite enjoyed those comprising Letters from fellow Readers, and those containing short Stories, which you so skillfully laid out; sometime for Moral Instruction, and sometime for Amusement.

. . .

I am, Sir, &c.

* As of writing, I can not, yet, lend truth to the claim of having read the works of John Milton. But with your frequent praise, and weaving of the most befitting extracts, I am most bestirred to compleat my current poetical studies, (which, for the near future, will find me residing in the 14th-16th Centuries), so that I too, can enjoy that Beauty and Sublimity which you so highly extol.
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Okay, that was mildly amusing, but the result is not very accurate, and it would take far too much time to produce a full review in a more accurate Johnsonian style, so I'll stop there.

This selection published by Penguin contains 126 Essays in all; 76/208 from The Rambler, 16 of his contributions to The Adventurer, and 34/103 from The Idler, and contains excellent notes.

As stated above, Johnson muses on a variety of topicks; Time and Self-Cultivation being two of his favourites, but they can, and are, about anything and everything. His talent for weaving serious topicks with a light and amusing style makes his Essays immensely readable; I was never anything less than excited to read the next one. They are occasionally peppered with Letters from his Readers (I'm unsure whether these are actually written by Johnson himself?), and fictional stories of individuals.

As these were originally published as part of a Newspaper, each Essay is roughly similar in length (2-4 pp.) and you can easily read quite a few in one go, or savour them one-at-a-time.

Johnson opens each one with a Quotation from a Greek or Roman author (Horace is by far the most frequent), and he also frequently quotes from these authors within the Essays themselves. He is similar to Montaigne in his respect, in that if you are not already familiar with the eternal quality, relevance, and poetical power of the Antients, reading Johnson will certainly whet your appetite.

He also reverences Milton as a poet par excellence, quoting him with high frequency; and in The Rambler, Essay No. 90 , he excerpts him with great excellence, using his Magnum Opus to explain some Aesthetics of Poetry; one example being why 'the noblest and most majestic pauses which our versification admits, are upon the fourth and sixth syllables . . .' and so why we find lines that rest on these very aurally pleasing . If, like myself, you don't have a deep understanding of poetical cadence, I would highly recommend reading that Essay.
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Johnson adopted anonymous Personae for his Essays, and so, unlike in Montaigne, you do not really get to know him on a more personal level, which is a real shame. Furthermore, if he was not restricted by the Newspaper format, and if he was given financial independence allowing a great deal of leisure, I can't help but think that Johnson could have easily combined and expanded a lot his musings to produce a more succinct and dense body of work which could have probably rivalled that of Montaigne.
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I found this website to be an excellent resource. It makes available every Essay, and has, as titles, a succinct summary of the contents of each one. When I was reading through The Rambler, I was browsing through the Essays which weren't included in the selection, and making a note of any which I thought I would particularly enjoy; but I abandoned this practice during The Idler, and accepted the fact that I would have to read his Essays in full, and I look forward to doing so in the future.

Some extracts can be found below
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From The Rambler:

The uncertainty of our duration ought at once to set bounds to our designs, and add incitements to our industry; and when we find ourselves inclined either to immensity in our schemes, or sluggishness in our endeavours, we may either check, or animate, ourselves, by recollecting, with the father of physic [Hippocrates], that art is long, and life is short. (17)

Antiquity is the darling of Learning. (22)

The great fault of men of learning is still, that they offend against this rule [know thyself], and appear willing to study any thing rather than themselves. (24)

As he that lives longest lives but a little while, every man may be certain that he has no time to waste. (71)

It is certainly dangerous to be too much pleased with little things. (85)

Of the numbers that pass their lives among books, very few read to be made wiser or better, apply any general reproof of vice to themselves, or try their own manners by axioms of justice. They purpose either to consume those hours for which they can find no other amusement; to gain or preserve that respect which learning has always obtained. (87)

His name is, indeed, reverenced; but his works are neglected. (106)

He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground. (108)

Time was his estate; an estate indeed, which will produce nothing without cultivation, but will always abundantly repay the labours of industry, and satisfy the most extensive desires, if no part of it be suffered to lie waste by negligence, to be overrun with noxious plants, or laid out for show rather than for use. (108)

I have been informed by a letter from one of the universities, that among the youth from whom the next swarm of reasoners is to learn philosophy, and the next flight of beauties to hear elegies and sonnets, there are many, who, instead of endeavouring by books and meditation to form their own opinions, content themselves with the secondary knowledge, which a convenient bench in a coffee-house can supply; and without any examination or distinction, adopt the criticisms and remarks, which happen to drop from those who have risen, by merit or fortune, to reputation and authority. (121)

The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated. (137)

I know not whether any condition could be preferred to that of the man who involves himself in his own thoughts . . . (207)
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From The Adventurer:

Whatever can be completed in a year, is divisible into parts, of which each may be performed in the compass of a day; he, therefore, that has passed the day without attention to the task assigned him, may be certain, that the lapse of life has brought him no nearer to his object; for whatever idleness may expect from time, its produce will be only in proportion to the diligence with which it has been used. (69)

It is, however, reasonable, to have Perfection in our eye; that we may always advance towards it, though we know it can never be reached. (85)

Much of my life has sunk into nothing, and left no trace by which it can be distinguished, as of this I now only know, that it was once in my power and might once have been improved. (137)
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From The Idler:

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention, and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied but to be read. (30)

Idleness is a silent and peaceful quality, that neither raises envy by ostentation, nor hatred by opposition; and therefore no body is busy to censure or detect it. (31)

When these collections shall be read in another century . . . (40)

He that writes upon general principles, or delivers universal truths, may hope to be often read, because his work will be equally useful at all times and in every country (59)

He then fulminates his loudest censures against the monkish barbarity of rhyme; wonders how beings that pretend to reason can be pleased with one line always ending like another. (61)

Milton is the only writer whose books M— can read for ever without weariness. (61)

He then puts on a very serious air; he advises the pupil to read none but the best authors; and when he finds one congenial to his own mind, to study his beauties, but avoid his faults; and, when he sits down to write, to consider how his favourite author would think at the present time on the present occasion. He exhorts him to catch those moments when he finds his thoughts expanded and his genius exalted, but to take care lest imagination hurry him beyond the bounds of nature. (61)

So many hindrances may obstruct the acquisition of knowledge, that there is little reason for wondering that it is in a few hands. To the greater part of mankind the duties of life are inconsistent with much study; and the hours which they would spend upon letters must be stolen from their occupations and their families. Many suffer themselves to be lured by more sprightly and luxurious pleasures from the shades of contemplation, where they find seldom more than a calm delight, such as, though greater than all others, its certainty and its duration being reckoned with its power of gratification, is yet easily quitted for some extemporary joy, which the present moment offers, and another, perhaps, will put out of reach. (94)

We always make a secret comparison between a part and the whole; the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination; when we have done any thing for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted us is past, and that as more is past there is less remaining. (103)

As the last Idler is published . . . I hope that my readers are already disposed to view every incident with seriousness, and improve it by meditation; and that, when they see this series of trifles brought to a conclusion, they will consider that, by out-living the Idler, they have passed weeks, months and years, which are now no longer in their power; that an end must in time be put to every thing great as to every thing little; that to life must come its last hour, and to this system of being its last day, the hour at which probation ceases, and repentance will be vain; the day in which every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past. (103)
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From The Adventurer, 107:

Posidippus, a comick poet, utters this complaint: “Through which of the paths of life is it eligible to pass? In public assemblies are debates and troublesome affairs: domestick privacies are haunted with anxieties; in the country is labour; on the sea is terrour: in a foreign land, he that has money must live in fear, he that wants it must pine in distress: are you married? you are troubled with suspicions; are you single? you languish in solitude; children occasion toil, and a childless life is a state of destitution: the time of youth is a time of folly, and gray hairs are loaded with infirmity. This choice only, therefore, can be made, either never to receive being, or immediately to lose it." [Greek Anthology, ix. epigr. 359]

Such and so gloomy is the prospect, which Posidippus has laid before us. But we are not to acquiesce too hastily in his determination against the value of existence: for Metrodorus, a philosopher of Athens, has shown, that life has pleasures as well as pains; and having exhibited the present state of man in brighter colours, draws with equal appearance of reason, a contrary conclusion.

“You may pass well through any of the paths of life. In publick assemblies are honours and transactions of wisdom; in domestick privacy is stillness and quiet: in the country are the beauties of nature; on the sea is the hope of gain: in a foreign land, he that is rich is honoured, he that is poor may keep his poverty secret: are you married? you have a cheerful house; are you single? you are unincumbered; children are objects of affection, to be without children is to be without care: the time of youth is the time of vigour, and gray hairs are made venerable by piety. It will, therefore, never be a wise man’s choice, either not to obtain existence, or to lose it; for every state of life has its felicity.” [Greek Anthology, ix. epigr. 360]

In these epigrams are included most of the questions which have engaged the speculations of the inquirers after happiness; and though they will not much assist our determinations, they may, perhaps, equally promote our quiet, by showing that no absolute determination ever can be formed.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Johnson, Samuel. Selected Essays, ed. David Womersley. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Samuel Johnson was a modern-day Ecclesiastes. He puts constantly before our minds the weighty issues of life and the inexorable reality of death and finality. James Boswell may have written about Johnson, but he could never write such a book as this.

Johnson’s Style

He is the greatest of the English prose authors. When you read Johnson, note that the last sentence of a paragraph is filled with parallelism. Consider, speaking of the book reviewer who is tasked,

“With the hopeless labor of uniting heterogenous ideas, digesting independent hints, and collecting into one point the several rays of borrowed light, emitted often with contrary directions” (R No. 23).

We often speak of those great writers with whom we disagree, but also yet with whom we cannot dismiss. Johnson is one of them. He is too powerful a force to ignore when he contradicts you. Let’s take his odd claim that good literature must deal with good themes (Rambler No. 4). This claim seems manifestly false. Why would Johnson say it? I think he means that such knowledge would have to be experiential knowledge, which would mean that the authors were evil in character. On a less alarming note, such literature normally sells well among the unlearned, base, and ignorant (think of today’s Fifty Shades of Gray).

Johnson doesn’t mean every type of literature. Older romances were generally okay, since they dealt with the fantastic and would not likely be imitated today. Realistic fiction, however, when coupled with moral ambivalence, is another matter. I think that is Johnson’s point. Johnson, however, is aware that this isn’t a hard and fast rule. He writes of a “manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings” (R No. 14).

Johnson argues that art imitates nature; therefore, bad art imitates bad nature. This claim is a bit harder to shake.

Aphorisms

“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope” (R No. 2).

“We know that a few strokes of the axe will lop a cedar; but what arts of cultivation can elevate a shrub” (R No. 25)?

“That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind” (R No. 64).

“Exercise cannot secure us from that dissolution to which we are decreed; but while the soul and body continue united, it can make the association pleasing” (171).

“To proceed from one truth to another, and connect distant propositions by regular consequences is the great prerogative of man” (R No. 158).

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

His essays are the reason I love him.

There is not a single essay without at least one little phrase or idea to make you think, ponder or smile. It's a real pity there isn't a completely affordable version of his Rambler Essays for everyone, as even the lesser of those have something to say.

For example, I was reading one last night and came across the phrase, 'general smile of mankind'. I love it, so succint and so right.

Yes, Johnson uses long sentences and is keen to use a long latinate word (he was putting a dictionary together at the time after all) but not a word is wasted.

Also, he's funny. The one about living in a garret, where he lists all the benefits - or the one where he talks about the 'human screech owl' who shouts down the project. Or the few where he talks about writing right up to the deadline because he is too lazy.

I love it all.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samuel Johnson's special genius is his ability to address human nature in a way that seems always modern. Some stylistic points aside --- he prefaces his essays with quotes from classical authors that few today have read --- his language and the matter of his essays would not seem out of place on a 21st-Century blog. All that would be surprising is their quality, the frankness and rectitude of their moral advice, their optimism about the ability of people to improve themselves, and the gentlemanly tone in which they are expressed. (I believe comments would be off, however.)

The best of these are the Rambler essays, in my opinion; the later essays lack some of the simplicity and warmth the earliest ones have in plenty, though they are still worth reading if you are so inclined. If you are not, the collection is worth the price for the Rambler essays alone.

[Matthew Retoske · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't the edition that I have, but no matter. Johnson's essays stand as one of the true shining intellectual treasures of his or any other age. Sharp, precise, wide-ranging, dark but always fringed with a tattered yet resolute sense of hope and unwavering morality. Johnson is one of the few writers who doesn't shy away from exploring genuine human frailties and refuses to feel shame on account of our all too humiliating collective or individual habits.

The writing simply shines, his prose style is flawless- and constantly surprising. I was struck on rereading the wide ranging spiritual implications of the essays, and the occasional thread of truly a enlightened individual on profound journey of reflection and consideration of the world around him.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did it. I’m done with this.

Samuel Johnson’s essays border the line of him being a dick and me agreeing with him. There are no in-between feelings about his essays. His style is annoying because it is a dizzying mix of philosophy and morals.

I just had to read this for a class, but this is counting towards my reading goal.

[Noah Goats · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read about half of this book, but that was enough to give me a pretty good taste. I enjoy Johnson's flowery, yet muscular 18th century prose. He writes with intelligence and wit, and reading these essays give a reader an interesting window on the 1700's.

[Cynthia Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

In spite of the three stars I gave the book, I very much enjoyed perusing it. The "essays" we're nearly all from the publication that Samuel Johnson wrote nearly daily for several years. The subjects cover every thing from deeply philosophical a meanderings to political discussions of the relationship between the British, the French, the north American natives, and the colonists.

Some of them are very reliant for all time, and many are reflective of his time.

The language, of course, would have been very erudite in 1750 but is rather ponderous today. Every essay had some eminently quotable kernel of truth. What a brilliant man! But not a fun book to read.

[Peter Kirby · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Idler I found the language more accessible.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Penguin Classics collection of essays by the great English critic and moralist Samuel Johnson is devoted largely to his periodical writing. In its introduction, the editor David Womersley notes that Johnson was known only (if at all) as an editor, lexicographer, and occasional poet when he began, in 1750, to publish short essays under the name The Rambler. Later in the decade, he began two subsequent series, The Adventurer and The Idler. "In his view the periodical essay derived from conduct books," Womerseley observes: Johnson writes to help people improve their morality and their behavior. This goal accounts for what might initially repel contemporary readers from these essays.

Nowadays, every essay about the genre of the essay begins with a reminder that the very word "essay" is etymologically related to the concept of trying, of making an attempt, of experimenting; so we expect that every great instance of this literary form will show a mind at variance with itself and the world, will display on the page the author's second thoughts, misgivings, and self-contradictions. Johnson's periodical essays, on the other hand, read more like sermons, or like an intermediate form between the sermon and its current secularized avatar, self-help.

Johnson's essays are shaped like sermons. They tend to begin with an epigraph, a text for commentary, though usually a classical rather than biblical one; then they assert large generalities about one or another aspect of human experience, and then they narrow to the essay's particular topic, a subcategory of the generality just offered, discussed with examples and illustrations, before concluding with an exhortation about how to behave.

Moreover, at a first glance, Johnson's advice seems too dour and conservative to furnish the pleasure that literary reading should afford. He recommends that literature itself always be morally improving, as he goes on to censure idleness, procrastination, avarice, delusion, and other types of human folly.

Given these didactic aims, understandable in a cleric or guru but not in line with our idea of a literary genius, how has Johnson earned his reputation as perhaps the greatest of English essayists and critics? In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom, hailing Johnson as "the canonical critic," provides a clue when he writes:

Like his true precursor, whoever it was that wrote Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible, Johnson is disturbing and unconventional, a moralist altogether idiosyncratic. Johnson is to England what Emerson is to America, Goethe to Germany, and Montaigne to France: the national sage. But Johnson as much as Emerson is an original writer of wisdom, even though he insists that his morality follows Christian, classical, and conservative ideologies.

Bloom's praise for Johnson's originality alerts us to look for more than just moralistic truisms in the work, while his comparison to Ecclesiastes alludes to the nearly nihilistic undertone of despair in Johnson's writing, writing constantly alive to the intractable reality of suffering and death. Like Emerson, with whom he otherwise has little in common, Johnson recommends energetic work or even play to parry, or at least to endure, the blows of life.

I differ with Bloom, though, in seeing Johnson's self-understanding ("Christian, classical, and conservative") as delusive. Though he mocks the Stoics and Epicureans, Johnson has what I think of as a classical temperament, one that tries to thrive in the darkness of human uncertainty and to display in the face of death's inevitability a heroic composure. And his conservatism is genuine, if conservatism implies a belief in both the fragility and the necessity of longstanding human institutions, as well as the need for individual self-control and self-reliance given humanity's tendency to decay into idle and destructive pleasures if left without a sense of purpose.

Even Johnson's Christianity, which is admittedly more evidenced by his platitudes than by his literary allusions or aesthetic tastes, shows itself through the compassion his social and political writings display: he enjoins sympathy for women forced by need into prostitution, calls for the abolition of debtors' prisons and for the death penalty in cases of minor offense, inveighs against the tyranny of fathers and against what was not yet called predatory lending, and laments the oppression and destruction of Native Americans. In the The Idler, he even sympathetically composes a fictional speech by an Indian chief attempting to rouse his desolate compatriots with visions of European defeat:

But the time, perhaps, is now approaching, when the pride of usurpation shall be crushed, and the cruelties of invasion shall be revenged. The sons of rapacity have now drawn their swords upon each other, and referred their claims to the decision of war; let us look unconcerned upon the slaughter, and remember that the death of every European delivers the country from a tyrant and a robber; for what is the claim of either nation, but the claim of the vulture to the leveret, of the tiger to the fawn? (The Idler, No. 81)

It is all the more important to remember Johnson's compassion when we consider his general polemical aim in writing moral essays. Womersley's introduction provides context:

Just as Johnson was politically an internal exile (a stubborn Tory obliged to live under Hanoverian monarchs and of a world in which the politics, irrespective of which particular party happened to be in or out, were fundamentally shaped by the Revolution Principles of 1688) so, too, he was estranged from the fashionable ethical theories of his time, the spokesman for a conscious ethics of the will at a time when the contrary theory of morals was dominant. [...] Johnson...was...an opponent of affective theories of ethics; that is to say, theories which located the origin of moral discriminations in involuntary sentiments, rather than conscious and reasoned judgments.

Johnson was opposed to the theory that morality comes, as if spontaneously, from emotion. (This theory is as fashionable now as it was then; today it travels under the name of "empathy.") We spend our days in terror of death, immersed in habit, and seduced by pleasure, which means, according to Johnson, that we are constantly misled by our emotions; for this reason, morality needed to rest on a more secure foundation.

He therefore that would govern his actions by the laws of virtue, must regulate his thoughts by those of reason (The Rambler, No.8)

Writing in this argumentative vein could easily prove tiresome, though. Essays listing our duties might lack variety or come to seem unforgivably tendentious. But Johnson earns his moral authority because he does not pretend that life is good or easy. You could make a digest of his writings that eliminates the moral recommendations and keeps only the grim existential realism. It would read like Schopenhauer, and it makes sense that Beckett admired Johnson.

But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it required what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled. (The Rambler, No. 47)

Johnson even suppressed in a later collected edition of his work an issue of The Idler that tells a parable about an older vulture instructing a younger in how their kind benefits from humanity's inexplicable urge to self-destruction in war and violence, unexampled elsewhere in nature.

In one of my favorite essays from The Rambler, Johnson ruminates on the perennial conflict between youth and age. As we get older, time compels us, by its lessons on the limitations and finitude of life, to become more conservative (this is a matter of temperament, not politics). Youth believes the cautions offered by the aged to be mere bigoted lies, because to young people the world is an open and pleasurable field of new experiences.

Johnson allows that the old are correct in their assessment: the world is rather a moral maze where dangers physical and metaphysical lurk on every side, and people should therefore behave with prudence. But, he strikingly continues, the aged should not press their case too forcefully, because if the young knew what the world really had in store for them, they would not be able to live at all:

They who imagine themselves entitled to veneration by the prerogative of longer life, are inclined to treat the notions of those whose conduct they superintend with superciliousness and contempt, for want of considering that the future and the past have different appearances; that the disproportion will always be great between expectation and enjoyment, between new possession and satiety; that the truth of many maxims of age gives too little pleasure to be allowed till it is felt; and that the miseries of life would be increased beyond all human power of endurance, if we were to enter the world with the same opinions as we carry from it. (The Rambler, No. 196)

Johnson concludes the aforementioned Rambler essay about sorrow: "The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment." His recommendation of energy is a constant throughout the book, and the one that is most likely to appeal to contemporary readers, despite our historical and cultural distance from 18th-century London.

Johnson prescribes work as an antidote to what we would call anxiety and depression, and he insists that it is necessary to achievement. He is also canny about how we delude ourselves with busywork without actually accomplishing anything ("no man ever excelled in painting, who was eminently curious about pencils and colours"), and about how we propose impossible tasks for ourselves as a form of self-sabotage, excusing our failures by making them inevitable.

His most practical recommendation, which still holds true, is to work constantly at your task, but in small and non-fatiguing increments. He notes that many illustrious figures accomplished great things in the arts and sciences while leading difficult lives marked by poverty, exile, or other calamities, and he advises that they did so not by herculean and exhausting efforts but by "improving" each free moment with useful labor. This advice has not aged one bit: write 500 words a day, and you'll have written a book in less than a year.

It is as a literary critic that Johnson is perhaps best remembered. This collection does not have a literary focus per se, but the topic recurs throughout the book, including in a highly technical discussion of Milton's prosody. Johnson is humbling and wise on the uncertainty of literary reputation, both while authors are living and after they have died. (He was not, it should be said, a famous author before he began The Rambler; these essays themselves made his name.) He tries to explain why most authors are left behind by time:

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a publick library; [...] Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance, are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions, and engage universal attention. (The Rambler, No. 106)

In other words, if you write for topical interest, your writing will fade with the controversies you address. After 100 years, or even after 25, no one will care about, or even be able to comprehend, your anti-Trump polemic or your #resistance-inspired dystopia. (Future readers may not even understand the preceding sentence.)

In The Rambler No. 4, the most famous of these essays among literary critics, Johnson observes that the type of fiction coming to predominate in the 18th century "may be termed not improperly the comedy of romance," by which older words he seems to indicate what we would call the realist novel. He approves of this development away from the more fantastical and thus escapist strains of romance, as he prefers literature that is most likely to inculcate moral knowledge in the reader: this includes not only realism in fiction, but, as later essays explain, also biography and autobiography in nonfiction. All these genres exemplify morality through the particular stories of fictional characters or real people that the common reader can identify with:

In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself; the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose actions were regulated upon motives of their own, and who had neither faults nor excellencies in common with himself.

But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope, by observing his behaviour and success, to regulate their own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part. (The Rambler, No. 4)

(Johnson might, in spirit anyway, like our autofiction. Interestingly, he also observes that history as a literary genre has the same fault as fantasy: both are too distant from people's ordinary everyday lives to be morally relevant.)

This preference for a mimetic literature of the self accords with our own sense of the 18th century as the age of the novel and of burgeoning individualism. It was also the great age of epistolarity: some of Johnson's essays take the form of narrative letters that give his readers a comic or sentimental glimpse of people's real lives, usually to make one or another moral or political point. Most notable among these texts is the harrowing novelistic or Richardsonian tale of Misella, a young woman sexually groomed from girlhood by an abusive custodian and then driven into prostitution.

Johnson's literary ideas are more nuanced than his praise for moral fiction might suggest. Consider his still-relevant discussion of literary originality. Writers are too often criticized for plagiarizing each other's ideas, he says. But both fiction and nonfiction writers address themselves to experience and morality, which should, he argues, be more or less universal once you have gotten beyond the costume of custom and circumstance. There are, consequently, no original ideas, either for stories or for their morals. The proper arena for literary invention is, to use a later critical vocabulary, not content but form.

Bloom notes that Johnson considered "invention" the highest art of poetry, by which word Johnson seems to mean the line-by-line and sentence-by-sentence development of original combinations of imagery, ideas, and sentiments:

Johnson's melancholia...taught him to value invention all the more highly, because the cure for melancholia involves a continual discovery and rediscovery of the possibilities of life.

We read literature, then, to be distracted by possibility from the inevitability of misery and death. Early in The Rambler, Johnson proclaims:

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. (The Rambler, No. 2)

One of his purposes is to deliver us from false hopes to realities. But in the intelligence of his mental fight against a brilliantly evoked despair, he is a model of real hope. Given our limitations, he everywhere implies, we should do our best. As long as it is our best, it will, whether we superficially succeed or not, be enough.

The traveller that resolutely follows a rough and winding path, will sooner reach the end of his journey, than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hours of day-light in looking for smoother ground and shorter passages. (The Rambler, No. 63)

[Amzon_Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Must For All ‘Johnsonians’.

The Penguin Classics is one of my ‘very’ favourite collections of books. The [signature] unique spine of these books is ‘much displayed’ on the book housings around my spaces.

Now, the thing about the great characters of now historical placement is: there are far too many different books, volumes and collections throughout which their works are spread. Thus; much over-lapping is apparent. This means one needs to purchase far too many different books to gain the complete coverage of content. Still, as a ‘bib’, I’m not unhappy to purchase any and all number of versions to read, peruse and review at my leisure!

The book contains a large extract, by no means complete, of Essays & ephemera from the great mans bibliography. There are some four books in the penguin classics series of ‘Johnson’ works or Biography.

I can recommend the book to all levels of expertise. It is a most enjoyable read. Personally, I’d always go for the physical book, however, in an age of aspirant minimalism, some may want to opt for the digital offering, or if you’re preferring to save some pounds/francs/lira, then the ebook is also your better option.

[A small note: If you want to purchase ‘only’ one book containing as much as possible of Dr. Johnsons work, you should purchase: ‘Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Johnson (Illustrated) Kindle Edition’ from the amazon ebook range]

Jolly good!

Enjoy some artikulate and graphik expounding from an expressive and genial host of the eighteenth century literati!

[Michael Baranowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and enjoyable ramble through the various musings of Samuel Johnson. Not something I'd read through in a few days, but perfect for 5-10 minutes every morning to start off my day.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a few chauvinistic ideas in some of his works which I hated. But then one must understand it was the time period and the idiotic ideas of the day. Otherwise, I greatly enjoyed Johnson's views on almost every topic imaginable back then. I'd love to see the man in this day and age with all our science and techno. He'd probably like it, but with a deep concerning caution. Absolutely loved these essays.

[Matt Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't read Johnson until this book so I felt it was a good introduction; or, he's just that good. I choose the latter. It's a bit trying to read this old style English but fighting through it will allow ideas to be implanted within you that will literally be remembered daily.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than most newspaper editorials I come across, though the taste of all those quotes from the classics is strange on the tongue.

[foundfoundfound · Rating 5 out of 5]

a heavy diet of latinate english, issuing in balanced, cascading clauses. oracular in style. a sound, & sometimes solemn, understanding of human of nature.

[:) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible. A master of wit, and his biographical writing is both sympathetic and probing.