Doctor Johnson and William Law

Abstract

Everyone who knows the life of Johnson remembers his revelation to Boswell of what first set him “thinking in earnest of religion,” after a youth spent mostly in indifference toward it, and in lax talking against it. This laxity, he said, “lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford I took up ‘Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,‘ expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.” Everyone accepts this as a significant event in Johnson's life, and nearly every book written since either about Johnson or Law repeats it. There has been, however, a curious indifference among Johnsonian scholars toward examining its significance, or considering the possibility that Law's influence on him may have extended beyond this admittedly important event in his young manhood. Mrs. Thrale was the only person I know of in his own day who suspected a real debt to Law in his writings, and since his death, with the exception of those critics who have surmised an influence of Law's “portraits” on some of Johnson's character-sketches in the Rambler, there have been, I believe, only two who have seen Law's influence at work on the mature Johnson.