Dr Johnson on Trial: Catherine Talbot and Jemima Grey Responding to Samuel Johnson's The Rambler

Abstract

This article is an analysis of contemporary critical approaches to the relationships between Dr Johnson and women, particularly with reference to The Rambler, followed by the introduction of previously unpublished letters which display a female reader of the periodical, Jemima Campbell, Marchioness Grey, choosing not to write for The Rambler and instead opting to produce a satirical attack on “Mr Rambler” within the private sphere of a familiar letter to her friend Catherine Talbot. Talbot did write an essay for Johnson's periodical, and this article looks at the two documents as different case studies in responses to Johnson's moralizing persona. Essentially, criticism on The Rambler has undergone a shift from celebratory analysis of his positive and nuanced representations of his female characters and relationships with contemporary women writers, since James Basker and Isobel Grundy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to a reappraisal of his relationships with women through looking at the responses of his readers gleaned from epistolary sources, as seen in Antony Lee's and Peter Sabor's recent essays on The Rambler. This article provides new material for that debate, as well as addressing the differences between public and private voices for eighteenth-century intellectual women.