Johnson, Lilliput, and Eighteenth-Century Miniature

Abstract

Samuel Johnson's observation that "there is nothing . . . too little for so little a creature as man" is substantiated by eighteenth-century material culture, which produced thousands of small versions of familiar items. The phenomenon of downsizing indicates changes in the relationships between things, human cognition, and literature. Such changes inform Johnson's work, beginning with his early adaptation of Jonathan Swift's Lilliput, the period's most famous literary miniature. Johnson's reworking of Gulliver's first voyage establishes a cognitive paradigm at the intersection of material culture and moral thought, a paradigm to which Johnson returns in order to test the miniature's promise of comprehending the whole at once.