‘No Vain Speculation’: Samuel Johnson's Rambler and Eighteenth-Century Attitudes to Orality

Abstract

This essay won the 2007 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Eighteenth Century Section. The oral culture of pre-literate peoples received unprecedented critical attention during the eighteenth century. The bard and the noble savage, oral tradition and original genius all rose to prominence and, despite the tenacity of a model of progress which equated orality and the primitive and literacy with civilisation, many writers were nevertheless captivated by the idea of an ancient world uncorrupted by literate civilisation. Samuel Johnson's Rambler essays, along with his later Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland demonstrate that he was not one of those for whom illiteracy could ever be celebrated. Indeed, his intense hostility to the proposition has led many to conclude that he rejects every aspect of it. The engagement of these texts with the ideas of literacy and orality, however, is more complex than this. Beneath the antagonism of his tone, there are elements of the ancient worldview that Johnson finds appealing and much of his thinking about oral savagery is in fact a vehicle for reflection upon the broader predicament of human nature. Issues of stability and memory, we discover, preoccupy him, and erode any simple opposition of voice and text.