SAMUEL JOHNSON, ANOTHER AND THE SAME

Abstract

The last fifty years have seen a transformation in our understanding of Samuel Johnson. The fractious literary dictator and sturdy moralist that the scholars of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s worked so hard to rehabilitate is now widely, even routinely, regarded as a flexible and profound intelligence on literary, historical, political, and social matters, capable of speaking directly to modern readers. There has been criticism in abundance on Johnson's various writings, to which body of work the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson has provided a solid scholarly backbone since 1958. However, large scholarly editions being particularly subject to the uncertainties of circumstance, we still await the publication of the Yale Lives of the Poets. While we have had several good selections of Johnson's Lives for the ordinary reader – that by John Hardy (1971) being most useful – for the last hundred years scholars have had to make do with G. B. Hill's 1905 Clarendon Press edition. We could have done much worse, because Hill, though perhaps unduly influenced by Boswell, was a learned and sympathetic editor interested in Johnson's writings, and more than one generation of scholars grew to love the Lives of the Poets within the pages of his three maroon-coloured volumes. But bibliographical practices have advanced; our knowledge of Johnson's oeuvre and of his intellectual milieu has grown even as our technological access to sources has increased, and it has long been clear that we need a new edition of Johnson's great critical and biographical work. In a mere fifteen years or so – though as the product of a long life in scholarship – Roger Lonsdale has surveyed all of the primary material from China to Peru, and produced a magnificent and monumental work that may become the standard edition for the next century.