The Contemporary Distribution of Johnson's Rambler

Abstract

1T IS BEYOND the powers of humanity to spend a whole life in profound study and intense meditation, and the most rigorous exacters of industry and seriousness have appointed hours for relaxation and amusement. . .. There must be a time in which every man trifles; and the only choice that nature offers us, is, to trifle in company or alone. These observations might have come from the lips of any dedicated scholar who from time to time has felt the need of diversion after a prolonged period of concentrated intellectual effort. They are taken from a piece of solid prose which readers of the Leedes Mercury saw on the front page of that paper on Tuesday, January 29, 1751. Two days later the readers of the Nottingham Weekly Courant found the same fourteen paragraphs in their paper. At the end of that week the piece occupied two columns on the front page of the Newcastle Journal and two columns on the back page of the rival paper, the Newcastle Courant. Readers of the Gloucester Journal had to wait a little longer, but eventually (on March 19, 1751) they too had it in their local paper. What those readers of five provincial newspapers got free of charge was Samuel Johnson's Rambler No. 89, which had found few purchasers when it was offered for sale at twopence in the London bookshops on Tuesday, January 22, 1751. It is the purpose of this article to show that, in addition to the relatively few copies printed in London during the original run of Johnson's best periodical essay, many of the Ramblers were reprinted almost immediately in several English provincial newspapers and thereby gained an audience eight or ten or twelve times greater than the public that bought the essays as they came from the press of Payne and Bouquet in London on Tuesdays and Saturdays during the two years from mid-March 1750 to midMarch 1752.