We heartily welcome the return of this fine scholarly annual after a hiatus of several years caused by the death of publisher Gabe Hornstein in early 2017. Longtime subscribers will notice three changes, only one of which is at all important. The dustcover, present since the volume size was enlarged in 2003 (volume 14), is no more, a negligible price to pay for the resumption, as is the reversion to the original volume size. However, the index, a fixture since the first volume, will be missed. The current volume contains eight contributions, seven of which are reviewed below, two review essays and five book reviews.Susan Kubica Howard’s “The Curious Case of Charlotte Lennox: Conducting a Professional Literary Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain Outside the Bluestocking Circle” is a comparison of what seems like every conceivable connection, or lack thereof, between Lennox and the Blues: “Lennox’s choice of literary themes, her politics, her religion, her uncertain social standing, her personal, familial, and financial situations, her directness and candor—all of these put her at odds with the Blues.” Howard, Lennox’s advocate throughout, writes clearly and can turn a phrase: “Her disordered domesticity would not have been fathomable to most of the Blues.” I find her speculation about political differences, especially during the American Revolution, quite convincing, especially in view of Lennox’s living in America as a child and sending her son out to America in the early 1790s. And certainly her hardscrabble professional life, a situation that she shared with Samuel Johnson, at least until his pension, would join them as it distanced her from the Bluestockings.Because Howard’s treatment of Johnson and Lennox is one key to her essay, I will point out two instances where details she cites, relying on previous sources, are at least dubious. The party Johnson orchestrated at the Devil’s Tavern to celebrate Lennox’s first novel may not have been in 1751 but in the previous year. Howard relies on a summary of Sir John Hawkins’ description, a description in which he errs in the publication date of the novel. The recent scholarly edition of Hawkins’ biography of Johnson, edited by O M Brack Jr., accepts the view of Duncan Isles that “Hawkins’ date, ‘the spring of 1751’ is in many respects unacceptable; spring or autumn 1750 appear to be more likely.” More important is the issue of Johnson’s supposed contribution of a chapter to The Female Quixote, which Howard accepts without comment. Again, a diverging view can be found in Brack, this time his edition of Johnson’s reviews, prefaces, and ghost-writings (Johnson on Demand [2109]), where he concludes, Johnson “did not write the penultimate or any other chapter of the book.” Now I do not know whether Brack and others are right or wrong about these things, but Howard should have been aware of these issues and at least noted their existence.Marcus Walsh provides a way via Aristotle to discuss Johnson’s annotations in “Mimesis and Understanding in Samuel Johnson’s Notes to Shakespeare (1765).” Even while acknowledging the potential flaw in an approach from classical theory to practical, editorial application (“Clearly Johnson’s critical arguments and ideas cannot be described as straightforwardly Aristotelian”), he largely succeeds in helping us understand exactly what we should do, or at least can do, with Johnson’s annotations. It is not surprising, of course, to be told that “the content and rhetoric of Johnson’s notes repeatedly insist on the general and perpetual truth and application of Shakespeare’s characterization,” but the particular insights, especially of the second half of the essay, are quite useful. Among them is the explanation of Johnson’s paraphrases within his explication, which clearly differentiates him both from his fellow eighteenth-century editors and from the subsequent, largely Romantic “insistence on the unique and untranslatable linguistic mode of existence of any worthwhile poem.” Of further interest is Walsh’s suggestion that this championing of paraphrase fits comfortably within the “Protestant interpretative custom and tradition,” as opposed to that of Roman Catholics.Walsh’s explanation of one of Johnson’s corrections of Warburton concerning a passage from Measure for Measure is perhaps his best example: “Like many other paraphrases . . . this begins with a specifically textual issue and has a primarily hermeneutic purpose. . . . [H]owever, it includes striking and insistent appeal to shared experience: the truths that Shakespeare relates are such as ‘neither man nor woman will have much difficulty to tell’; they are ‘what every one knows’ and ‘what every one feels.’” Important too is Walsh’s reminder that Johnson was annotating the plays to be read, with the notes at the foot of the page: “Johnson’s notes are directed at the reader in the closet, not the audience in the theater.”In “Punitive Injustice in Caleb Williams: Godwin’s Vexed Call for Penal Reform,” Suzanna Geiser finds frequent similarities and one major difference between William Godwin’s 1794 novel and his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. The explicit subject of the Enquiry is “penal reform—specifically, a general prohibition on coercive discipline and a corresponding commitment to noncoercive mediation of problematic behaviors.” Of course, the epitome of coercive discipline is capital punishment, and the existence of over two hundred capital crimes in Britain in the century had garnered contemporary opposition on both moral and pragmatic grounds—see Samuel Johnson on the topic. But Geiser establishes that theoretical arguments based on deterrence or forced reformation were quite common, and the object of Godwin’s pushback not only in his tract but also in his novel.The best parts of the essay occur near the end, as Geiser discusses the role reversal between the murderer Falkland and his legal nemesis Caleb: “as Caleb pursues ‘the truth’ . . . the punishment he inflicts begins to exceed the crime, and Falkland takes on the role of the criminal for whom further punishment becomes an injustice, while Caleb assumes that of the tyrant for whom power and control are intoxicating.” I found unconvincing, however, the attribution to elitism that Godwin and other writers of his day (and perhaps Geiser) made as a primary cause of the unjust system of justice. The example of the French Revolution—mentioned in the essay—stands in contrast to this generalization, as does the presence of approximately thirty-six capital offenses among the Old Testament Hebrews and twenty-five among the ancient Babylonians. Perhaps it is rather that hard cases make bad law.Most of us share the modern view of the author of the Homeric poems but fewer, perhaps, realize that two eighteenth-century critics, Thomas Blackwell (1701–1757) and Robert Wood (1716/17–1771) largely embraced the same view. In “Sensibility Reclaimed: Thomas Blackwell, Robert Wood, and the ‘Conjectural History’ of Homer,” Peter M. Briggs demonstrates how these two mid-century critics followed and popularized ideas first casually advanced by Richard Bentley some five decades earlier. Those ideas include the oral rather than written origin of the poems and the historicity of the events at Troy. Briggs would further extend the contributions of Blackwell and Wood. Blackwell’s view of the poet “as both an historian and a seer” suggests a movement “toward a new theory of poetic sensibility. . . . [T]he epic bard was becoming a man of feeling.” And Wood’s “broad reading and extensive travels” led to his comparisons of Homer with both ancient and modern poetry of various cultures, “a more ethnographic understanding of the epic as a genre.” Briggs realizes that these are huge claims, especially for a thirteen-page essay, but his calling attention to Blackwell’s and Wood’s roles in the process is welcome.The first two things to notice about Paul Tankard’s “Johnson (and Boswell) in the Lists: A View of Their Reputations, 1933–2018” are its length (forty-two pages including notes) and the pun in the title. The author’s light touch makes the length easier to digest. He surveys lists with extensive view, from middlebrow—Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940) and Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan (1960)—to highbrow—Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), includes even “pop” entries like 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die (2006), and tabulates the appearances, or not, of Johnson and Boswell. Those of us expecting a steady decline in interest in two of our favorites find some surprises. For example, neither is among the 113 authors listed by Adler. From the fact that more lists are formulated by Americans than Brits, Tankard extrapolates, “it is from the United States that come many of the most strident—and particularly institutional—efforts to formulate literary canons,” which certainly is one motive for list-making. Other takeaways: “there is less disparity than I expected to find between the two writers: Johnson appears as a writer on twenty-eight of the fifty-seven [lists], Boswell on twenty-five”; and “Boswell and Johnson do not appear to any noticeable extent more in British or American lists.” Tankard seems not upset at all that neither Johnson nor Boswell appear in The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them (2006): “The only book chosen by three contributors is To Kill a Mockingbird. . . . Tolstoy and Dante seem not to have changed any lives.”Johnson’s friendship with printer Edmund Allen is well known, but in “Samuel Johnson and the Allen Family” Matthew M. Davis has expanded our knowledge significantly, especially in the area of Johnson’s unremarked relationship with several other members of the Allen family. Working from a manuscript that he discovered in the Bodleian in 2013 (a family history written in 1865 by Mary Allen Brooke), Davis demonstrates that the majority of what Brooke has to say is verifiable, or at least probable. Davis weighs the evidence scrupulously and establishes, to my satisfaction at least, that three adult members of the Allen family—Edmund and his cousins John and Charles—were known to Johnson. Among other things, the results solve a small mystery—the hitherto unidentified “Mr. Allen of Magdalen-Hall” mentioned by Johnson in a letter is John Allen—and may correct another identification. Writing to (probably) Thomas Warton in October 1757 about “some literary business for an inhabitant of Oxford,” Johnson mentions consulting with “Mr. Allen” about such a scheme. Previously this Allen was thought to be Edmund, but Davis convincingly argues that John Allen is more likely: “[John] was an Oxford don who had resided in Oxford for twenty years, he had worked in the Bodleian Library, and he was said to have looked into more books than most men of his day,” while Edmund did not seem to have received a university education. This is a model factual essay.“Milton at Bolt Court” is a beautifully crafted essay, interesting, I would think, to anyone who might pick up the volume. Working from the engraving of Milton by Jacobus Houbraken, owned by Johnson at 8 Bolt Court and now to be seen in Dr. Johnson’s House, 17 Gough Square, Stephen Clarke traces the provenance of the print, especially through John Hoole (1727–1803) and his family. Clarke is particularly good on the period in late 1784, when “Hoole [became] a sort of gatekeeper to Johnson’s last days.” Working back and forth from the Sale Catalogue of Johnson’s books, Johnson’s will, and Hoole’s published narrative of Johnson’s “Last Illness,” Clarke makes fascinating connections: “It is surely no coincidence that Hoole should have bought [at the library sale] the set of Clark’s sermons, one of which Johnson had asked him to read to him little more than ten weeks before.” Two black-and-white illustrations of the etching are included, and the essay is “framed” by acknowledgment of Johnson’s divergent views of Milton as a poet and as a man. The etching and books are not the full extent of acquisitions Hoole made from Johnson’s study. Clarke quotes Thomas Tyers’s biographical sketch published in GM in the month of Johnson’s death, that his “literary chair [was] purchased by Mr. Hoole. Relicks are venerable things, and are only not to be worshipped.” Clarke uses this sentence from Tyers as an epigraph to his essay.Age of Johnson rightly gave this essay pride of place: it is first in the volume. I have discussed it last, in order to conclude with this compliment. Other eighteenth-century journals may regard an essay like Clarke’s (or Davis’s) of interest too limited for their readers, of antiquarian interest only, “fine in its place” so long as that place is elsewhere. The editors of AJ properly continue to demonstrate the truth of Terence’s dictum: homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.