20 Comments

I ordered Johnson on Shakespeare. I have not read any Johnson and you've whetted my appetite.

My literary exposure to Johnson is from the beginning of Vanity Fair, in which Becky Sharp tosses his dictionary out the coach window as a last rebuke to her first enemy, the unpleasant headmistress of the Boarding School who worships Johnson. So that was a negative influence for me on Johnson. Strange how we develop opinions sometimes with such scant evidence!

robertsdavidn.substack.com/about

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Ah good--let me know what you think!

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What I like about Damrosche is that it gives a picture of the intellectual world in which Johnson moved. I was not thinking merely of his essay on Johnson. In our compartmentalized world, we often forget such a rich mixture of people and specialities existed. In Andrew Roberts' "The Last King of America" one sees Johnson working in the King's library, which he opened to scholars and the pleasure the king took in his presence there.

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that's true it is a good immersion in the world

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What a fine job of capturing the multi-faceted Johnson. I think Leo Damrosch's "The Club" affords as good a context for understanding him and the way he interacted with others of his time as any I've encountered. I encountered Johnson early and as an undergraduate, many of his pithy comments struck me as "made to shock." With experience, I came to see they were made to challenge lazy thought.

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Challenge lazy thought is *exactly* right. Damrosch is pretty good for context, yes, but quite standard and I think many of the older biogs are excellent.

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Your point about the Rambler and Idler being blogs is a good one; it also leads me to wonder who is the new Johnson of the modern age.

I've heard it said that the drinking of caffeinated beverages in the eighteenth century was a key catalyst of the more rigorous intellectualism in the Enlightenment era. What are your thoughts?

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I’m not sure we have a Johnson today--a moralist who combines Christian and classical wisdom... Bloom talked about himself as an inheritor of the critical side of Johnson’s Work but that was a loose connection.

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Bloom flatters himself too much.

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He wasn’t trying to flatter himself, more to suggest a shared temperament, but yes it’s a bold claim. The biggest resemblance of course was their role as a public critic.

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I understand that. I spoke with a smile on my face. And Bloom probably comes as close as our culture permits. The fragmentation with which Bloom deals was beginning in Johnson's time.

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Shared interest in the common reader, too.

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Love love love this post! Johnson on Shakespeare I could go on and on about - nature over accident, the movement against classical rules, his insight on the three unifies.. I could go on… but I'd just be gushing.

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We like gushing about Johnson around here!

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Well! I'm in fine company then!

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I re-discovered SJ whilst on assignment in Lichfield earlier this year, thank you for adding yet more layers to this fascinating man.

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I went there earlier this year--https://commonreader.substack.com/p/the-plain-style-says-one-thing-but

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What a beautiful footnote! That says it all.

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> People who met him found his intelligence literally unbelievable after they had observed his ‘strange antic gestures’.

Let's see, autodidact, voracious reader, hyperlexia, periods of intense focus, co-morbid depression, stimming...

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Yep…

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