Samuel Johnson, Another and the Same

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.

This work provides newly edited texts of the fifty-two Lives while taking into consideration all the authoritative editions (1779-81, 1781, 1783), non-authoritative editions, and all of the extant manuscripts and proofs. Textual policy, eminently reasonable, is clearly stated (i. 182-5). As in Hill, individual lives in Lonsdale have numbered paragraphs, facilitating use and movement between these two editions. Extensive textual variants (86 pages in all) are listed. Each particular life has a commentary that includes an account of its composition (often the most informative facet of the commentary, as in the case of Pope, for whom the sources are abundant), a bibliography of primary and secondary works, and detailed annotation. The commentary runs to a staggering 877 pages in reduced print, and constitutes an impressive compendium of knowledge in eighteenth century literary history, criticism, biography, and bibliography. The edition concludes with three appendices (including the historically enlightening 'Some Early Periodical Reactions 1779-1783' and visual responses), and a very long and detailed index of primary sources. Prefacing the texts and the commentary is a substantial introduction, an autonomous critical work (185 pages in length) dealing with the composition of the Prefaces (1779-81) and the Lives (1781, 1783), Johnson's theory and practice of biography, the Lives' contribution to literary history, its political dimensions, the textual history of the work, and the edition's governing principles.

This edition offers many insightful critical and historical vignettes, only a few of which can be mentioned here: the section on John Nichols's (i. 53-72) and Isaac Reed and George Steevens's (i. 72-80) influence on the composition of the Lives; the notes on Casimir (i. 343) and on the Pindaric revival (i. 344); themini-dissertations on Cowley's reputation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (i. 349), on Newton's Milton and Lauder's forgeries (i. 366), on Milton's education (i. 381), on the freedom of the press and the Licensing Act of 1695 (i. 383-5), on the growth of reading and the idea of a common reader (i. 398), on the theatre during the Commonwealth (ii. 323-4), and on...