Petty Caviller or 'Formidable Assailant'?: Johnson Reads Dennis

Given John Dennis's prominence as a Dunciad dunce courtesy of the satire of Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson in his own critical work gave a surprisingly generous quantity of attention to Dennis's literary criticism. Dennis was notorious in the eighteenth century as 'The Critic', and this essay suggests that Johnson's lively critical reaction to Dennis was more complicated than we might expect. For all the pettiness and irrepressible ill-temper of his predecessor, Johnson recognised, albeit with undisguised reservations, that Dennis sometimes had much of formidable good sense to say—on Shakespeare, on Addison and particularly on Pope.