Selected Essays (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Samuel Johnson was a writer in the classical mode; one who believed that literature must follow a pre-programmed set of recognized texts and subtexts that pointed toward the reader's accepting the morality of the work as an accepted good and pleasing that reader at the same time. Johnson's education in the classics well prepared him to internalize the notion that literature and art by themselves were incomplete aspects of the learner unless that learner could teach others of the benefits accruing from their close study. Despite his adherence to eighteenth century classicism, Johnson was not an inflexible ideologue. He could appreciate that there were fixed attributes to taste that were universal--at least to upper class English society then--but he could also see that differences in individual reaction to that taste might vary enormously, and not always in a positive way. Johnson was quick to pounce on those who posed as exemplars of decorum but in his opinion did little more than use sham and quackery to undermine that decorum.

Of his two periodicals, published several years apart, it is in the Rambler that Johnson is at his most conventionally moral and didactic. Very few of the more than two hundred essays are light, folksy, and airy. The vast majority deals with numerous variations of Johnson's favorite theme--that human beings are forever locked in a ceaseless struggle for the material things in life: money, power, beauty, and material possessions. When men and women are so driven to acquire what he saw as ephemeral baubles that they risk losing their immortal souls, then Johnson saw it as his bounden duty to lecture them about abandoning this mad pursuit. Writing from the lectern of his periodical, he saw no room for levity. His morality then was one of a deadening seriousness, based on his perception that it had to be viewed through the prism of individual character rather than the collective weight of sanctioned culture. In Essay # 134, Johnson considers the deleterious effects that idleness has on the human mind. This essay is a straightforward lecture on the evils of procrastination, a flaw that inheres within the breasts of all people. In the remainder of his essays that lecture the reader on How to Behave, one gets the feeling that each individual flaw is a stain on humanity that flows directly from Adam's original transgression. In addition to his lessons on conduct, Johnson also taught literary criticism. The first four essays of the Rambler relate to theories of writing that he felt sure were of vital necessity for his readers to know. In Essay # 4, he points out the potential for harm that careless novelists might unwittingly inflict on the unwary. Regardless of the topic, Johnson felt comfortable using a prose style that his critics referred to as ponderous but he saw as the height of proper writing. Since he was taught that classical writing was synonymous with using an infinity of Latinate expressions, inversions, and antithesis, it came as no surprise to anyone who knew him that the essays of the Rambler were pithy expressions of a philosophy that was not limited to men like Samuel Johnson.

By the time that Johnson was led by financial need to pick up the essayist's pen as the writer and editor of the Idler, he was ready to make some revisions in his adherence to the classical mode of writing. He was only all too aware of popular resentment by his readers toward his beloved means of writing. The bottom line of profit once again in the world of business would cause its players to modify some long treasured beliefs. Much reduced was Johnson's ornate and Latinate mode of expression. He also knew that his readers had tired of his incessant hectoring on the eternal flaws within the human breast. Though he would not totally abandon his search for the infelicitous in the human condition, he lowered his comfort zone of classical acceptance to include a number of lighter and more informal themes. Readers from the previous generation of the Spectator and the Tatler seemed to enjoy the personal and humorous comments of critics who could poke holes in the inflated egos of those who insisted that sham and reality were identical. Johnson resurrected Addison and Steele's technique of giving a name to a critic or even to a commentator on society who had something witty and germane to say. Johnson used names like Dick Minim and Mr. Sober as literary lightning rods to attract the interest of readers who might otherwise have shunned the journal. Johnson was astute enough to recognize that his readers would easily see through the sham of using made up names to hide his own true identity, thus generating ongoing sales. Yet, Johnson could not completely disassociate himself from his classic roots. As with the Rambler, he used the Idler as an occasional forum to transmit his views on matters literary. The Idler, then, emerges as a mixed bag and ill-defined hodgepodge of classicism and hard-nosed pragmatism. The more that Samuel Johnson lowered art from its previously unquestioned position as the very deification of the human condition, the less conventional the entire concept of writing and literature came to be seen. In his two year tenure as the driving force behind the Idler, Samuel Johnson is now seen as a transitional figure between the logic and decorum of the Augustan Age and the encroaching sentimentalism and commonality of the Pre-Romantics.

Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was a prolific author during the Augustan Age of English Literature. He is best known for his English Dictionary of the English Language published in 1755 and his biography written by his Scottish friend James Boswell.
Penguin has taken essays Johnson wrote in the 1750-1760 period which he wrote for periodicals named: The Rambler, The Adventurer and the Idler.
Johnson's style is difficult for a modern reader to peruse. He often quotes the ancients, his sentences are labyrinthal and he can be repetitive in what information or thoughts he is sharing.
Nevertheless, the reader admires and learns from Johnson who was a man of immense learning. He discusses such topics as: Reading, Marriage, Solittude, Virtue, Stagecoach Travel, British soldiery, political affairs, Sleep, Idleness, Vanity, the fears we all have of death and the joy of Christian salvation.
This is a collection that will require time and effort but it does yield its rewards of wisdom and sage advice from a giant of English literature.

The great range of his interests, the complex classical balance of his sentences, the passion and forcefulness in which he justifies his tastes, the sense of authority and integrity which radiate from the page- all these are elements which make Johnson's essays of great possible interest to those who can endure the difficulty of understanding such complexity, and the discomfort of being in the presence of so forceful a personality. He wrote these essays for the 'Spectator', the 'Rambler' and he was apparently paid well- enough for them to avoid being considered a blockhead.

Yet how strange and paradoxical that it is not for these 'Essays'( in which he too discusses the subject of Literary Fame) but for the portrait of him made by another writer( Boswell in the 'Life) that he most lives in our minds and hearts.