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Hawkins, Biography, and the Law
No full textSir John Hawkins was an attorney at the Court of King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas in the mid eighteenth century, and Chairman of the Middlesex Quarter Sessions. He was also the author of a major history of English music and the first greatLife of Samuel Johnson (1787). This essay explores ways in which Hawkins’ Life of Johnson is based in legal thought, especially with regard to his understanding of Johnson’s legacy to the former slave Francis Barber, and Johnson’s legal advocacy on behalf of the condemned clergyman William Dodd
Johnson and fiction
Get PDFThe chapter opens by considering Johnson’s seemingly hostile attitude to the eighteenth-century novel and its realistic portrayals of human life, as contrasted with that of his contemporary Henry Fielding. It places The Rambler’s theoretical strictures on such writing alongside Johnson’s views on biography and practice as a writer of fiction in Rasselas, eliciting his various contradictory opinions on representing bad characters and negative examples in literature. The chapter shows how, for Johnson, human imagination is both dangerous – competing with truth for control of the human psyche – and a positive source of creative energy. Fiction is sometimes therefore synonymous, in his mind, with falsehood and unreality. But it is also synonymous with literature of all kinds, and with the human endeavor to depict the world and other people in strikingly new and powerful ways that may, paradoxically, “awaken us to things as they are.
Johnson and the Essay
No full textThis discussion of ‘Johnson and the Essay’, analyses Johnson’s relationship with the essay—both his own idea of the essay and as compared with others’ practice in the form. After showing that the spirit of the essay is pervasive within Johnson’s writings and not confined to his major periodicals, the argument focuses on the special case of the periodical essay and draws attention to the moral and philosophical pertinence of The Rambler (Johnson’s “pure wine”), taking examples from his serious and comic modes. The account concludes by examining the experience of Johnson’s singular style and the fit between individual essays and the shape and meaning of the succession of papers overall. If Johnson’s essays do not resemble those of Michel de Montaigne in temper or structure, they are, in the case of The Rambler, a single-handed intellectual project of a similar order and a comparable endeavour in the art of self-founding
Johnson's Criticism, the arts, and the idea of art
No full textThe essay discusses Johnson's alleged ignorance of the 'arts', his thought, knowledge and taste in the matter of the musical and the poetical. Other parts of the discussion include the relationship between poetry and painting, images of Johnson himself, and his attitude to art and artifice, the arts and performance musically and theatrically. The essay concludes with commentary on both the heights of art and the practical crafts
Johnson and China: Culture, Commerce, and the Dream of the Orient in Mid-eighteenth-century England
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