Introduction

Four years after Johnson’s death in 1784, the essayist Vicesimus Knox remarked on the severity with which he had been treated by critics and biographers:

Here in summary form is the outline of Johnson’s critical reception both during his lifetime and afterwards. Few writers have been subjected to an equally sustained, rigorous, and wide-ranging scrutiny for upwards of a century. Few have emerged from ‘so fiery a trial’ with such a secure reputation for greatness. The general nineteenth-century view of that greatness does not coincide with our own; but eminence of some kind was rarely denied him. He was constantly before the public: whether to acclaim or admonish, a succession of reviews, pamphlets, and books kept him there. It may have been merely an anonymous letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1774 in which he was cited as evidence that the ancients did not excel the moderns ‘in elegance of stile, or superiority of knowledge’.2 Or the swingeing attacks made on him by men like Charles Churchill, John Wilkes, Archibald Campbell and James Callender. Or such a book as Robert Alves’s Sketches of a History of Literature (1794) which, because of its censorious attitude towards Johnson, forced the Monthly Review into a reappraisal of its critical view of him.3 Or, on the other hand, it may have been no more than the casual sneer that occurs in Cobbett’s Tour of Scotland (1832):

Whatever the nature of the reference or the authority of the commentator, the reading public were continually reminded that the character, writings, and reputation of Johnson were subjects for debate. Indifference to them was impossible.