ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a particular instance of mental disturbance and threatened collapse into madness from crucial period. It is the case of a man who suffered the torments of melancholy on and off all his life, who feared that his melancholy would career downhill into madness proper; a man who recorded symptoms, speculated on causes, and reported his experience of that affliction and attempted remedies in some detail. The chapter explores the course, nature, and possible explanations of Samuel Johnson's melancholy. Johnson was thus haunted by dread that his 'mind corrupted with an inveterate disease of wishing', would eventually succumb to monomania. Christianity gave Johnson a prospect of managing mortality, a vision of triumph over the Grim Reaper, an earnest of life eternal. The chapter concludes by briefly indicating what wider conclusions Johnson's sufferings might help us to draw about mental disturbance in Georgian England.
