This book offers the first analysis of the life and thought of the writer Samuel Johnson from an historian’s viewpoint, reversing the orthodoxy which has dominated the subject for over thirty years. Jonathan Clark, who has written extensively on English and American religion, ideology and politics in the eighteenth century, presents here a Johnson strikingly different from the apolitical, pragmatic and eccentric figure who emerges from the pages of most students of English literature. Johnson’s commitments and conflicts in religion and politics, obscured since Macaulay, are reconstructed; his role in the literary dynamics of his age is revealed against a new context for English cultural politics between the Restoration and the age of Romanticism. This book will therefore be of interest not only to Johnsonians but to historians of ideas and students of English literature.
• The first book on Johnson by a (controversial) historian rather than by a literary critic • Brings to bear on its subject the ‘revisionist’ history of the last decade, in which Clark has played a major role • Destroys the account of Johnson repeated by almost all literary critics since Greene’s The Politics of Samuel Johnson (1960)
Contents
List of illustrations; Preface; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Politics, literature and the culture of humanism; 2. Johnson and the Anglo-Latin tradition; 3. The political culture of Oxford University, 1715–1768; 4. Johnson's career and the question of oaths, 1709–1758; 5. Johnson and the nonjurors; 6. Johnson's political conduct, 1737–1760; 7. Johnson's political opinions, 1760–1784; 8. Johnson's writings, 1760–1781; 9. 'Sophistry', 'indiscretion', 'falsehood': the denigration of Samuel Johnson, 1775–1832.
Review
‘This is a stimulating and cogent work which offers a refreshing and provocative re-appraisal of some central features of Johnson’s life and work.’ David Nokes, The Times Literary Supplement
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