This chapter explores David Ferry’s poetical recreations of Johnsonian prose under the aspect of “compassion.” Attention is initially focussed on Ferry’s poetical re-working of a passage from the “Life of Pope” on Pope’s physical disablements. The poem “Johnson on Pope – from the Lives of the Poets” (1960) is compelling. The chapter highlights how Johnson’s critical prose can be closely associated with the language of poetry. With each reading his language sinks deeper into our consciousnesses and eludes paraphrase. Also discussed are lines from Ferry’s “That Evening at Dinner” and use of a passage from Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry (1757). Through the language of his modern poem Ferry brings out the poignancy of suffering in the closing stages of life. This discussion is reinforced by a close analysis of Johnson on the final years of Jonathan Swift from the “Life of Swift.” Ferry’s formula – that of “unsentimental pity” – is then the basis for a closing examination of the final decline of the poet William Collins, one of the poets from the Lives of the Poets Johnson had known in person.

This chapter extends philosophical comparison to Montaigne, whose first translator, Florio, was Shakespeare’s friend. The chapter focusses on likenesses and unlikenesses, but brings out a common wisdom. There are confluences of nature and taste. Both find pleasure the central motivation for literary study. Their essays take different forms but assert Reason’s instability; Montaigne’s array of topics remains prescient of Johnson’s. Thus, the “ondoyant et divers” qualities of Montaigne are reflected in the “mingled” drama Johnson attributed to Shakespeare; likewise, the Johnsonian flux of experience links Johnson’s Rasselas with Montaigne’s “Of Experience.” The tendency of Imagination to dominate reason recalls, similarly, Montaigne’s “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde.” The effort to live according to nature is defeated by nature. The chapter concludes with discussion of the Lives. Montaigne’s sense of the random and various ways by which life comes to an end anticipates Johnson’s accounts of the deaths of the poets.

British and Danish policymakers in the long nineteenth century developed schools to support nation-building, industrialization, and democratization; yet they made different choices about the timing of public-school systems, workers’ access, variation of educational programs, pedagogical methods, and mechanisms for oversight. Beliefs about the purpose of education informed policy choices and fiction writers were important sources of ideas about education. British writers portrayed education as an essential tool for the cognitive development of the child and believed that a well-educated individual should master a prescribed curriculum to attain full selfhood. The right and left disagreed about the advisability of educating workers, yet even many on the left worried that educating the working class could “contaminate” the nation’s culture. Danish writers recognized the value of education for individual self-development, but both left and right also viewed schools for farmers and workers as essential for a strong society. Fiction writers joined political movements to put education and they fulfilled vital services in these movements. They were the spin doctors who provided cognitive frames about educational problems and solutions, and they popularized social problems with vivid, emotional language. A chorus of literary voices provided the soundtrack, inspiration, and subliminal messaging for campaigns supporting school development.

The Introduction offers a rationale for the first general analysis for a number of years of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism. It sets forth the distinctive emphasis of the new volume and justifies its focus on Johnson’s “criteria of the heart.” This formulation points to the emotional foundation for many of Johnson’s literary judgments. How Johnson’s emotional demands count as criteria is then explained and the connection between the chapters is spelled out. Each explores Johnson’s critical artistry or aspects of his thought – the application of philosophical rigor to statements of critical opinion. The Introduction stresses the poetical character of Johnson’s critical prose and looks forward to the prose of the Lives of the Poets; a passage from this work has served as the basis for David Ferry’s poetical recreation of Johnson. The introductory excursus suggests that categories commonly employed to explain Johnson’s criticism in historical terms will always strike the wrong note. They make unwarranted assumptions about the nature and progress of criticism and disfigure our sense of Johnson’s place within critical history.

The theme of Time is the philosophical issue of this chapter – the perplexity of how we can at once exist in time and observe time as it flows “over” our heads, or “before us” as a stream. Johnson shares an ambition to disentangle such problems with philosophers. But the need to mark time as a self-accounting is an emotional determinant of Johnson. Johnson’s reckoning is connected to life’s possibilities and limits, to his religion, to the pleasures of literature and to his experience of writers whose work seemed so much longer than it was. Johnson is a literary artist on time; his words have philosophical value and effect; but his treatment recalls the metaphorical temper of poetry. Johnson allows us access to a consciousness partitioned off by the specializations of philosophy and folds us back into our own consciousness. He gives us an experience of what it means to be in time and out of time as a shared condition. This is elusive, ironic, comic and tragic; it is one and indivisible, as a function of General Nature, indefinable because universal.

Why do successive education reforms within a country resonate with familiar assumptions about educational goals, society, class, and state, even at moments of radical change? Repeating cultural narratives sustain continuities within institutional change processes, by influencing how new ideas are interpreted, how interest groups express preferences, and how institutional norms shape political processes. Repeating narratives make it more likely for some types of reforms to be implemented and sustained than others. This chapter develops a theoretical model suggesting how cultural narratives are transmitted across time and an empirical method for assessing cross-national differences in cultural narratives. Each country has a distinctive “cultural constraint,” or a set of cultural symbols and narratives, that appears in a nation’s literary corpus. Writers collectively contribute to this body of cultural tropes; despite individual fluctuations, they largely reproduce the master narratives of their countries. Computational linguistic processes allow us to observe empirical differences between British and Danish cultural depictions of education in 1,084 works of fiction from 1700 to 1920. Cultural narratives do not determine specific outcomes, as tropes must be activated in political struggles. Yet we can show how significant cross-national differences in literary images of education resonate with British and Danish educational trajectories.