Britain developed a public education system in 1870 but eliminated alternative schools for poor children on the basis of their poor quality. In 1855, Denmark prioritized expanding access over quality standards, by supporting private evangelical schools serving rural populations. Cultural frames informed these struggles over education. For British authors, education would build character and social stability, and the left endorsed workers’ rights to schooling; yet even sympathetic Victorian social reform novelists worried about the culture of poverty and missed the social investment benefits of workforce training. Their depictions of quality problems helped to close schools and reduce access. Alternatively, Danish authors supported education as a means of producing useful citizens and did not worry about a culture of poverty. Danish authors depicted a government in benign terms and affirmed the importance of local government self-determination. British and Danish authors participated in movements to expand schooling to underserved populations. British writers Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote heart-wrenching stories that stirred charitable impulses toward the poor; Matthew Arnold directly shaped the 1870 legislation. Danish authors such as NFS Grundtvig and Bernhard Severin Ingemann inspired the free school and folk high school movement that greatly expanded education among rural peasants.

Britain’s Education Act of 1902 created a unitary secondary education system emphasizing humanistic studies, eliminated funding for vocational programs, and served only academic students. Denmark’s 1903 Grammar School Act created a system with multiple academic programs (in classics, mathematics, and modern languages) and retained ample funding for vocational, agricultural, and folk high schools. The authors contributed to the momentum for secondary education. British authors largely advocated for a classical curriculum: Rudyard Kipling linked education to nationalist imperialistic ambitions and H.G. Wells feared cultural degradation. Some, for example, Thomas Hardy, sought classical study for the working class and viewed vocational training as second-class education. Alternatively, Danish authors across the political continuum portrayed workers’ education and skills as essential to the industrial project, economic competitiveness, and the collective good. Writers joined in struggles over secondary education reform. British Fabians worked closely with Robert Morant, the architect of the 1902 secondary education act; Kipling waged a public opinion campaign linking education to the Boar War. Danish authors in the Modern Breakthrough movement formed “the Literary Left” faction to help forge the Left Party’s positions on education and fostered closer ties among evangelical farmers and workers.

This chapter turns to the emotional sources of Johnson’s poetical criticism. The chapter examines the contrast between Johnson’s response to the overblown dramas of Dryden and his enthusiasm for the power of Alexander’s Feast (1697). Attention then moves to Johnson’s taste for poetry deriving from genuine sorrow when this is compared with the confected grievings of Milton’s Lycidas. But Johnson’s emotional consciousness eschews excess. His neo-Latin verse, for example, seems to shield Johnson from memories that might be too painful to express in English. Reinforcing this vulnerability are Johnson’s emotional state on the death of his wife and his disordered feelings at the news of the widowed Mrs. Thrale’s marriage to Piozzi. Unbearable loss is then explored by reference to a scene from Rasselas and through a passage from the Preface to Shakespeare on tragedy. The deaths of Shakespeare’s heroines caused him intense pain; the combination of tragic with comic scenes as “mingled” drama supplied its own intensity, as Hamlet illustrates.

Johnson’s critical relationship with Thomas Warton is the subject of this chapter. The chapter examines their respective approaches to the writing of poetical history. Warton, as antiquarian, brings old poetry into the light; Johnson brings out the present value of poetry already known. Warton reads past societies through their lost literatures and by measuring the rational relation of historical causes to historical effects; Johnson’s concern is poetry as a source of pleasure and consolation. Warton is often highly digressive as a poetical historian; Johnson is frequently condensed, direct and economical. But the two friends also have much in common, not least their focus upon the literary past as such. This is recalled in Johnson’s work on the Harleian Library catalogue; his sense of the history of the language is manifest in his Dictionary etymologies and his glosses on Shakespearean language. As critics and poetical historians, they share a sense of poetry’s improvement over time. Warton’s audience is in the main the curious reader; Johnson’s is the common reader. But this implies no diminution in the curiosity Johnson brought to the poetical past.

Contemporary educational reformers strive to balance education for some (elite knowledge workers) with education for all. British and Danish policymakers resolve this conflict in different ways that resonate with long-term cultural frames. British politicians applaud vocational education but devote few resources to it. Efforts to equalize schooling focus on rewarding winners from the working class, but these interventions do little to develop skills for nonacademic learners. Denmark devotes more resources to vocational education, yet reformers have problems meeting the contradictory needs of high and low-skill workers, and immigrants are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the poorly educated. Cultural legacies echo in young people’s views of education in an internet survey of 2100 British and Danish young people. British respondents support national quality standards and uniform curricula more than Danish ones, who prefer individualized learning experiences. Danish students are happier with their educational experiences, support educational investments to strengthen society, and appreciate practical, real-life skills. Upper-secondary vocational education students are more likely to report obtaining useful skills than their British colleagues. Yet Danish NEETs feel shut out of the core economy and their exclusion may be more agonizing because it goes against the historical commitment to a strong society.

This chapter suggests how Johnson gained from his acquaintance with the criticism of John Dennis. Johnson’s remarks on Shakespeare, Addison and Pope are all shaped by his reflections on the older critic, whose work Johnson quotes more fully than he does any other. Johnson’s response to Dennis is usually to disagree; but there is also respect, and acknowledgment that Dennis had good points to make about Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a poem that was for Johnson a success. Dennis’s reflections on Shakespeare and his complaints that Shakespeare failed to obey decorum trigger Johnson’s most eloquent passages in the Preface. In Johnson’s note to King Lear, where Johnson is lamenting the death of Cordelia, it is to Dennis that Johnson turns when calibrating his own uncertain yet distressed reactions to the play. Similarly, Dennis’s attack on the most celebrated of eighteenth-century tragedies, Addison’s Cato, offered the opportunity for a vivid comparison between a poet of manners and a “poet of nature.” There is truth as well as satire in Johnson’s description of Dennis as a “formidable assailant.” Johnson fulfills an obligation of fairness to his critical past.

Despite having few natural resources and peasant serfs, Denmark developed public primary education in 1814, while Britain delayed the mass, public school system until 1870 and provided little instruction to working-class students. Later, Denmark’s secondary education system included publicly-funded vocational training programs, while Britain developed a single-track system that ignored technical skills. Fiction writers and their cultural narratives contributed to educational choices. Authors became important individual political agents in school reform movements, by using fiction to advance policy ideas and inspire emotional outrage. Writers collectively contributed to the nationally distinctive symbols and narratives about education that appeared in their country’s literature. Each generation of authors inherited these distinctive cultural tropes from their literary ancestors, reworked these for new problems, and passed these along to future generations. Studying fiction writers and their narratives offers a tangible way to evaluate how culture matters to political outcomes, as we may empirically (with computational linguistics and a close reading of texts) observe significant cross-national differences in historical literary images of education. The work suggests how cultural narratives contribute to the emergence of coordinated and liberal varieties of capitalism and reflects on how cultural narratives provide a source of continuity within long-term processes of institutional change.

In 1814, Denmark created a public primary school system, but Britain only developed private church schools. This chapter recounts the struggles over education in the decades surrounding 1800 and the role of authors in these battles. Writers’ literary tropes fostered distinctive perceptions of education in the two countries: Danish enlightenment writers portrayed education for workers as necessary for building a strong society, vibrant economy, and secure state. Many British authors worried that mass schooling would foster instability and overpopulation. But in both countries, some writers participated as activists in the campaigns for education. In Britain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1808 lecture on education was credited with launching the mass education movement. Coleridge, William Wordsworth Sarah Trimmer, Hannah More, and others resisted a national education system and promoted the Bell monitorial model (espoused by the Anglican National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor. In Denmark, Ludvig Holberg bequeathed his fortune to the Sorø Academy (which educated future political statesmen) and encouraged the school to adopt his enlightened ideas about education. Later Danish Romantic writers helped a progressive coalition supporting the crown prince to advance mass schooling and to resist challenges from reactionary estate owners.

When the Lives first appeared as “Prefaces,” the final, resonant, paragraph was the conclusion of the “Life of Gray.” But when individual “Lives” were printed separately from the poems, this particular grace was replaced by the possibility of reading with more continuity from one “Life” to the next. Such integration highlights internal transitions, changes and shifts of topic and tone; gradations of critical engagement mark Johnson’s developing interpretation of his task. Each “Life” inscribes an individual career; this is placed in the context of other “Lives” to draw attention to ends and beginnings. Johnson thereby resurrects within his late eighteenth-century present the ghosts of a 150-year poetical past. He actualizes this past in the fictional imagination of the living. The artistic moral of the Lives arises from the succession of births and deaths of poets whose company was the late-life mental habitation of a critic who found solitude unbearable.

This penultimate chapter introduces two complete editions of the Lives. The first was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press and the second in 2010 by Yale. The value of these editions is the attention they bring to the textual details of Johnson’s critical writing; they promote accuracy in dealing with his terminology. Evaluating Johnson’s criteria depends on such detail. The editions invite us to look more closely at the implicit meanings within the overall structure. They are of course very different and suggest different editorial cultures. The Oxford is very ample in its commentary; the Yale annotation is leaner and conforms in editorial style to the Works to which it belongs. Different users will find merits in both approaches, and a final preference is difficult to determine given the different ways in which Johnson’s critical and biographical writings are read or used. But both editions, in their ambition and magnitude, suggest the persistent presence of Johnson’s critical writing and are crucial to its reception.

This chapter tackles the term “truth” as a criterion of Johnson’s criticism. The central focus is Johnson’s apparent preference for poetical works based on actual events from history. In two exemplary cases from Dryden and Pope there is the implicit suggestion that such an anchorage in history is a merit. But there are many occasions – the defective historical allegory of Absalom and Achitophel and Johnson’s taste for the fanciful imaginings in Shakespeare’s comedies (as against the “Histories”). Here critical judgments cannot be reliably linked to such a preference. Analysis concludes that Johnson sought forms of artistry based in the foundational power of common experience: not the mystical, the occult or the abstruse. This is an emotional need for Johnson: The mind “loves” truth. But such a need in no way excluded the fact that Johnson attached extraordinary value to the poetical imagination; it did not weaken his demand for its presence in poetry.

Johnson found Shakespeare full of truths; but how far Shakespeare thinks philosophically has been debated. This chapter considers how Shakespeare has been considered a thinker in dramatic form. He enacts morals via character and dramatic situation. Johnson generates no philosophical aesthetics. Indeed, his criticism is a counterweight to contemporary analysis of such concepts as the “sublime,” or “genius.” However, he does appreciate the ways in which Shakespeare thinks and the senses in which the plays help us to think rationally about life. Johnson’s praise of Shakespeare as “the poet of nature” forms a contrast with major eighteenth-century philosophers. They did not always think highly of Shakespeare. Yet Kant’s ambition not to “allow my judgement to be determined by a priori proofs” suggests a philosophical analogue for both Pope and Johnson. They were aware that Shakespeare can deliver in the moment an experience that no thought or theory could seem to precede, explain or predict, but that once experienced, appears natural and universal.