'I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English language', Wilde said in an interview published in 1892. 'There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life', he explained, 'and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it.'

The beautiful thing he had made was a one-act play, Salome, written in French in Paris in late 1891 and offered to Sarah Bernhardt for a London production, in French, in 1892. 'Sarah va jouer Salome, Wilde wrote excitedly to the novelist Pierre Louys, perhaps in June of that year (L 316). By late June, the celebrated French actress was in rehearsal at the Palace Theatre, London, when the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays, E. F. S. Pigott, denied a licence for performance on the grounds of a prohibition against biblical characters on the stage. William Archer, champion of Ibsen and other avant-garde dramatists, condemned the Examiner's decision in bitter terms: 'A serious work of art, accepted, studied, and rehearsed by the greatest actress of our time, is peremptorily suppressed.' On reflection, what is puzzling is not the denial of a licence but the blithe assumption (attributed by Wilde's friend and literary executor Robert Ross to Bernhardt's ignorance of English stage censorship) that a licence would be forthcoming. For beneath Pigott's official reliance on Henry VIII's interdiction of mystery plays lay a condescending disdain for serious poetic drama and, some might have added, a covert preoccupation with sexuality that he shared with the public he served. Describing England's 'loathsome pruriency' in their 1913 study of English censorship, Frank Fowell and Frank Palmer observed that sex had been degraded 'into a national obscenity, a thing of dark places, of shame and disease'.

I would like to begin by commenting on two recent full-length critical works on Wilde's plays to help define the parameters of my subsequent argument. In 1990 Kerry Powell, in Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, examined the extent to which the dramatist must be seen to be a man of his times and moulded to some degree by those times. He showed how aware Wilde was of both popular and less conventional drama in performance on the London stages: current developments in melodrama and comedy were potent influences (Gilbert, Jones, Pinero and Sardou), but so too, crucially, was Ibsen. The opening chapter of Powell's study is significantly entitled: 'Rewriting the Past' and his subsequent thesis in analysing the sources of the major plays extensively documents Wilde's borrowings, 'quotings' and manipulations of situations, dramatic climaxes, visual effects that he could rely on his audience quickly recognising. (Another chapter is pointedly entitled 'Algernon's Other Brothers'.) Wilde was sufficiently ardent and perceptive a theatregoer, as Powell shows, to be capable of devising roles to suit the performance-style of particular actors: Beerbohm Tree, George Alexander, Sarah Bernhardt. This view sees Wilde as both innovatory and Victorian, but the emphasis is chiefly on the second epithet.

An earlier publication by Katharine Worth makes rather different claims. Her study was issued within Macmillan's series, Modern Dramatists, and appropriately her concern is to establish Wilde's modernity. What steadily emerges here is an image of Wilde as a transitional figure whose interest, for example, in Wagner and the symbolists shaped in Salome a play that anticipated developments in poetic drama to be made by playwrights such as W. B. Yeats. In part Worth is seeking to account for the enduring popularity of Wilde's social comedies in the twentieth-century theatre and consequently she continually stresses their potential for actor, designer, director. She does not ignore the nineteenth-century material that played so creative a part in Wilde's inspiration, but she places it differently.

Johnson started The Rambler almost at the midpoint of his most productive literary and scholarly decade (1745-55). In 1745, with his Observations on Macbeth, he laid the groundwork for his largest editorial project; in the first months of 1746, as he finished his “Short Scheme of an English Dictionary” (dated 30 April 1746), he set forth on his immense lexicographical labors. He was already well acquainted with large, ambitious undertakings, as we know from his parliamentary reporting. His Debates in Parliament, as the publishers of the first collected edition (1787) called them, form his first major literary project, although Johnson obviously did not undertake that task, which ran from November 1740 to February 1743, with a final collection in mind. The Rambler is different. As the centerpiece of this decade of immense literary activity, Johnson saw it from the beginning as an entrepreneurial undertaking that would rival the other great collections of English essays, Bacon's Essays Civil and Moral and Addison and Steele's The Spectator. Every collection is a miscellany, but Johnson, even before he started The Rambler, understood the opportunity for his new project to rival if not supersede his famous predecessors.

Wilde once said that people are good until they learn how to talk. He was born into an age when philosophers were coming to the conclusion that language itself is a dubious, slippery commodity and that to talk is to learn how to tell lies. In consequence, many modern artists have distrusted fluency and eloquence, admiring hesitation and even inarticulacy as marks of the honesty of a speaker. Their ultimate guarantee of sincerity is not even a broken sentence but absolute, unqualified silence. Playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett have constructed their work around moments of shared silence or painful, pregnant pauses. For them language is a mere babble used to frame these epiphanies, or else a device to occlude the truth (as when one of Beckett's characters laments to a girlfriend that words are inadequate to conceal what he feels). Indeed, Beckett went so far as to characterise literature as 'the foul convention whereby you either lie or hold your peace'.

Commentators see this distrust of language as a fairly recent phenomenon, but, like so much else in modern theatre, that tradition has important origins in the work of Oscar Wilde. At the close of the first act of The Importance of Being Earnest Jack says 'Algy, you never talk anything but nonsense.' His companion has a deep reply: 'Nobody ever does.' That is to say, no matter how hard a person tries to prattle meaninglessly, there is always some tiny flicker of substance to it all.

Conversation is so central to and representative of Samuel Johnson's work and life that by assembling and examining his writings on conversation, dialogue written for his fictional and factual characters, accounts of Johnson talking, and the meanings and performance of conversation in Johnson's England, a metonymic biography of this man could be written, one which Johnson, I suspect, might not be sorry to see undertaken or even, perhaps, to have written himself. An essay cannot, of course, be a full-fledged biography. But my aim in the pages that follow is to provide biographical insight by taking something like a core sample of Johnson through the strata of his ideas about and practice of conversation. Johnson experienced personally and wrote about the values of conversation as one of the greatest pleasures and improving exercises of human life. He was alert to risks endemic to conversation, directly proportional to its entertaining and instructive possibilities.

Samuel Johnson would have enjoyed the truly Quixotic irony that, however scholars tilt at the windmill of the Johnson myth, it stubbornly persists. His misogyny is as firmly established in the public mind as his “amorous propensities” behind the scenes of Garrick's theatre. At best, he is seen as patronizing the “pretty dears.” The most familiar pronouncement seems to say it all: “Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all” (Life, i, 463). Less well known but certainly more representative is Johnson's assertion that “Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves” (v, 226). Unsurprisingly, Johnson does share with his contemporaries firm ideas on the demarcation between the genders, but he demonstrates in his writing an extraordinary sympathy with women. Showing the limitations imposed on them by social conditions, he consistently advocates their education, and places a supreme value on “female” qualities of tenderness, gentleness, and emotional responsibility, for both men and women.

It is impossible adequately to understand or appreciate Johnson the author without seriously considering Johnson the Christian believer and theological thinker. From the time Johnson first read William Law's Serious Call at the age of twenty, Boswell tells us, “religion was the predominant object of his thoughts” (Life, i, 69-70). Another early biographer, Sir John Hawkins, examined the plan of study Johnson composed at Pembroke College, Oxford, and concluded: “his favourite subjects were classical literature, ethics, and theology” (Hawkins, p. 11). Johnson's first book, a translation of a French edition of the Portuguese Jesuit Jerome Lobo's A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), reveals his willingness to engage with the theological and religious debates of the seventeenth century.

A further sign of Johnson's early theological inclination is the fact that the second project he ever proposed to Edward Cave, editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, was a new translation of a long, complex, and heavily annotated theological work: Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent (Letters, 1, 12—13). This work immersed him in the most contentious theological issues of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: sacramental theology, ecclesiastical polity, apostolic succession, and justification by faith alone. Because of competition from another translator, Johnson eventually abandoned the project in April 1739, though not until he had already produced between 400 and 800 quarto pages of translation and commentary over the course of nine months.

The most infamous evaluation of Samuel Johnson's literary ceuvre is the broad attack launched by Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his Encyclopedia Britannica article of 1856. Macaulay's assessment stands soundly rejected today. Yet what was really at stake in his attack - the discomfort of a Whig historiographer and colonial administrator with the universalist thought of Johnson - is seldom fully understood. Macaulay's views about Johnson's Rasselas thus bear quoting at some length:

THE POSE OF INTENSITY AND THE CULT OF AESTHETIC RESPONSE IN THE 1880s AND 1890s

When Oscar Wilde first rediscovered and began to write in Pen, Pencil and Poison' of the life and opinions of the Regency painter, belletrist, convicted forger and 'subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival', Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, he found revealed in the character of this artistic and intellectual dandy not only an aspect of his own nature and genius, but also, perhaps, the key to an essential quality of the Aesthetic and Decadent sensibility as it developed in England in the 1880s and 90s. That quality we might define as a Dandyism of the Senses - a self-consciously precious and highly fastidious discrimination brought to bear on both art and life. The dandy-aesthetes of the fin-de-siècle period above all honed their senses and cultivated the rarest of sensibilities; they made the perfection of the pose of exquisiteness their greatest aim and they directed all their languid energies towards nurturing a cult of aesthetic response that begins beyond ordinary notions of taste, that lies beyond mere considerations of fashion, and operates quite outside the dictates of all conventional canons of morality.

Wilde was perhaps the first to perceive that this very specific sensibility had been intriguingly foreshadowed by the ideas and opinions enshrined in Wainewright's precociously brilliant art-journalism of the early years of the nineteenth century; in particular in those essays in which the mercurial dandy-critic first adumbrated his own idiosyncratic version of a pose of exquisite sensibility and the notion of a cult of aesthetic response.

If Oscar Wilde is remembered for anything since his turn-of-the-century demise, it is his meteoric rise as a raconteur, playwright and cultural critic, and his startlingly rapid fall into disrepute as a homosexual committed to two years in solitary confinement with hard labour in Reading Gaol. Since this memorable story has been told so many times and in so many versions - not least in his own work of life writing, posthumously named De Profundis, and in biographies as notable and substantial as Richard Ellmann's - one would reasonably imagine that we must now know all there is to discover about Wilde's scandalous sexual behaviour, not to say the imprint of transgressive desire across the gamut of his works. Indeed, the enduring interest in his life and writings - from Peter Ackroyd's fictional The Last Will and Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) to Philip Prowse's visually arresting productions of the Society comedies - suggests that Wilde addresses issues that still vibrantly preoccupy our own fin de siecle, particularly where questions of sexual identity are concerned. This is especially the case in the world of scholarly research where the upsurge of critical attention paid to Wilde's oeuvre has risen sharply in the light of a burgeoning lesbian and gay studies since the mid-1980s. Such developments have meant that academic readers are now altogether freer in articulating the homoerotic patternings that would seem to inflect his writings from beginning to end.

Scholars writing about Johnson like to point out, correctly, that he wrote more on politics than most readers suppose. In a broad sense it can be argued that all writing implies a politics, but Johnson's engagement with politics in one way or another is coterminous with his professional life as a writer. Writers were less specialized in the eighteenth century than they have become, and “literature” had a broader signification. Apart from Johnson's late work as political pamphleteer, whether as journalist, satirist, essayist, lexicographer, book reviewer, sermon-writer, biographer, throughout his career many of Johnson's writings directly engage politics and others touch upon politics in a range of ways. This essay will trace the broad outline of Johnson's political opinions and make particular observations on some of his political writings.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.” Johnson made this famous declaration in 1777, but he had already said something similar to James Boswell on 11 October 1773 whilst they were both temporarily marooned on the island of Coll in the Hebrides. Boswell had commented that until their joint expedition, “You yourself, sir, had never seen, till now, any thing but your native island,” to which Johnson replied “But, Sir, by seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can shew.” It seems clear that “life” in these pronouncements cannot mean whatever it was that Johnson had come to the Hebrides to see. London could encapsulate “life” because life everywhere – that is to say human character – is the same. London’s social and cultural diversity, the richness of its human resources, means that it is the perfect laboratory for the study of human nature. Johnson’s remarks can be read as testimony not only to his love of the city, but to his conviction that human beings are alike everywhere, the same, in fact, in London as (to use his phrase at the opening of The Vanity of Human Wishes) “from China to Peru.” What then had taken him to the highlands of Scotland?