Rasselas was written and published in 1759, and immediately became a popular work, running to several editions in the course of Johnson's lifetime and being frequently reprinted thereafter. It is still the best known of any of Johnson's works, and is probably the best place to start for anyone coming to Johnson for the first time. It is short, for one thing, saying much in relatively few pages. It deals with a self-evidently large and interesting subject - Johnson thought of titling it “The Choice of Life” - and does so without reference to intellectual or historical matters now become obscure. It has the congenial form of a narrative fiction, and although it is unlike what the modern reader would think of as a novel, the narrative form remains essential to its effect: the unwinding line of the story and the contingency of event play against the discursive, intellectualizing impulse in a way that releases some of Johnson's best writing, here as in the Lives of the Poets. And, perhaps more unmistakably than any of his other works, Rasselas impresses with the power of Johnson's intelligence, the “strength of thought” which, as he says in the “Life of Cowley,” is essential to any account of true wit (Lives, 1, 19-2,0).

Wilde died in 1900, the year before Queen Victoria and the same year as Nietzsche. Dating him in such a way evokes the modernity of the Victorian age, with its values of progress, technology, global markets and individualism. It also evokes the postmodernism of Nietzsche, the philosopher with whom Wilde is most often compared, in their transvaluation of values, in the second half of the twentieth century. The Victorians agonised over values - family values, British values, value as use or exchange - while Nietzsche revealed value as a fraud, a tool of domination of some over others, on the one hand, and promoted a radical perspectivism or scepticism, on the other. Wilde, a figure of paradox and contradiction, participated in both modern value critique and postmodern perspectivism.

Modernism in social theory, as distinguished from modernist aesthetics, refers to processes that began to be theorised during the European Enlightenment. First among these were the democratic revolutions - the abolition of race slavery, the enfranchisement of working men and then women, and the struggle for increasing circles of rights - until today one speaks of the rights of many social groups, children, (non-human) animals, even non-animal life, as in radical ecology. Inseparable from the conditions that gave rise to the democratic revolutions was the growth in scientific knowledge and technology that led to the economic and population explosion that we call the industrial revolution: it was in fact the political economists rather than the moralists who first argued against slavery, as an inefficient use of labour. It is important at the outset to note that for the Enlightenment and for the Victorian modernists described here, progress was a moral and political category as much as a technological or economic one.

A poem labelled dubiously as having been 'translated' by Oscar Wilde - from Polish, which he did not speak - is buried deep in an obscure anthology edited by Clement Scott, drama critic of the London Daily Telegraph. The poem, 'Sen Artysty', supposedly written by actress Helena Modjeska and translated by Wilde near the time of her London debut, is as conflicted as many other stories and poems in The Green Room (1880), the anthology of theatre-writing in which it appears. The actress, or rather the persona of the poem that Wilde associated with Helena Modjeska, regrets her choice of an artistic life, is left with 'a restless pain' in her heart, and receives the stigmata of 'red wounds of thorns' on her brow when he tries to take off the laurel-crown. 'Sen Artysty' not only harmonises with other writings in Clement Scott's anthology - all of them stories, essays or poems about the theatre - but asserts the same themes as many other Victorian assessments of women performers. Actresses were commonly thought to pay a terrible price for the public lives they led, including even the fortunate minority, like Modjeska, whose genius or hard work opened the way to riches and international fame. That price was figured in the rhetoric of suffering, illness and death, in lives wrecked by maladies both physical and mental. Victorian praise and even adulation of actresses was thus mingled with representations of them as suffering or wounded, like the speaker in the Helena Modjeska poem, or as monstrous, sick, or dying - victims of their own success in transcending the usual limits of a respectable Victorian woman's life.

“He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. - Johnson is dead. - Let us go to the next best: - there is nobody; - no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.” Thus the words of William Hamilton as reported by James Boswell at the end of his Life of Johnson (1791). In a sense Johnson scholarship has always been concerned with filling up the space left by Johnson's death in 1784; at the same time it has also been aware of the impossibility of that effort. Since Boswell's Life and the review of John Croker's edition of that work by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1831 readers have internalized a certain set of physiological images and style of speech that have come to identify Johnson in the popular and even the academic mind. Perhaps more than any other English writer, including Shakespeare, Johnson's words have been quoted and misquoted in almost every form of public discourse, and his works have been interpreted and misinterpreted, not only by eighteenth-century scholars but by specialists in other areas. Johnson has been fair game for all. The attention he has received is the mark of many things: it is a sign that his personality continues to fascinate, that his works continue to speak to the experience of modern people, and that he and his works represent a complex cultural authority that provide some readers with deep, intelligent instances of moral, social, and literary insight, while symbolizing for others the worst excesses of absolutist and ethnocentric rationalism produced by the Enlightenment.

The history of Oscar Wilde's plays in performance is closely linked to the larger history of their author's social and cultural reception. During the 1890s Wilde's dramas helped to inaugurate a series of aesthetic and commercial transactions in which up-market viewers found their worlds both celebrated and mocked on West End stages. They also formed part of Wilde's personal campaign to secure a place in 'best circles' Society. Consequently, although he talked with Shaw about founding a 'great Celtic' school of drama (L 339), and promised to aid Ibsen actress Elizabeth Robins in bringing about a 'theatre of the future', Wilde's career as a professional playwright more closely resembled that of commercially minded rivals like Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. Contemptuous of London's avant-garde theatres and makeshift theatre clubs (natural venues for a Shaw or Robins), Wilde turned exclusively to the West End's most fashionable playhouses and flamboyant actor-managers, building upon and responding to the sensibilities of their public. Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's first stage success, received its premiere at George Alexander's St James's Theatre in February 1892. Alexander, newly installed at the St James's, believed that a play by Wilde would draw to his theatre the carriage-trade crowd in which Wilde himself was just beginning to move. Wilde, for his part, determined to use the occasion to query the aesthetic and moral values of Alexander's viewers. The result was a production that drew upon the stage conventions of drawing-room melodrama and the goods of an emerging consumer society to challenge the world it seemed to endorse. Wilde's correspondence with Alexander shows how completely the playwright relied upon the textures and commodities of Society life to make his points, as well as the extent to which he intruded himself into every aspect of performance, from minute details of stage business and mise-enscène to the seasonal lines of Alexander's dressmakers, Mesdames Savage and Purdue.

When Matthew Arnold formulated his ideal of liberal education, he turned not to Coleridge or Hazlitt or De Quincey, or even to Keats or Wordsworth or Tennyson, but to Johnson's Lives of the Poets. In his Six Chief Lives from Johnson's “Lives of the Poets” (1878) Arnold designated Johnson's lives of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, and Gray as points de repère - “points which stand as so many natural centres, and by returning to which we can always find our way again.”These critical biographies covered the period from the birth of Milton in 1608 to the death of Gray in 1771, a crucial century and a half in English literature; and although there were significant critical disagreements of judgment between Arnold and Johnson, when it came to an education in literary history, biography, and criticism Arnold saw the Lives of the Poets as offering a “compendious story of a whole important age in English literature, told by a great man, and in a performance which is itself a piece of English literature of the first class” (p. 362).

Johnson's first acquaintance with Shakespeare gave him a shock. As a boy in Lichfield, and reading Shakespeare's Hamlet in the basement of his father's shop, he was frightened by the scene with the ghost and rushed upstairs “that he might see people about him.” Later, in the relatively unsuperstitious maturity of early middle age, Johnson published some sample notes for a planned edition of Shakespeare. In these, the Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth (1745), he lights on a passage that arouses but also scares him. Johnson compares the passage from Shakespeare with a famous passage from Dryden's Conquest of Mexico (1667):

What James Clifford and Donald Greene observed in 1970 is still true: “The history of Johnson's reputation since his own lifetime is in fact complex and needs even more study than it has received.” Their introduction to Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (Survey hereafter) is essential reading for anyone interested in Johnson and his reception. I could, in fact, recommend their survey to my readers and end my essay at this point, except for three considerations: their discussion goes only to 1969 (Greene and John Vance's update, A Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, 1970-1985, does not include a survey); they offer perhaps more detail than the reader who seeks an introduction might desire; and their discussion considers only indirectly the methods used in Johnson's critical reception.

Two other valuable resources should be mentioned at the outset. Edward Tomarken's History of the Commentary on Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson (1994) contains much that is useful and enlightening, but his “interpretive history” aims for “a new kind of literary method,” which he calls “New Humanism.” Thus Tomarken examines the critical record according to his ambitious goal. In addition, James Boulton's Johnson: The Critical Heritage very conveniently collects and excerpts eighty-one documents related to Johnson's reception from the period 1738-1832.

Cicero describes a poet who, undeterred by losing his audience, continues his recitation to the end: “Plato alone is as good as a hundred thousand,” the poet declares. It is no surprise that this tale of merit's endurance in a hostile age should have lodged in Johnson's mind. “The Lecturer was surely in the right, who, though he saw his audience slinking away, refused to quit the Chair, while Plato staid,” he tells John Wesley (6 February 1776; Letters, II, 290 and n.). He later acknowledges a compliment from Hester Thrale with quieter reference to the tale: “There is some comfort in writing, when such praise is to be had. Plato is a multitude” (18 March 1779; III, 157).

To value a lone connoisseur as highly as a mass readership was not only to salvage pride in an overlooked work, nor was it simply to claim kinship with such other addressees of “fit audience . . . though few” as Milton. In the context of his correspondence with Hester Thrale (who elicited from Johnson no fewer than 373 surviving letters, including many of his finest), it was also to suggest that private genres like the letter itself could count for as much as literature printed and bound.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's most famous and - posthumously - most successful play, was first produced by George Alexander at the St James's Theatre on 14 February 1895. London was enduring a prolonged and severe spell of cold weather: several theatres advertised their steam-heating among the attractions of their programme, and the first night of Wilde's comedy had been put off from 12 February because several of the women in the cast had bad colds. In addition to the habitual glamour of a first night at a fashionable theatre, the occasion was especially interesting because Wilde was in vogue. An Ideal Husband had been playing at the Haymarket Theatre since 3 January, and at the same theatre A Woman of No Importance had completed a successful run, having opened on 19 April 1893. On 20 February 1892 Lady Windermere's Fan had been the second play staged by Alexander's new management at the St James's Theatre, running until 26 July of that year.

Wilde's spectacular debut in the early 1880s had been followed by a period of less glamorous work as a reviewer, editor and jobbing author for journals and magazines. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales. In 1891 he had published four books, including The Picture of Dorian Gray and Intentions. Now, a decade after his appearance on the London literary scene, he was a successful West End dramatist and was beginning to seem a more substantial figure. A book-length lampoon, The Green Carnation, by imitating (perhaps reporting) his style of conversation, contributed to his renewed prominence in the literary and social gossip columns. To some readers it may also have suggested - or confirmed - the impression that there was a less positive side to Wilde's notoriety.

'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.