We have been reading Gulliver’s Travels for nearly 300 years, and we have been arguing about it just as long. The history of the critical reception of Swift’s masterpiece begins as soon as the book was published, when Swift was charged with indecency and misanthropy, though he has always had defenders as well as detractors, a situation that continued into the nineteenth century. In the Victorian period, Gulliver was often sanitised through abridgement, especially in versions for children. In the twentieth century, Gulliver’s Travels has been the subject of numerous lines of academic enquiry, including criticism that focuses on its sources and generic identity; on its employment of rhetoric and irony in service of satire; on feminism and sexuality; on colonialism and politics; and on the histories of science, philosophy, and religion.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) has long had a reputation as the ‘first English dictionary’, despite the dozens of dictionaries that had appeared in the century and a half before Johnson’s. There are few ways in which Johnson’s book can be truly considered a ‘first’, since nearly all his contributions to dictionary-making had precedents in classical and European lexicography. He did, however, introduce some innovations in English lexicography, including grounding his wordlist in the works of English authors, discerning subtle shades of meaning in numbered senses, and providing extensive quotations showing the words in context. Together, these qualities made Johnson’s Dictionary, though not a chronological ‘first’, still the first English dictionary to be widely regarded as the standard of the English language.

The study of literary deception – which the US Library of Congress calls “literary forgeries and mystifications” in its catalog of subject headings – has plenty of attractions. We can treat the thief or the faker as an embodiment of the mythological trickster figure wreaking havoc on a staid establishment, or the crafty pícaro mischievously showing up his betters. Literary malefactors are adored for their chutzpah in embarrassing the self-important and revealing they are gullible fools and knaves.

The Interests of Prince Charles Stuart

Samuel Johnson never went to war. That has not prevented a few eccentrics from considering the possibility that he somehow engaged in combat himself. Boswell records that his hero “was once drawn to serve in the militia, the Trained Bands of the City of London … . He upon that occasion provided himself with a musket, and with a sword and belt, which I have seen hanging in his closet.” Boswell found “the idea” of Johnson in uniform, “with all its circumstances, is certainly laughable,” and any reasonable reader has to number this among Johnson's more ridiculous moments. But the evidence of a musket and sword prompted J. L. Ward to wonder conspiratorially in 1932,

We know the answer to this question: “slaving at dull literary hackwork.” It would be virtually impossible to for something like military service to escape biographical notice, and we would have to pity any commanding officer obliged to give orders to the authority-averse and half-blind Johnson. Whatever the exact nature of his “kind of liking for Jacobitism,” it did not extend to defending the Pretender's interests on the battlefield. Even Ward calls it “admittedly difficult to picture the scholarly and myopic Samuel Johnson, armed with dirk and targe, tramping in the ranks of the Young Pretender's army.” And yet he cannot forbear concluding that “some definite Jacobite activity may reasonably be suspected.” This stretches the definition of “reasonably” past the breaking point. Johnson never went to war.

Preface

Perhaps no English author gains more from being set in context than Samuel Johnson. “The Age of Johnson” – the phrase has been used since at least 1834 – suggests that he stands at the center of “his” age in a way few writers do. Studies of Johnson, therefore, almost always turn into studies of his age: it is impossible to discuss him without also discussing his intellectual, literary, and cultural contexts. His uniquely encyclopedic mind somehow stands for his entire world. Finding one’s way through that world, though, can be daunting, because the volume of accumulated scholarship on the subject is vast. Samuel Johnson in Context therefore serves as a kind of vade-mecum to eighteenth-century British culture. The contributions from forty-seven leading experts in the field explore the state of the art in recent thinking about eighteenth-century British life.

The collection is divided into three parts. The first, “Life and works,” focuses on Johnson himself: his biography and his most important biographers, the works he wrote for publication, and the letters he wrote for private consumption. The second part, “Critical fortunes,” gives a broad overview of the way Johnson has been discussed, analyzed, studied, and mythologized during his lifetime and since: the collected editions of his works, the translations of his writings into other languages, the critical reception of his works from his death to the present, the portraits and caricatures that appeared during and shortly after his lifetime, and his transformation into the legendary character “Dr. Johnson.”