Samuel Johnson

Introduction to the Essays

Ramblers 170 & 171. These two letters to the Rambler by "Misella" are purely fictitious. They present a very typical account, however, of how an honest young girl is reduced to prostitution on the streets of London. Johnson, though no patron of prostitutes, nonetheless had something like Defoe's knowledge of the London poor and criminal classes, including its hookers.

Rambler 73. Another fictional letter writer, Cupidus tells of his family's experience waiting for a long-promised inheritance. Johnson's attitude toward his fictional narrator, Cupidus, is complex and ambivalent. ("Cupidus" is Latin for "greedy one.")

Rambler 108. A straight moral essay on the proper use of time, how we fritter it away, and how we could use it better.

Rambler 207. An essay on the need for endurance in great undertakings. Though a cool, objective discussion, you can judge its personal relevance for Johnson when you notice that the next Rambler essay is his last. He has now worked six years of the nine he takes on his Dictionary and has published over 200 essays in two years.

Adventurer 111. On bogus and real forms of happiness. Johnson analyzes a number of false sources of happiness and then sketches what true happiness consists of.

Idler [22]. Be careful to find the right essay: Idler [22] with brackets, dated September 9, 1758, page 417. Having published the essay in a magazine, Johnson kept it out of his collected essays, presumably thinking it too bitter. When later editors included it in his collected works, they had to bracket it to distinguish it from the current Idler 22, also in your book. You can see in reading it why Johnson may have been uneasy with his own work and why later editors thought it too good to pass up. Johnson is rarely this savage.

Idler 81. Johnson was among the extremely few Europeans to side with the American Indians against the European colonists. He considered the French and Indian War to be, as he wrote elsewhere, the quarrel of two robbers over the property of their victim, an attitude which at the time was almost scandalous.

Idler 41. Another fictitious letter writer, though this one is Johnson himself. This is Johnson's response to the death of his mother, which he turns into a short sermon on the proper handling of grief. It is one of Johnson's most somber and beautiful essays and one of his most personal.

Idler 88. A fine example of Johnson's distinctive blend of cool realism and generous humanity. We all, he suggests, feel like underachievers, though he explains why there is no reason to do so.

Idler 103. On the "horror of the last," this is Johnson's final serial essay, written close to Easter. One of Johnson's constant themes is that to live well we must habitually reflect on our mortality. The last anything helps us to do so.

Reflection Essay Questions

Read all of the assigned essays and then answer either one of the following questions.

[1] For Johnson, the great eternal question is how to live happily and well "in a world bursting with sin and sorrow." Pull together the threads running through the essays that, taken together, present Johnson's beliefs and recommendations on this issue. What forces and realities make happiness difficult to achieve, and how, according to Johnson, can we come closest to attaining it?

[2] Though he is not primarily a satirist, Johnson can wield a rhetorical broad sword with the best of them. Find the passages of satire in the essays and compare his work to Swift's in terms of its targets and weapons.