Samuel Johnson

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Standard Name: Johnson, Samuel
Used Form: Dr Johnson
Arriving in eighteenth-century London as one more young literary hopeful from the provinces, SJ achieved such a name for himself as an arbiter of poetry, of morality (through his Rambler and other periodical essays and his prose fiction Rasselas), of the language (the Dictionary), and of the literary canon (his edition of Shakespeare and the Lives of the English Poets) that literary history has often typecast him as hidebound and authoritarian. This idea has been facilitated by his ill-mannered conversational dominance in his late years and by the portrait of him drawn by the hero-worshipping Boswell . In fact he was remarkable for his era in seeing literature as a career open to the talented without regard to gender. From his early-established friendships with Elizabeth Carter and Charlotte Lennox to his mentorship of Hester Thrale , Frances Burney , and (albeit less concentratedly) of Mary Wollstonecraft and Henrietta Battier , it was seldom that he crossed the path of a woman writer without friendly and relatively egalitarian encouragement.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Letitia Barbauld
The collection includes her Biographical Account of That Author, and Observations on His Writings, her longest single extant work, Johnsonian in manner, taking a critical attitude towards its sources. Her editorial alterations were extremely...
Intertextuality and Influence Rachel Hunter
The preface opens by quoting Johnson 's view of Shakespeare as the poet of nature who moved away from the universal reliance of dramatists on romantic love as the only motive for action. What a...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Ann Kelty
She goes on to quote Johnson , Cowper , Emerson (with whose thought she engages in some detail), and many other canonical names. Among women she quotes from Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (a passage about communion...
Intertextuality and Influence Hannah More
The title-page quotation from Paradise Lost features the archangel Raphael's pronouncement that it is better for human beings to know That which before us lies in daily life than things remote.
Feminist Companion Archive.
According to critic...
Intertextuality and Influence Catherine Talbot
This essay, an answer to number 11, which had taken the form of a letter from To-day, displays CT 's characteristic whimsical ingenuity. Night, claiming to be the elder sister of Today, defends dark...
Intertextuality and Influence Joan Aiken
This book is a prequel to some of its predecessors. Brazil in South America (here called New Cumbria in Roman America) is another transformation of actuality, ruled over by the sinister Queen Ginevra. Dido arrives...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Anne Barker
MAB 's discussion of schools leads her into an account of a visit made by the Norwegian missionary, Bishop Schreuder , to a later Zulu chief, Cetshwayo , taken from a blue-book or government report...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Deverell
MD has an acute sense of the way women are disadvantaged. She is, she confesses, a rebel against the domestic sphere.
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun.
1: 43
Of all the faults, that were ever laid to the charge of...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Inchbald
EI did not choose the plays herself. Shakespeare fills the first five volumes, apart from one piece by Ben Jonson , and five of her own plays fill volume 20. The eighteenth century is better...
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Fielding
This novel had some influence on Samuel Johnson , both on his Rambler essays and on Rasselas: a matter which deserves critical attention. In fiction it ushers in a brilliant mid-century constellation and, together...
Intertextuality and Influence Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
Here, more directly than in her novels, she deals with political and social issues: double tithing (Catholics having to support the established church which they did not frequent), corrupt middle-men, and absentee landlords.
Campbell, Mary. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora.
76-7
In...
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Grant
Charlotte Lennox is alluded to in this book (though AG gives her birth name wrongly as Massey),
Grant, Anne. Memoirs of an American Lady. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1: 21n
along with the more highly-ranked Milton and Johnson (whose Life of Savage she echoes, without naming...
Intertextuality and Influence Frances Arabella Rowden
The notes explain many classical allusions and some to more recent literature. The Maid of Greenland, for instance, is Ajut, in Johnson 's Rambler essays 186 and 187.
Rowden, Frances Arabella. The Pleasures of Friendship. A Poem.
104
Intertextuality and Influence Frances Jacson
Chapters are headed with a lavish array of quotations. Among the better-known authors are Ariosto (in the original), Shakespeare , Drayton , Milton , Pope (on the title-page), Young , Gray , Collins , Johnson
Intertextuality and Influence Jane Taylor
Her idiosyncratic humour is well shown in The Toad's Journal. A moral passage at the end of this poem, in a different metre, draws a moral against idleness, or living in vain; but the...

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