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
Friends, Associates Anna Seward
Acquainted with Hester Piozzi (and an admirer of her wit),
Seward, Anna. Letters of Anna Seward. Editor Constable, Archibald, Vol.
6 vols.
, A. Constable, 1811, 6 vols.
2: 102
AS was long but less warmly acquainted with Johnson . She accused him both of malice (repeatedly) and of liking only worshippers...
Friends, Associates Mary Masters
Among the households where she lived were those of Elizabeth Carter (who sometimes read her work and discussed it with her) and of Edward Cave (the proprietor of the Gentleman's Magazine). It was Carter...
Friends, Associates Radagunda Roberts
Though very little is known of RR 's life, she was well acquainted with at least one other woman writer: Frances Brooke (whose son attended St Paul's while Roberts's brother was High Master, and who...
Friends, Associates Anna Margaretta Larpent
In 1776 the future AML recorded meeting the Corsican patriot Paoli and Dr Johnson ye Great.
Feminist Companion Archive.
After her marriage her own and her husband's work brought her into contact with the cultured elite of London...
Friends, Associates Oliver Goldsmith
Goldsmith met and became a friend and associate of Edmund Burke , Samuel Johnson , Sir Joshua Reynolds , and others belonging to the Club, of which he was a founder member. He was a...
Friends, Associates Anna Williams
AW 's father knew many of the leading figures in the science of his day, and she probably met them through him. Her celebrated friendship with Samuel Johnson seems to have begun through his interest...
Instructor David Garrick
He attended the tiny, unsuccessful school on which Samuel Johnson lost his wife's money.
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Whateley Darwall
Liberty borrows from Johnson 's newly-published Rasselas the idea of a happy confinement which is not happy. It laments the poet's lack of autonomy.
Messenger, Ann. Woman and Poet in the Eighteenth Century: The Life of Mary Whateley Darwall (1738-1825). AMS Press, 1999.
24ff
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
In this first publication ESG stands on her dignity. She opens with a Johnson ian aphorism (Some alleviation of our distresses is always derived from communication)
Gooch, Elizabeth Sarah. An Appeal to the Public. G. Kearsley, 1788.
prelims
and closes on a note of...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Eliza Bray
From an early age, AEB admired Samuel Johnson 's style and adopted elements of his writing methods for her own career, such as keeping a journal of progress.
Bray, Anna Eliza. “Introduction”. Autobiography of Anna Eliza Bray, edited by John A. Kempe, Chapman and Hall, 1884, pp. 1-36.
26
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Masters
The poem here entitled The Vanity of Human Life must have been at least known to Johnson long before he wrote his own Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749. Clemene's Character aroused the ire of...
Intertextuality and Influence Medora Gordon Byron
This novel turns on a favourite Byron theme: the contrast between domestic and fashionable life. It opens, Above five hundred cards had announced to the fashionable world that lady Cheveril would be at home. It...
Intertextuality and Influence Harriet Lee
The preface says that a woman, Precluded, by Sex, from the deep Observation of Life, which gives Strength to Character, feels inevitable Apprehensions . . . on making a first Effort in the Drama.
Lee, Harriet. The New Peerage. G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1787.
prelims
Intertextuality and Influence Charlotte Nooth
The governess Matilda regrets that there are no professions for women; nothing is to be done but by the sacrifice of our rank in society.
Nooth, Charlotte. Eglantine; or, The Family of Fortescue. Valpy, 1816, 2 vols.
1: 199
She calls herself quite a detached being, alone...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
ESG quotes on her title-page from James Hammond and early in her first volume from Samuel Johnson (no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author).
qtd. in
Gooch, Elizabeth Sarah. The Life of Mrs Gooch. Printed for the authoress and sold by C. and G. Kearsley, 1792, 3 vols.
1: 11
The quotation from...

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