Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Samuel Johnson
-
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.
ECK
relates her experiences at the English and at various European courts, and includes sketches and anecdotes of famous people she knew, including those of an earlier generation like Samuel Johnson
and Frances Reynolds
...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Priscilla Wakefield
Despite the title, the travel in this sequel or companion to The Juvenile Travellers confines itself to the British Isles, where one of the most pressing topics of local interest is association with writers...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Her annotations were a vehicle for her own reminiscences and critical writing. When she marked up her copy of Boswell
's Life of Johnson she contradicted Boswell regularly, offering evidence or reasoning to prove his...
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin.
72
Beginning in...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Montagu
The patriotic element in EM
's reading of Shakespeare is crucial. She magisterially rebukes Voltaire's view of her admired author as having been primitive and unpolished, and seeks to outmanoeuvre the prestige of the French...
Textual Production
Jane Porter
She wrote this novel while living in London.
Porter, Jane. The Scottish Chiefs. Derby and Jackson.
19
In her preface to the first edition (now extremely rare)
Feminist Companion Archive.
she wrote that she had made no hesitation to accept truth as the helpmate of...
Textual Production
Jane Johnson
Her letters to her children are charming, though she seems to have encouraged the kind of rivalry among them which Samuel Johnson
deplored. In November 1753, when Robert was eight, she wrote to him: I...
Cokayne, George Edward. The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant. Editor Gibbs, Vicary, St Catherine Press.
In opening and closing she invokes Samuel Johnson
(a travel writer more interested in the...
Textual Production
Ann Hatton
The dedication, to Mrs Carsgill
of Holme Lodge, Northumberland, mentions past discussions with her on the topic of the passions, and cites Johnson
's Life of Savage to prove their violence.
Hatton, Ann. Deeds of the Olden Time. A. K. Newman.
This bears no relation to Susanna Haswell Rowson
's Rebecca; or, The Fille de Chambre, 1792. It sounds, however, like a...
Textual Production
Hester Mulso Chapone
Hester Mulso (later HMC
) contributed four brief letters from imaginary, high-society correspondents to the tenth number of Samuel Johnson
's Rambler.
Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. Editors Bate, Walter Jackson and Albrecht B. Strauss, Yale University Press.
1: 51-4
Textual Production
Barbara Hofland
BH
published The Merchant's Widow and her Family. A Novel, with a title-page quotation from Samuel Johnson
and a date of 1814.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
4th ser. 4 (1813): 448
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
Later reprints often appeared as The Common Reader, First Series. VW
took her title from a formulation of Samuel Johnson
's, meaning that non-specialist, non-academic reader to whose taste, said Johnson, he was always...
Textual Production
Hannah More
HM
published her first poem, the ballad Sir Eldred of the Bower, revised with the help of Samuel Johnson
. It was printed with another poem, The Bleeding Rock, bearing the date of...
Textual Production
Anna Williams
Johnson
wrote to Samuel Richardson
to enlist his support for AW
in her plan to compile a dictionary of philosophical, that is scientific, terms.
Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Redford, Bruce, Princeton University Press.
1: 79-80
Timeline
27 June 1777: The clergyman William Dodd was executed for...
Building item
27 June 1777
The clergyman William Dodd
was executed for forgery despite the efforts of many distinguished people to win him a pardon.
15 January 1778: A Scottish court found in favour of Joseph...
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15 January 1778
A Scottish court found in favour of Joseph Knight
, a slave of African origin who had been brought to Scotland and now sued for his liberty. In effect this abolished slavery in Scotland: a...
By September 1782: The Letters of the black Londoner Ignatius...
Writing climate item
By September 1782
The Letters of the black Londoner Ignatius Sancho
were published two years after the author's death.
7 November 1783: The last public hanging took place at Tyburn...
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7 November 1783
The last public hanging took place at Tyburn in London (near where Marble Arch now stands), putting an end to the practice of parading the condemned through town en route to the scene of execution.
1 October 1785: The year after Johnson's death, Boswell published...
Writing climate item
1 October 1785
The year after Johnson
's death, Boswell
published The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.
7 December 1789: Hester Lynch Piozzi heard the African John...
April 1791: The month before the appearance of his Life...
Writing climate item
April 1791
The month before the appearance of his Life of Samuel Johnson
, and as parliament debated the bill to abolish slavery, James Boswell
published a long poem entitled No Abolition of Slavery; or, The Universal...
16 May 1791: James Boswell published The Life of Samuel...
Writing climate item
16 May 1791
James Boswell
published The Life of Samuel Johnson, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of the day that he and Johnson first met.
March 1824-May 1829: Walter Savage Landor published Imaginary...
Writing climate item
March 1824-May 1829
Walter Savage Landor
published Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen.
February 1906: Publisher J. M. Dent launched Everyman's...