Introduction

This collection of newly minted chapters trains a re-focalising eye on the person of Samuel Johnson, his writings, his friends, contemporaries and relations with other authors—all subject areas we might expect to know well yet never know well enough. And as an expanding Johnsonian scholarship continues to burst the bookshelves with its bulk, nothing suggests that opportunities for critical conversation about Johnson, on these and other themes, are exhausted. In the exercise of their critical practice, contributors to this project embed their original perspectives in relatively short, essayistic, excursions—with all that entails concerning the trialling of approaches, the free expression of literary tastes and the analysis of received opinion. There is no implied promise to translate preferences and perceptions into classifiable theories, and while the range of subject matter cannot embrace all that is contained in the various and adventurous mind of Johnson, the material is at no point peripheral. This volume brings together discussions of genres and critical issues: Johnson’s poetry, the historical and political background and affiliations of other poets and their value today, poetical criticism, philosophical, theological and moral thought, aspects of travel writing, definitions in the Dictionary , male-female friendships, biography and bibliography, domestic life and cultural legacy.