Empire of Letters: Mapping the Arts and the World in the Age of Johnson

Although they were Victorian critics who dubbed the late 18th century the “Age of Johnson,” contemporaries of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) would have recognized the justice of the term. Aside from compiling the first English dictionary of note, Johnson was a gifted and hugely influential critic, poet, political commentator, biographer, and novelist, as well as a legendarily pithy conversationalist and a master of the English sentence. His overbearing but strangely lovable personality was preserved for posterity by his friend and disciple James Boswell, who in 1791 published the greatest of all literary biographies, The Life of Johnson, which records (among much else) Johnson’s near-blindness, probable Tourette’s Syndrome, and selfless love of cats. Now, three years after the tercentenary of his birth and the flood of books commemorating it, Johnson remains perhaps the most familiar model of a vigorously independent public intellectual, even with (or perhaps because of) his many eccentricities and contradictions (his hatred of both slavery and the American Revolution, for instance). The age of Johnson, moreover, remains uniquely pertinent to students not only of cultural history but also of government and international relations, as it was his era (and, in part, his literary circle) that produced the contesting theories of empire and of cosmopolitanism, of trade and of liberty, with which we are still reckoning as global citizens. This course will reappraise Johnson’s legacy but will do so within a broad cultural survey of the Anglophone world across the second half of the 18th century. In addition to Johnson, Boswell, and other titans of Enlightenment prose—such as Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Adam Smith—we will sample international writing on imperialism and the slave trade (Olaudah Equiano, the abolitionist poets), the French and American revolutions (Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke), and women’s rights (the bluestocking circle, Mary Wollstonecraft). We will read some novels (Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith), dramas (Richard Brinsley Sheridan), oriental tales (William Beckford), and personal writing (Fanny Burney’s diary, Boswell’s shockingly candid London Journal), as well as pay attention to the emerging literature of Scotland and Ireland (James Macpherson, Maria Edgeworth), visual art (Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Rowlandson), and the poetic innovations that laid the groundwork for Romanticism (Thomas Gray, William Collins, George Crabbe). We will also glance at Johnson’s reception and influence over the centuries; for instance, in the work of Virginia Woolf.