The traditional view of Samuel Johnson as a writer hostile to particulars, trifles, and aesthetic mediocrity only half-explains his character. This book argues that in a period exercised by social and literary hierarchies, Johnson's works reveal a defining interest in ‘little’, ‘mean’, or ‘low’ topics and people. The book is about Johnson's relationship to an 18th-century art of the bathos; about his inheritance, via such an art, of classical rhetoric; and about his strenuous adaptation of that rhetoric to various, competing influences, especially to Christianity. Spanning the period from John ... More

The traditional view of Samuel Johnson as a writer hostile to particulars, trifles, and aesthetic mediocrity only half-explains his character. This book argues that in a period exercised by social and literary hierarchies, Johnson's works reveal a defining interest in ‘little’, ‘mean’, or ‘low’ topics and people. The book is about Johnson's relationship to an 18th-century art of the bathos; about his inheritance, via such an art, of classical rhetoric; and about his strenuous adaptation of that rhetoric to various, competing influences, especially to Christianity. Spanning the period from Johnson's birth and the inception of Tatler to Boswell's Life of Johnson, the book attempts a series of incremental shifts in the understanding of Johnson, neo-classicism, and 18th-century literature. It shows how undecided Johnson could be, and how often that indecision came to the surface in his writings. In so doing, this study moves away from a critical emphasis on what literature of the period excludes, in order to consider its modes of including recalcitrant material.