Johnson continues to offer fresh challenges and pleasures to both new and seasoned readers. This introduction sketches in some essential characteristics of Johnson as a companion, and as a critical thinker whose contemplation of time, human limitations, suffering, and the formative powers of language make him unusually contemporary – in short, a writer for life amidst a global pandemic. Drawing on his poetics of memory in Rambler 41, his remarks on Shakespeare’s King Lear, Pope’s last days, the folly of the heroic, Soame Jenyns’s metaphysics, and human failure in Rasselas, Greg Clingham suggests how Johnson engages with questions of self-knowledge, social justice (e.g., the education of women, the treatment of animals, capital punishment), and some of the political issues of the day (e.g., slavery and colonialism). In conclusion, the introduction describes the principles governing the chapters in this book, which honor the centripetal, seamless, and flexible manner of Johnson’s thinking and writing.

The chapter opens by considering Johnson’s seemingly hostile attitude to the eighteenth-century novel and its realistic portrayals of human life, as contrasted with that of his contemporary Henry Fielding. It places The Rambler’s theoretical strictures on such writing alongside Johnson’s views on biography and practice as a writer of fiction in Rasselas, eliciting his various contradictory opinions on representing bad characters and negative examples in literature. The chapter shows how, for Johnson, human imagination is both dangerous – competing with truth for control of the human psyche – and a positive source of creative energy. Fiction is sometimes therefore synonymous, in his mind, with falsehood and unreality. But it is also synonymous with literature of all kinds, and with the human endeavor to depict the world and other people in strikingly new and powerful ways that may, paradoxically, “awaken us to things as they are.”

Despite having the reputation of a misogynist for most of the twentieth century, Samuel Johnson has gradually been recognized as perhaps one of the most progressive male writers on the topic of women’s education. What does this say about Johnson’s position on gender? A cross-genre analysis of Johnson’s writing – dictionary entries, periodical essays, the verse tragedy Irene, the philosophical oriental tale Rasselas, and the critical biography of John Milton in the Lives of the Poets – demonstrates that while Johnson was certainly situated within the heteronormative framework characteristic of eighteenth-century England, and while his Christian chauvinism made his defense of Christian women (and Christian men) not fully intersectional, his defense of women as moral agents was a resource and reinforcement for eighteenth-century women writers.

This chapter discusses an underexplored and relatively unappreciated, but essential, aspect of Samuel Johnson’s writing and thinking: his intellectual relationship with Renaissance humanism. Looking at representative figures such as Sir Thomas More, Sir Francis Bacon, and Michel de Montaigne, Lee explores the influence these writers and thinkers had upon Johnson, describing his lifelong interest in the kinds of scholarly works for which they were known (dictionary, scholarly edition, biography, satire, skeptical essay) and also detecting their presence in Johnson’s moral and philosophical commitment to an “active” life, and even in his very prose style. In so doing so, the chapter concludes that Johnson embraced Renaissance humanism while simultaneously adapting it into a project relevant and responsive to the demands of his own day and age – and, indeed, suggesting a model for our own potential humanism today.

Samuel Johnson’s lifelong interest in travel and travel writing aligns neatly, in many ways, with his empiricist metaphysics. When we travel, we compare our assumptions and preconceptions against the real world and track the inevitable incongruities. But Johnson’s enduring interest in travel also reveals a more complex engagement with the material world – and Lockean empiricism more broadly – than we often recognize, and his attitude toward the genre is more complicated, more critical and probing, than we might expect. With reference primarily to Rasselas and A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, this chapter examines how Johnson leverages travel to combat habituation; enable comparative knowledge, which produces meaning and value; and assess our bodies and minds as we perceive, digest, and retain knowledge. Facilitating a comparative intellectual paradigm, and foregrounding epistemology, travel is, for Johnson, a critical posture that underpins his thinking far beyond his travel texts.