Afterword

Abstract

In the early 1830s, an edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson by John Wilson Croker received surprisingly detailed and thoughtful reviews by both Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. After noting Croker’s numerous editorial errors, Macaulay and Carlyle turn their attention to the significance of Johnson’s career, and a offer a lengthy reassessment of his place in literary history. Johnson’s reputation badly needed this boost. ¹ After his death in 1784, writers increasingly questioned his status as a critic, poet, and moralist. Johnson, they claimed, failed to look and act the part of the sage: his nervous ticks, dirty clothes, voracious appetite, and combative conversational style appeared completely at odds with contemporary expectations for a distinguished author’s appearance and behavior. Blaming Johnson’s bodily contortions on the “solitude and low breeding, to which he was long condemned in the early part of his life,” the Reverend William Johnson Temple maintained that his class origins, along with his unseemly physical presence, inhibited public acceptance of him as a writer: “You would rather take him for an Irish chairman, London porter, or one of Swift’s Brobdingnaggians, than for a man of letters.”²