英美文学选读学习笔记 Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was born in Richfield, son of a book-seller. The boy was sent to the Richfield Grammar School where he remained for 8 years and acquired a solid foundation in Latin. In 1728 he went to Oxford and studied there, on and off, until 1731 when his father died and he had to quit the university without taking a degree. In 1735 he married a rich old widow. In hope of establishing himself in society, Johnson first made a futile attempt to set up a school and then went to London to try his fortune as a literary adventurer. The years between 1737 and 1755 were very difficult for him: he did translations, wrote poems, essays and accounts of parliamentary debates for the book-sellers and edited magazines, but earned no more than enough to maintain a meager living. It was only after the publication of his Dictionary that his financial status took a turn for the better. And in 1762 the government gave him a special pension which freed him from the burden of "writing for a living." So during the last twenty years of his life he wrote as little as he decently could and enjoyed a pleasant and easy life, sort of as a literary authority, talking about and commenting on literature and literary men in his famous Literary Club, where he was surrounded with respect by the elite of The literary circles.

Johnson was an energetic and versatile writer. He had a hand in all the different branches of literary activities. He was a poet, dramatist, prose romancer, biographer, essayist, critic, lexicographer and publicist. His chief works include poems: "London“ (1738), and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749); a romance: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759); a tragedy: Irene (1749); several hundred essays which appeared in the two periodicals under his editorship-- The Rambler and The Idler; and literary criticism as found in the face to his edition of Shakespeare and in his comments on 52 poets in Lives of the Poets (1779-1781). As a lexicographer, Johnson distinguished himself as the author of the first English dictionary by an Englishman -- A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), a gigantic task which Johnson undertook single-handedly and finished in over seven years.

Johnson was the last great neoclassicist enlightener in the later eighteenth century. He was very much concerned with the theme of the vanity of human wishes: almost all of his major writings bear this theme. He tried to awaken men to this folly and hoped to cure them of it through his writings. In literary creation and criticism, he was rather conservative, openly showing his dislike for much of the newly rising form of literature and his fondness for those writings which carried a lot of moralizing and philosophizing. He insisted that a writer must adhere to universal truth and experience, i.e. Nature; he must please, but he must also instruct; he must not offend against religion or promote immorality; and he must let himself be guided by old principles. Like Pope, he was particularly fond of moralizing and didacticism. So, it is understandable that he was rather pleased with Richardson's Pamela but was contemptuous of Fielding's Tom Jones.

Johnson's style is typically neoclassical, but it is at the opposite extreme from Swift's simplicity or Addison's neatness. His language is characteristically general, often Latinate and frequently polysyllabic. His sentences are long and well structured, interwoven with parallel words and phrases. However, no matter how complex his sentences are, the thought is always clearly exssed; and though he tends to use "learned words," they are always accurately used. Reading his works gives the reader the imssion that he is talking with a very learned man.