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Annotated Immortality: Lonsdale's Johnson

Annotated Immortality: Lonsdale's Johnson Review Essay Philip Smallwood University of Central England Samuel Johnson. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006). Vol. 1, Pp. 464. £85. ISBN 0-19-928479-2; vol. 2, Pp. 448. £85. ISBN 0-19-928480-6; vol. 3, Pp. 488. £85. ISBN 0-19-928481-4; vol. 4, Pp. 680. £85. ISBN 0-19-928482-2 For Matthew Arnold, writing in the High Victorian period, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets could still convey powerfully a critical and biographical experience of profound humanistic value for the student of literature and of life. In his preface to The Six Chief Lives (London, 1879), Arnold claimed that Johnson’s essays were the most humanely informative introduction for beginning readers of English poetry, and indeed constituted an education, as much moral and intellectual as biographical and critical, this on account of the moral and intellectual quality of the human being behind them: “The more we study him,” wrote Arnold, “the higher will be our esteem for the power of his mind, the width of his interests, the largeness of his knowledge, the freshness, fearlessness, and strength of his judgements” (xxiv). T. S. Eliot has in the twentieth century http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Eighteenth-Century Life Duke University Press

Annotated Immortality: Lonsdale's Johnson

Smallwood, Philip
Eighteenth-Century Life , Volume 31 (3) – Oct 1, 2007
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
© 2007 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0098-2601
eISSN
0098-2601
DOI
10.1215/00982601-2007-004
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Abstract

Review Essay Philip Smallwood University of Central England Samuel Johnson. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006). Vol. 1, Pp. 464. £85. ISBN 0-19-928479-2; vol. 2, Pp. 448. £85. ISBN 0-19-928480-6; vol. 3, Pp. 488. £85. ISBN 0-19-928481-4; vol. 4, Pp. 680. £85. ISBN 0-19-928482-2 For Matthew Arnold, writing in the High Victorian period, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets could still convey powerfully a critical and biographical experience of profound humanistic value for the student of literature and of life. In his preface to The Six Chief Lives (London, 1879), Arnold claimed that Johnson’s essays were the most humanely informative introduction for beginning readers of English poetry, and indeed constituted an education, as much moral and intellectual as biographical and critical, this on account of the moral and intellectual quality of the human being behind them: “The more we study him,” wrote Arnold, “the higher will be our esteem for the power of his mind, the width of his interests, the largeness of his knowledge, the freshness, fearlessness, and strength of his judgements” (xxiv). T. S. Eliot has in the twentieth century

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Eighteenth-Century Life – Duke University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2007

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