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April 2006

Johnson's divided mind

by Adam Kirsch

On Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets.

On March 29, 1777, the night before Easter, Samuel Johnson wrote an apologetic note in his diary: “I treated with the booksellers on a bargain, but the time was not long.” By custom, Johnson set aside Easter Eve for meditation, weighing up his achievements and failures over the past year; doing any business that day seemed, to his painfully active conscience, a kind of offense against both piety and self-discipline. But at least, he reassured himself, it did not take too much time for him to agree to the proposal that the booksellers had brought him: to write brief prefaces for a new edition of English poets.

The three men who visited Johnson that day were emissaries from a much larger group of London publishers. To produce “Works of the English Poets,” a series of fifty-six volumes that promised to include all the important English poets since the Restoration ...

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Adam Kirsch's most recent book is Invasions: Poems (Ivan R.


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 24 April 2006, on page 19

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