The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson (Studies In Modern History Ser.)

By: Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill

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Synopsis: A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-century English letters. This book, one of a trilogy from Palgrave, brings that debate to a decisive conclusion, retrieving the 'historic Johnson' as opposed to the 'usable Johnson' that had been devised in the early twentieth century. The trilogy makes untenable the old picture of a Johnson who was Olympian, detached from the conflicts of his age, a timeless moralist. It reinstates a man well-informed about and deeply committed to the conflicts of his era in Church and State, in theology and in political ideology. And instead of a timeless, unchanging Johnson, it offers a picture of a man whose views importantly developed over the course of his agonized lifetime.