Community and Solitude

New Essays on Johnson’s Circle

Edited by Anthony W. Lee

SERIES: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

Bucknell University Press

Samuel Johnson’s life was situated within a rich social and intellectual community of friendships—and antagonisms. Community and Solitude is a collection of ten essays that explore relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries—including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Robert Chambers, Oliver Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Arthur Murphy, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, and Thomas Warton—and analyzes some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within those relationships. In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a “thick” and illuminating description of Johnson’s world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility.

Contributors: Christopher Catanese, James Caudle, Marilyn Francus, Christine Jackson-Holzberg, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Elizabeth Lambert, Anthony W. Lee, James E. May, John Radner, and Lance Wilcox.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This volume of essays advances the field not only because it focuses on a new topic but also because of the patient and imaginative analysis in the various essays. The audience here extends beyond Johnsonians because so many other figures of interest are included, from Frances Burney, Burke, Warton, Seward, and Arthur Murphy to Goldsmith and of course Boswell. Steven Lynn, University of South Carolina

An invaluable, erudite, thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to the study of Samuel Johnson's life, philosophy, and literary work, Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson's Circle is an extraordinary body of informative and deftly scripted scholarship. Midwest Book Review

The scholarship is of a consistently high level, and the prose is clear and well edited. Community and Solitude provides a salutary reminder that authorship is not always the solitary activity that many people assume. Recommend.' Choice

This collection of ten essays begins with three solid essays, all making good use of correspondence. Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

Lee, as editor, sets out to counterbalance Johnson’s need for solitude to accomplish his literary works with his at times almost desperate search for company to alleviate his periods of despair and disillusion. How could someone with such a sociable character and love of conversation succeed in creating such a corpus of work that within its pages we can find epithets suitable for most occasions in life? The New Rambler

These essays, well presented in this volume by Bucknell University Press, bring context, color, and an array of information that should prove of value to students and scholars of Johnson’s expansive circle. Eighteenth-Century Studies

The book uses...discussions to provide an engaging illustration of time, place, and character for a wide audience. For scholars who know Boswell’s biography and eighteenth-century London well, the book offers primarily a useful synthesis of biographies and cultural history. Eighteenth-Century Fiction

As a monograph designed for considering the historical interconnectedness in readings of literature, history, and culture, Community and Solitude, part of Bucknell University Press's Transits series, accomplishes its goal with welcome fidelity. The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

This volume of essays advances the field not only because it focuses on a new topic but also because of the patient and imaginative analysis in the various essays. The audience here extends beyond Johnsonians because so many other figures of interest are included, from Frances Burney, Burke, Warton, Seward, and Arthur Murphy to Goldsmith and of course Boswell. Steven Lynn, University of South Carolina

An invaluable, erudite, thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to the study of Samuel Johnson's life, philosophy, and literary work, Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson's Circle is an extraordinary body of informative and deftly scripted scholarship. Midwest Book Review

The scholarship is of a consistently high level, and the prose is clear and well edited. Community and Solitude provides a salutary reminder that authorship is not always the solitary activity that many people assume. Recommend.' Choice

This collection of ten essays begins with three solid essays, all making good use of correspondence. Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

Lee, as editor, sets out to counterbalance Johnson’s need for solitude to accomplish his literary works with his at times almost desperate search for company to alleviate his periods of despair and disillusion. How could someone with such a sociable character and love of conversation succeed in creating such a corpus of work that within its pages we can find epithets suitable for most occasions in life? The New Rambler

These essays, well presented in this volume by Bucknell University Press, bring context, color, and an array of information that should prove of value to students and scholars of Johnson’s expansive circle. Eighteenth-Century Studies

The book uses...discussions to provide an engaging illustration of time, place, and character for a wide audience. For scholars who know Boswell’s biography and eighteenth-century London well, the book offers primarily a useful synthesis of biographies and cultural history. Eighteenth-Century Fiction

As a monograph designed for considering the historical interconnectedness in readings of literature, history, and culture, Community and Solitude, part of Bucknell University Press's Transits series, accomplishes its goal with welcome fidelity. The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

Anthony W. Lee’s research interests center upon Samuel Johnson and his circle, mentoring, and intertexuality. He has published three books and more than thirty essays on Johnson and eighteenth-century literature and culture. He has two books forthcoming, Revaluation: New Essays on Samuel Johnson (with the University of Delaware Press, 2018) and “Modernity Johnson”: Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists (Clemson University Press, 2019).Anthony has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Tech University, Kentucky Wesleyan College, the University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Maryland University College, where he also served as Director of the English and Humanities Program.

List of Tables… v
Abbreviations … vi
Introduction ... 1
Part I. Personal Relationships: Letters and Conversation ... 11
One           Connecting with Three “Young Dogs”: Johnson’s Early Letters to Robert Chambers, Bennet Langton, and James Boswell ... 12
John Radner
Two           James Elphinston and Samuel Johnson: Contact, Irritations, and an “Argonautic” Letter ... 44
Christine Jackson-Holzberg
Three         The Case of the Missing Hottentot: John Dun’s Conversation with Samuel Johnson in Tour to the Hebrides as Reported by Boswell and Dun ... 79
James Caudle
Part II. Literary Relationships: Major Texts and Topics ... 118
Four           Oliver Goldsmith’s Revisions to The Traveller ... 119
James E. May
Five           “Down with her, Burney!”: Johnson, Burney, and the Politics of Literary Celebrity ... 165
Marilyn Francus
Six             In the First Circle: The Four Narrators of the Life of Savage ... 205
Lance Wilcox
Seven        “Under the shade of exalted merit”: Arthur Murphy’s A Poetical Epistle to Mr. Samuel Johnson, A.M. ... 236
Anthony W. Lee
Eight        Johnson, Burke, Boswell, and the Slavery Debate ... 258
Elizabeth Lambert
Nine         Samuel Johnson and Anna Seward: Solitude and Sensibility ... 295
Claudia Thomas Kairoff
Ten            Johnson, Warton, and the Popular Reader ... 331
Christopher Catanese
Acknowledgments... 358
Bibliography ... 360
Index ... 389
About the Contributors ... 390

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