ENL3231 The Age of Johnson
CRADDOCK T5-6, R6
In the history of British literature, the second half of the "long eighteenth century"--roughly 1740-1810--has been called by several titles, such as the Enlightenment, the Pre-Romantic period, the Georgian age, and the Age of Johnson. Others that might be used include the Age of the Literature of Everyday Life, the Age of Classical Prose, the Age of Revolutions, the Age of Expansion--we might go on and on. Why, then, do we settle on "The Age of Johnson"? Samuel Johnson wrote only one novel, only one play, only a small volume of poems--and some of those were in Latin. How can such a man give his name to an Age? It wasn't his good looks--here is his picture:
Rather, it was his intellectual range and influence, especially his extraordinary contributions in a wide variety of nonfictional genres, including the oral genre, conversation, as recorded by his friend and biographer, James Boswell.
Author of the first great English dictionary (and inventor of the idea of a dictionary that traced the usage and change of usage of words by quotations from significant writers), famous throughout the English-speaking world as an essayist, and notable as a great editor and critic, as well as for his original works, he will be represented by several works in this course. But we will also read the works of many of his friends, male and female, and some of his enemies. Whenever Johnson undertook a new form of writing, he tried to think out what that form of writing ought to be--and therefore, he was not only experimental and original in his own works, but encouraged similar responsible innovation in others.
We will see that originality in poems by "canonical" writers such as Goldsmith, Blake, Thomson, Gray, Johnson himself, Cowper and Crabbe, but also in poems by women writers and the Scots "plowboy" Robert Burns. We will also see it in surprising literary forms such as travel books, biographies, letters, diaries and autobiographies, philosophical dialogues, political speeches, and history, considering writers such as Piozzi and d'Arblay, as well as Boswell, Gibbon, Burke, Goldsmith, Johnson, Reynolds, Wollstonecraft, and Hume.
In drama, emerging from the lachrymose period of sentimental "weeping" comedy, we will enjoy two masterpieces that have remained in the standard repertory until this day, Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer and one of Sheridan's "greatest hits," either The Rivals or The School for Scandal. We will also download and read a play by recently-rediscovered Hannah Cowley.
Finally, we will explore at least two short experiments in fiction, probably either Johnson's Rasselas (comparable to Voltaire's Candide) or the ancestral Gothic novel, Walpole's Castle of Otranto, and Edgeworth's influential Castle Rackrent, which introduced both regional fiction and saga novels and a new kind of unreliable narrator.
Obviously the outline above includes more than we can do in one semester, but even so, it does not do justice to the riches available to the student of "The Age of Johnson." Remarkably, it is also the first great period in the history of the English novel, but the major novels are lengthy and the subject of another course. Even without the major works of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, and d'Arblay, however, this relatively unfamiliar period offers many riches to the modern reader.