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This chapter discusses Samuel Johnson and his moral and religious thoughts. It is said that Johnson frequently took for granted that his audience understood the context within which his opinions and observations were meaningful. Johnson also intended much of his best-known wisdom for an audience that was immediate and contemporary.

This chapter explores the unexpected but profoundly important presence of Samuel Johnson in the mind and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. It has two aims: first, to map the intertextual connections between them and thus show the extent to which Johnson informs Wollstonecraft’s mind and work; and, second, to examine three areas in which their affinity seems most remarkable — Wollstonecraft’s deliberate affiliation with Johnson as critical authority; as commentator on the condition of women; and, in her own life, as kindred spirit and consoling presence during moments of personal crisis and depression.

The fullest account of the social and political significance of Samuel Johnson's writings about language – that by John Barrell in his Equal, Wide, Survey – points to an apparent contradiction in Johnson's account of English usage. Barrell argues that Johnson ‘regards the national language as derived from a world apart from and above the languages of those who follow particular callings’, but also refuses to specify any group of language users who might be thought to inhabit such a world. These suggestions are significant, both for the way in which Johnson thought about and used the illustrative quotations which were the decisively new feature of his Dictionary, and for the close relationship in Johnson's philological career between lexicography and textual criticism. A problem of circularity attends any attempt to define a community of authoritative users of a language, and Johnson's is no exception.

This chapter discusses mostly the Christian Epicureanism and how it is different from other doctrines both before and after the eighteenth century. The difference of this doctrine from utilitarianism is of great significance to the study of Samuel Johnson.

By 1742, Robert Walpole had gone, only to be replaced by ‘politics as usual’, a Whig party reshuffle which in time came to include previous Patriot Whigs who abandoned their commitment to broad-bottom principles in pursuit of government places. Some of the most scathing definitions of Patriots, patriotism, and Whigs are supplied by Samuel Johnson. Patriot Whiggery and Jacobitism deployed overlapping sets of images and metaphors, especially those of redemptive kingship. But Patriot Whigs were rarely Jacobites. Patriot Whigs were remarkably consistent with their support for the House of Hanover, even if that support focused on the heir to the throne rather than its present occupant. This is not to deny that a few figures involved in Patriot politics later dabbled with Jacobite intrigue. But the fundamental tenet cherished by most opposition Whigs — defence of the Protestant succession — was ultimately irreconcilable with Jacobitism. Johnson's unusual oscillation between Whig Patriot idealism and stubborn Jacobite resentment was also characteristic of Richard Savage, perhaps the dominant influence on the young Johnson during his first years in London.

This chapter discusses doctrinal controversy, including the 1739 controversy on perfectionism that Samuel Johnson had some incidental connection. This debate involved Law's doctrine, but the Church of England was also forced to give official notice that perfection, understood in a particular way, must be the objective of all good Christians. As such, perfectionism became a major issue with the rise of Methodism in the late 1730s.

Samuel Johnson was born and raised in the established Church of England, in which communion he remained from conviction throughout his life. Nothing in his background of any formal or serious nature could prompt suspicion of political disaffection. Nothing in his early circumstances obliged him to become an opposition writer. Johnson could have written excellent satire dedicated to King George and Walpole. If he sought his readiest way to rise in the world he would have been well advised to do so. Yet Johnson chose the more dangerous course in his first published poem. Different as London is from anything from the pen of Pope, it shares with Pope a recognizable opposition and political standpoint. Johnson springs fully armed upon the stage as warrior of the opposition. London is an eloquent and energetic denunciation of a capital city and land allegedly decadent.

The Vanity of Human Wishes is a highly political poem showing a deep concern with the processes of history. It explores two ways in which a state might suddenly change or be changed: the fall of a Favourite or a revolution brought about by military invasion. Johnson employs the literary mode of oblique allusion, practised by Dryden and Pope, to reflect on the British experience of the 1740s. The Vanity of Human Wishes is not a poem of generality in the sense that it excluded recent historical events, but is comprehensive in assimilating them to famous examples of the past. The long view thus constructed displays not least the vanity of human wishes as the tragedy of political hope. It is a vision of the world from which one may turn either to Stoic or Christian doctrine to find a faith with which to live. Johnson's text turns to the Christian religion, though he has at least in common with Juvenal the rejection of chance and the advocacy of virtue.

The complex character of Samuel Johnson's defence of the value of textual criticism and his conception of the literary labour of the textual critic is reflected in his editorial practice. Johnson's edition is unprecedented in the extent of its desire to serve less as a display of the editor's own gentlemanly ease, painstaking labour, or comprehensive qualifications, than as a collection and summation of all previous editions. As with other eighteenth-century editors of William Shakespeare, Johnson's editing cannot be surveyed as if from the standpoint of a finally scientific understanding of textual criticism and found wanting or merely accidentally inconsistent. At first glance, Johnson's idea of the editor's task has much in common with William Warburton's. His depiction of Lewis Theobald, for example, is cast in terms surprisingly similar to Warburton's.