The Age of Johnson2 Marks Questions with Answers · Authors & Works · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

Dr Samuel Johnson dominated literary London from his Dictionary (1755) to his death (1784) — as lexicographer, critic, moralist and conversational lawgiver of The Club. Smollett nicknamed him 'the Great Cham of Literature'. The period is also called the Age of Transition or Age of Sensibility, because beneath its neoclassical surface the Romantic revival was already stirring.

A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) — about 40,000 words illustrated with some 114,000 literary quotations — was compiled by Johnson in nine years, virtually single-handed, and remained the standard until the OED. It earned him the name 'Dictionary Johnson'; its definitions ('lexicographer: a harmless drudge') and its prehistory in the famous rebuke to Lord Chesterfield are both examined.

In 1755, when Chesterfield belatedly praised the nearly finished Dictionary after ignoring Johnson's appeal for patronage seven years earlier, Johnson replied with the most famous letter in English literature, asking 'Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?' It is conventionally called the death-blow of the patronage system.

Founded in 1764 by Johnson and the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Club gathered the greatest minds of the age over weekly suppers: Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, the actor David Garrick, James Boswell, and later Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith and Sheridan. It is the institutional symbol of Johnson's reign over English letters.

James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is universally ranked the greatest biography in the English language. Built from decades of recorded conversation, it created modern biography — intimate, dramatic, unsparing — and preserved Johnson's talk so vividly that the man is now better known than his works.

The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81) are Johnson's critical biographies of fifty-two poets from Cowley to Gray. The Life of Cowley contains his definition of the metaphysical poets, in whose work 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together' — the starting point of every discussion of Donne, and among the most-quoted sentences in criticism.

Samuel Richardson (Pamela, 1740; Clarissa, 1747–48 — epistolary, the longest novel in English), Henry Fielding (Joseph Andrews, 1742; Tom Jones, 1749 — his 'comic epic poem in prose'), Tobias Smollett (Roderick Random, 1748; Humphry Clinker, 1771 — picaresque) and Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy). Together they established the English novel as the dominant modern form.

Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) wilfully breaks every rule the new novel had just made: the hero is not born until volume III, digression replaces plot, and the book plays typographical games — a black page mourning Yorick, a marbled page, blank pages, squiggled plot-lines. It anticipates the experimental and postmodern novel by two centuries.

The Graveyard School wrote night-time meditations on death and immortality: Edward Young (Night Thoughts, 1742–45), Robert Blair (The Grave, 1743) and, supremely, Thomas Gray (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 1751). Their melancholy, darkness and emotional introspection mark them as precursors of Romanticism.

The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), in elegiac quatrains, dignifies the unrecorded village dead — the 'mute inglorious Milton'. It supplied permanent phrases to the language: 'The paths of glory lead but to the grave', 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen', and 'Far from the madding crowd' — which Hardy took for a title. Johnson, rarely generous to Gray, declared it 'abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind'.

The 1760s rediscovered — and partly invented — the literary past: Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) revived the medieval ballads; James Macpherson's 'Ossian' poems (1760–63) were a sensational forgery of a fake Gaelic bard, exposed by Johnson; and Thomas Chatterton forged the medieval 'Rowley' poems before his suicide at seventeen — Wordsworth's 'marvellous Boy'. All three fed Romanticism's medieval imagination.

Goldsmith achieved classics in three forms in under a decade: the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766 — which Johnson sold for him to save him from arrest for rent), the poem The Deserted Village (1770, against rural depopulation: 'Ill fares the land…') and the comedy She Stoops to Conquer (1773), which routed sentimental comedy with laughter.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan revived the comedy of manners a century after Congreve: The Rivals (1775) gave English the word 'malapropism' from Mrs Malaprop ('as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile'), and The School for Scandal (1777) is the most brilliant comedy between the Restoration and Wilde. He later owned Drury Lane and became a famous parliamentary orator.

Poets who kept neoclassical forms while turning to nature, feeling and the common man: William Collins (Odes, 1746), William Cowper (The Task, 1785), George Crabbe (The Village, 1783 — the anti-pastoral answer to Goldsmith) and Robert Burns (Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the Kilmarnock volume, 1786). With Blake's early songs, they are the bridge from Pope to Wordsworth.

The Rambler (1750-52, twice weekly, 208 issues) was Johnson's moral-critical periodical, written almost entirely by himself — grave, Latinate and weighty, in deliberate contrast to Addison's lighter Spectator. The Idler (1758-60) was a shorter, wittier series published in The Universal Chronicle. Both are examined for Johnson's definition of biography as the most truthful kind of writing and for his moral seriousness compared with Addison's urbane wit.

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) is Johnson's philosophical tale in which the prince and his companions escape the Happy Valley to seek the perfect choice of life, finding everywhere that enduring happiness is unattainable. Written in about a week to pay for his mother's funeral expenses, it appeared the same year as Voltaire's Candide — a coincidence examiners love to ask about — and is the age's profoundest statement of pessimistic moral wisdom.

Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-48) is the longest novel in the English language — an epistolary tragedy in which Clarissa Harlowe is trapped between her tyrannical family and the brilliant rake Lovelace, who ultimately destroys her. Its psychological depth, the sustained interplay of two letter-writers with opposing moral visions, and its tragic end established the English novel as capable of the full complexity of inner life.

Tom Jones (1749) is architecturally the most precisely constructed novel of the century: eighteen books divided into equal spans of childhood, journey and London, with an intrusive first-person narrator who addresses the reader directly as companion and judge. The narrator's self-consciousness — discussing his craft as he practises it — made Tom Jones the model for Thackeray and a touchstone for theorists of the novel from Coleridge to Lukacs.

An epistolary novel tells its story entirely through letters, giving the illusion of unmediated truth — writing to the moment, conveying consciousness as it happens rather than memory recollected after the fact. Richardson favoured it because letters allowed him to render the minute-by-minute emotional truth of his heroines' inner lives, and because letters are by nature morally revealing — every sentence in Clarissa exposes a character's soul.

Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) is the first major novel by a woman to depict female experience in polite society from the inside — the embarrassments, the predatory men, the social traps. Published anonymously, it was praised by Johnson, Burke and Reynolds; its success made Burney the first female writer admitted to Johnson's inner circle. It is the immediate ancestor of Jane Austen's comic-social novel.

The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole is the founding text of the Gothic novel: a medieval castle, a tyrannical villain, a persecuted heroine, supernatural portents (a giant helmet, a bleeding portrait) and a dynastic secret. Walpole presented it in a preface as a medieval Italian manuscript. It created the Gothic formula that Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis would amplify into a major genre.

The Man of Feeling (1771) by Henry Mackenzie is the supreme novel of sensibility — a tearful narrative of its hero Harley's tender responses to the suffering of beggars, madwomen and the rural poor. So fashionable was weeping that readers competed to record how many tears the book produced. It represents the age's cult of sensibility at its peak and is the antithesis of Fielding's robust satirical comedy.

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) by Edmund Burke distinguished the Sublime — vastness, darkness, obscurity, terror, productive of astonishment — from the Beautiful — smoothness, smallness, sweetness, productive of pleasure and love. Burke's Sublime became the key aesthetic concept of the Romantic period, redefining landscape and poetry away from classical decorum toward power and awe.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88, six volumes) by Edward Gibbon narrates Roman history from the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, arguing that Christianity and barbarism together destroyed the Empire. Written in polished, ironic Augustan prose, it is both the greatest work of English historical writing and one of the supreme prose styles in the language — its long periodic sentences are a model of construction.

Blake's Poetical Sketches (1783) and Songs of Innocence (1789) fall within this period chronologically. Songs of Innocence introduces Blake's symbolic language — the Lamb, the Chimney Sweeper, the piper — through lyrics of childhood vision set against institutional oppression. Songs of Experience (1794) provides the dark antiphon: the Tyger, London and the Sick Rose. Together they form the age's most radical critique of industrial society and organised religion.

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786) by Robert Burns brought Scottish vernacular poetry to its greatest height: To a Mouse, The Cotter's Saturday Night, Holy Willie's Prayer and Address to the Deil. Burns used the Scots tongue to celebrate common life and attack Calvinist hypocrisy; his democratic sympathy made him a hero to the Romantics and a direct model for Wordsworth's argument for the language of ordinary men.

The Task (1785) by William Cowper is a blank-verse poem in six books — prompted by a friend's playful challenge to write about a sofa — that expands from domestic furniture into landscape, rural retirement, evangelical faith and social criticism. Its plain, conversational register, its love of the English countryside and its moral earnestness made it a direct precursor of Wordsworth, and its argument against the slave trade anticipates the abolitionist movement.

The Village (1783) by George Crabbe is the anti-pastoral answer to Goldsmith's The Deserted Village — instead of nostalgic lament for a lost rural paradise, Crabbe describes the actual misery of the rural poor: disease, poverty, the poorhouse. Johnson helped revise it before publication. It earned Crabbe the name the poet of nature's sternness and established the tradition of truthful rural realism that runs through Hardy.