Paper-105 : History of English Literature – From 1350 to 1900
“Samuel Johnson and the Rise of Literary Criticism in the Neo-Classical Age”
Academic Details :
● Name : Mital R. Helaiya
● Roll Number : 17
● Enrollment Number : 5108250018
● Semester : 1
● Batch : 2025-26
● E-mail : mitalhelaiya@gmail.com
Assignment Details :
● Paper Name : History of English Literature – From 1350 to 1900
● Paper No : 105
● Paper code : 22396
● Topic :Samuel Johnson and the Rise of Literary Criticism in the Neo-Classical Age”
● Submitted To : Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
● Submitted Date : November 10, 2025
Table of Contents
Abstract
Keywords
Research Question
Hypothesis
Introduction
Johnson and the Classical Inheritance
The Association of Ideas: Psychology as Criticism
Genre, Fiction, and the Re-Definition of “Kind”
The Shakespearean Example: Criticism as Mediation
Crosscurrents of the Age: Johnson’s Critical Position
Theorizing Johnson’s Method: A Modern Retrospect
The Epistemology of Experience
Moral Cognition and the Reader
Criticism as a Public Virtue
Conclusion
References
Abstract
The Neo-Classical Age, often characterized by its reverence for order, decorum, and imitation of classical models, also witnessed the emergence of a distinctly modern consciousness in literary studies. At the center of this transformation stood Samuel Johnson, whose critical writings both consolidated and transcended the aesthetics of his age. This paper examines Johnson’s role in shaping English literary criticism as a rational, moral, and interpretive discipline. Drawing on R. G. Peterson’s Samuel Johnson at War with the Classics (1975), M. Kallich’s The Association of Ideas in Samuel Johnson’s Criticism (1954), M. Krieger’s Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson’s Criticism (1970), D. H. Curnow’s Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1969), and D. Wheeler’s Crosscurrents in Literary Criticism, 1750–1790 (1987), the discussion situates Johnson within the intellectual tensions of late Enlightenment thought. The study argues that Johnson’s criticism rooted in empiricism, moral philosophy, and psychological realism converted literary commentary into an act of intellectual inquiry. His critical project marks both the culmination of Neo-Classicism and the genesis of modern hermeneutics.
Keywords:
Samuel Johnson, Neo-Classical Criticism, Enlightenment, Moral Philosophy, Literary Theory, Aesthetics, Humanism, Genre, Shakespeare.
Research Question
How did Samuel Johnson transform the prescriptive ideals of Neo-Classical criticism into a morally and psychologically grounded theory of literature that laid the foundation for modern literary criticism?
Hypothesis
It is hypothesized that Samuel Johnson redefined Neo-Classical criticism by integrating Enlightenment rationalism with moral philosophy and psychological empiricism, thereby shifting literary evaluation from rigid adherence to classical rules toward an interpretive practice centered on human nature, ethical judgment, and reader experience. His critical approach thus represents the transitional moment through which modern literary criticism emerged as a discipline of reflective and moral inquiry.
Introduction
The eighteenth century stands as a paradoxical epoch in English letters: a period disciplined by classical decorum yet animated by emerging individualism and introspection. In this climate of intellectual order and moral concern, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) achieved a critical authority that defined not only his own century but the critical tradition that followed. While earlier figures such as Dryden and Pope codified the canons of taste, Johnson sought to understand rather than merely to prescribe. His work constitutes a decisive movement from rule-based evaluation to experiential and philosophical criticism.
As R. G. Peterson (1975) contends. Johnson “stood at war with the classics” not to overthrow them but to re-humanize their principles. He transformed the Neo-Classical reverence for ancient models into a flexible ethic of truth and moral insight. Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare, The Rambler essays, and Lives of the Poets demonstrate a critical sensibility rooted in empirical observation, moral seriousness, and psychological depth qualities that mark his transition from the rational orthodoxy of his predecessors to the interpretive modernity of later critics.
This study explores five interrelated aspects of Johnson’s critical method: his dialogue with classical norms, his engagement with associationist psychology, his re-formulation of genre, his analysis of Shakespeare, and his place within the transitional movement toward modern literary criticism.
1. Johnson and the Classical Inheritance
The intellectual matrix of the Neo-Classical Age was defined by reverence for order and universality, derived from Aristotle and Horace and filtered through French critics like Boileau. Literature, in this scheme, imitated “nature” conceived as rational order by following established rules. Johnson inherited these assumptions yet treated them not as immutable laws but as instruments of reasoned judgment.
R. G. Peterson (1975) insightfully portrays Johnson as a “critic at war with the classics.” The phrase captures Johnson’s paradoxical stance: his deference to ancient models coupled with an insistence on individual moral truth. Peterson argues that Johnson’s realism his demand that art “exhibit life in its true state” subverted classical idealism, grounding criticism in empirical human experience rather than abstract perfection.
Johnson’s Rambler essays frequently oppose mechanical rule to moral reflection. In Rambler No. 4, he writes that the “business of the poet is to examine, not the individual, but the species.” This appeal to general human nature rather than to ideal forms shifts the axis of criticism from aesthetics to anthropology. Peterson’s study thus identifies Johnson as the first English critic to replace mimetic classicism with moral realism, redefining “nature” as the moral and psychological essence of humankind.
In Johnson’s thought, imitation ceases to be servile repetition of the ancients and becomes interpretation a process of discerning moral truth through artistic representation. His nuanced relationship with classicism anticipates the Romantic revaluation of imagination, yet retains the discipline and rational restraint of Enlightenment ethics.
2. The Association of Ideas: Psychology as Criticism
The second defining feature of Johnson’s criticism is his reliance on psychological empiricism. M. Kallich’s classic essay, The Association of Ideas in Samuel Johnson’s Criticism (1954), situates him within the epistemological framework of Lockean associationism. Kallich argues that Johnson’s theory of taste emerges from his understanding of how the human mind connects impressions and emotions into coherent patterns of meaning (p. 52).
Unlike the rigid formalists of his age, Johnson believed that literary judgment arises not from external rules but from the reader’s cultivated associations. Taste, therefore, is an acquired moral faculty, formed through habit, reason, and emotional sensitivity. His comment in Rambler No. 158 “criticism is a study by which men grow wiser, not a rule by which they are made infallible” articulates this anti-dogmatic ethos.
Kallich shows that Johnson’s critical psychology foreshadows modern reader-response theory: the text’s value lies in its capacity to awaken morally ordered emotions. The association of ideas links aesthetic pleasure with ethical truth; literature that distorts this connection by glamorizing vice or dulling virtue fails its critical test.
Through this moral-psychological lens, Johnson transforms criticism into a science of human response. He treats taste as a mode of moral cognition, thereby merging aesthetics with ethics. The Lockean mind becomes, in Johnson’s hands, a moral instrument.
3. Genre, Fiction, and the Re-Definition of “Kind”
If psychology furnished Johnson with a method, genre theory provided him with an arena for reform. M. Krieger’s study Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson’s Criticism (1970) argues that Johnson refused to regard literary kinds as rigid hierarchies. For him, form served moral and experiential ends rather than existing as an autonomous aesthetic order (p. 118).
Krieger notes that in the Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson’s defense of mixed drama constitutes a direct challenge to Aristotelian orthodoxy. By claiming that Shakespeare’s plays reflect the “real state of sublunary nature,” Johnson privileges verisimilitude of passion over unity of structure. The distinction between tragedy and comedy collapses under the weight of life’s moral complexity.
Johnson’s handling of fiction in Rasselas further develops this point. For him, fiction must not deceive but “instruct by pleasing.” Imagination is morally legitimate only when it reflects the ethical conditions of human existence. Krieger interprets this as a form of moral empiricism, where art is valued not for symmetry but for its capacity to articulate moral truth through imaginative realism.
Thus, Johnson’s conception of genre anticipates modern functionalism: literary forms evolve in relation to human needs and moral awareness. By substituting flexibility for rigidity, Johnson liberates genre theory from its prescriptive past and gives it interpretive vitality.
4. The Shakespearean Example: Criticism as Mediation
Nowhere is Johnson’s critical intelligence more apparent than in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765). D. H. Curnow (1969) contends that Johnson’s treatment of Shakespeare represents a “moment of transition” from Neo-Classical to Romantic criticism (p. 87). His reading restores humanity to both author and critic.
Curnow highlights Johnson’s defense of Shakespeare’s violations of the classical unities as a seminal act of critical liberalization. Johnson insists that dramatic truth resides not in temporal or spatial coherence but in the “just representations of general nature.” In doing so, he dethrones the authority of rule and enthrones the authority of experience.
Yet Johnson’s freedom remains moral, not anarchic. He censures Shakespeare for obscenity, profanity, and moral indifference critiques rooted not in formal but in ethical decorum. For Johnson, art’s legitimacy depends on its service to the improvement of the mind. Curnow thus identifies in Johnson a dialectical critic, balancing liberty with law, sympathy with judgment.
His Shakespearean criticism demonstrates that Neo-Classicism need not signify rigidity; under Johnson’s pen, it becomes a humane rationalism capable of embracing the contradictions of life. In mediating between classical order and romantic spontaneity, Johnson embodies the very “crosscurrents” that define late eighteenth-century thought.
5. Crosscurrents of the Age: Johnson’s Critical Position
D. Wheeler’s Crosscurrents in Literary Criticism, 1750–1790 (1987) situates Johnson within the intellectual turbulence of his time. Wheeler observes that Johnson’s career coincides with a cultural transition: the waning of Enlightenment rationalism and the rise of sentimental and historical consciousness. Johnson, he argues, exemplifies “the critic as mediator between two incompatible worlds” (p. 194).
While Johnson preserved the Enlightenment’s moral and rational ideals, he also anticipated Romantic introspection by foregrounding human passion, sympathy, and individual perception. His insistence that literature’s purpose is to “instruct by pleasing” fuses reason with emotion, creating a moral aesthetic that neither classical nor romantic criticism alone could sustain.
Wheeler’s notion of “crosscurrents” is crucial: Johnson does not belong wholly to any single school. His critical method absorbs empirical philosophy, classical decorum, and proto-romantic psychology into a unified discipline of reflection. The result is what later theorists would call criticism as an interpretive act an art that interrogates experience through language rather than applying pre-existing norms.
Through this synthesis, Johnson elevated criticism to an independent intellectual enterprise, comparable to history and philosophy. He made the critic not a legislator of rules but a philosopher of human nature.
6. Theorizing Johnson’s Method: A Modern Retrospect
When read together, the five scholarly perspectives delineate Johnson’s unique contribution to literary modernity. Peterson’s classical realism, Kallich’s psychological associationism, Krieger’s functional genre theory, Curnow’s mediating historicism, and Wheeler’s transitional synthesis converge to reveal a coherent critical philosophy grounded in Enlightenment humanism.
a. The Epistemology of Experience
Johnson’s criticism is founded on an empirical epistemology. Like Locke, he assumes that knowledge originates in sensory experience; unlike Locke, he treats experience as moral and imaginative, not merely perceptual. Hence, literary judgment must proceed inductively from the particulars of human life toward universal truths of conduct.
b. Moral Cognition and the Reader
By linking taste to moral cognition, Johnson positions the reader as a moral agent. His criticism presupposes that art’s influence extends into the ethical life of its audience. This conception anticipates later hermeneutic traditions particularly Coleridge’s moral imagination and Arnold’s “criticism of life.”
c. Criticism as a Public Virtue
For Johnson, criticism was not a private aesthetic indulgence but a public service. In his essays, he admonishes critics to cultivate clarity, humility, and intellectual honesty virtues consistent with Enlightenment civic humanism. His criticism thus embodies an ethical model of the critic as moral educator, bridging literature and society.
Conclusion
Samuel Johnson’s critical achievement cannot be confined within the boundaries of Neo-Classical orthodoxy. He inherited the classical reverence for order yet infused it with psychological and moral realism. Through the intellectual battles charted by Peterson (1975), the associative psychology analyzed by Kallich (1954), the genre theory expanded by Krieger (1970), the Shakespearean mediation examined by Curnow (1969), and the historical synthesis articulated by Wheeler (1987), Johnson emerges as the pivotal figure in the rise of modern literary criticism.
His method transformed the critic from a lawgiver into a philosopher of experience. By grounding aesthetics in human nature, Johnson created a critical discourse that could survive the collapse of classical authority and anticipate the freedom of Romantic expression. He stands, therefore, as the moral center of eighteenth-century thought and the intellectual ancestor of modern literary theory.
In Johnson’s hands, criticism became an act of moral reasoning, a dialogue between reason and passion, rule and freedom, tradition and innovation. His enduring relevance lies in his insistence that literature is a reflection of the human condition and that the critic’s duty is to illuminate that condition with clarity, justice, and compassion.
References
Peterson, R. G. “Samuel Johnson at War with the Classics.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 1975, pp. 209-225. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2737660. JSTOR
Kallich, Martin. “The Association of Ideas in Samuel Johnson’s Criticism.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 69, no. 1, 1954, pp. 49-57. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3039483. JSTOR
Krieger, Murray. “Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson’s Criticism.” ELH, vol. 37, no. 1, 1970, pp. 111-128. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2737675. JSTOR
Curnow, D. H. “Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2, 1969, pp. 86-99. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24776308. JSTOR
Wheeler, David. “Crosscurrents in Literary Criticism, 1750-1790.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 27, no. 3, 1987, pp. 191-205. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3189600.
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