Samuel Johnson: Selected Works

Samuel Johnson: Selected Works - The Yale Edition
Edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr, Stephen Fix, & Howard D. Weinbrot
Yale University Press, 2021

One hope for any volume like this gorgeous thing from Yale University Press, a Selected Works of Samuel Johnson compiled by three first-rate scholars, is echoed in Yale’s own sales patter for the book: that it will be “accessible to students and general readers alike.” 

It’s unavoidable that such hopes will be dashed. Johnson was an enormously complex intellect and a powerfully compelling writer, true, but he was also white, male, and, much to James Boswell’s chagrin, exuberantly heterosexual - all of which means he’ll be allowed onto fewer and fewer undergraduate curricula in the 21st century, and students will be instructed that he is an evil, unsavory figure, somebody they might, with long tweezers, study as a cautionary tale but not somebody they’ll ever be encouraged - or allowed - to read for pleasure. 

And general readers are excluded to a different but equal extent, in part by the sumptuous physical design of the thing. It’s 800 pages. It’s oversized. It costs $40. There appears to be no e-book. And it’s every bit as awkward to balance on your belly as a full-grown English bulldog, but entirely without the prospect of soaking face-licks as a reward. Oxford University Press brought out a 1000-page Selected Writings volume of Johnson in a $25 paperback in the US in 2020, edited by the great David Womersley, for instance; surely that’s the better bargain? 

There are some obvious responses, of course! The first and strongest is that one can never have enough Samuel Johnson. Whether it’s his essays for the Rambler or the Idler, or his Shakespearean scholarship, or his prefaces to his great Dictionary, or his endlessly entertaining Lives of the Poets, Johnson is unendingly, thrillingly insightful. In life, in conversation, he didn’t so much engage as engulf, and it’s perpetually amazing how easily this very quality transfers to his writing. 

That writing is produced here beautifully, and even in the Internet era, perhaps especially then, it’s no inconsiderable thing; this is a tough, pretty volume, with bright, creamy pages and ample footnotes, a volume to revisit over a lifetime. The twenty-three-volume Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson began in 1955 and ended in 2018, and this Selected Works is the best imaginable one-volume recension of that enormous endeavor. 

So: serious students would greatly benefit from this Selected Works if they can afford both the financial outlay and the social (or social media) risk it entails; general readers would greatly benefit likewise, if they’re prepared to deal with the Johnsonian dimensions of the thing. And the rest of us, recoiling at the thought of finding room for those twenty-three volumes, can rejoice at having a Greatest Hits volume this elegant and inclusive. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.