4 - Johnson, the essay, and The Rambler

Summary

Johnson started The Rambler almost at the midpoint of his most productive literary and scholarly decade (1745-55). In 1745, with his Observations on Macbeth, he laid the groundwork for his largest editorial project; in the first months of 1746, as he finished his “Short Scheme of an English Dictionary” (dated 30 April 1746), he set forth on his immense lexicographical labors. He was already well acquainted with large, ambitious undertakings, as we know from his parliamentary reporting. His Debates in Parliament, as the publishers of the first collected edition (1787) called them, form his first major literary project, although Johnson obviously did not undertake that task, which ran from November 1740 to February 1743, with a final collection in mind. The Rambler is different. As the centerpiece of this decade of immense literary activity, Johnson saw it from the beginning as an entrepreneurial undertaking that would rival the other great collections of English essays, Bacon's Essays Civil and Moral and Addison and Steele's The Spectator. Every collection is a miscellany, but Johnson, even before he started The Rambler, understood the opportunity for his new project to rival if not supersede his famous predecessors.