Abstract
It is generally agreed that The Idler is altogether a lighter affair than The Rambler. The essays are shorter. There is a quite new sprinkling of topical material. There is an attempt to lighten the style. There is even, in the portrait of ‘the ponderous dictator of sentences’ (31) or of Sober (36), a parody of Johnson’s Rambler persona. Even where the Rambler tone detectably creeps back, there is a far lower level of moral exhortation than in the earlier periodical.
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Notes
The review is conveniently reprinted in R. B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the Problem of Evil (Wisconsin, 1975). This extract comes from the penultimate paragraph.
Stuart Gerry Brown, ‘Dr Johnson and the Old Order’, Marxist Quarterly, vol. I (1937) pp. 418–30;
reprinted in Samuel Johnson, ed. D.J. Greene (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965) (Twentieth Century Views series).
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1874) vol. I, p. 417.
Quoted in E. C. Mossner, The Forgotten Hume; le bon David (New York, 1943) pp. 206–7.
Kathleen Grange, ‘Samuel Johnson’s Account of Certain Psychoanalytic Concepts’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 135 (August 1962) pp. 93–8; reprinted in Samuel Johnson, ed. D. J. Greene.
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© 1984 T. F. Wharton
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Wharton, T.F. (1984). The Idler: the ‘voluntary dream’. In: Samuel Johnson and the Theme of Hope. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17403-4_7
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