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COPYRIGHT 2004 Rice University
Browsing through the range of critical works available on Samuel Johnson's Rambler periodical, one gets the impression that the Rambler has been to modern readers a sort of ugly baby whom critics feel they really ought to love, but, although they try nobly, cannot quite manage to do so. One such critic, for example, intends to praise the Rambler by asserting, "What Johnson lacks in the qualities of other essayists--autobiographical originality, aphoristic concision, imaginative inventiveness, ease of expression, that philosophical sense of the comic which distinguishes the popular from the Johnsonian essay--he more than makes up for by effective and compelling seriousness and sheer power of perception." (1) This is, obviously, a lukewarm endorsement at best; readers cannot seriously be expected to feel convinced that Johnson's passionate solemnity could actually balance such a list of faults. Paul Fussell, who also claims to appreciate the Ramblers, excuses their supposed defects in part by asserting that Johnson probably did not enjoy composing them, that "writing the Rambler was ... like presiding over [a school], and a depressing one at that"--an attempt that comes nearer to dismissal than justification. (2) The Rambler is quite often utilized today by critics exploring other aspects of Johnson's work, but, a handful of notable individual admirers aside, it has few enough aficionados outside such context. When Leopold Damrosch suggests "that the Rambler, taken as a whole, is a remarkable achievement, but that we should not always take it as a whole," one feels with guilty relief that in addition to advocating a perfectly reasonable way of examining the essays, he also spares Johnson students the grim task of plodding through the entire series. (3) By focusing on neither the entire body nor an isolated piece, but on a certain category of the Rambler essays--the large body of epistolary essays--I hope to make a compromise between a daunting inclusiveness and a limiting specificity, and to suggest a "compellingly serious" way of reading Johnson while he is being "compellingly serious" without accidentally adopting the same rigidity this seriousness might seem to advocate. In doing so, I will argue that in the Rambler Johnson works through a number of contradictory impulses by tinkering with his own voice, seeking to sympathize with and simultaneously to distance himself from his live readership, and operating against his own very ambivalent feelings toward the creation of fiction.
In the epistolary Ramblers, Johnson both is and is not Mr. Rambler, both is and is not (or perhaps both creates and unmakes) a variety of strange "readers," both does and does not invent "fictions," and both embraces and repulses the readership that is his livelihood. In many of the letters to Mr. Rambler, most of which he wrote himself, he juggles all of these conflicts at once. "I shall venture to lay my case before you," writes one imaginary correspondent, Parthenia, to the recalcitrant Mr. Rambler. "I expect ... that whatever your age or solemnity may be, you will not, with the dotard's insolence, pronounce me ignorant and foolish, perverse and refractory, only because you perceive that I am young." (4) Using the voice of a young woman, Johnson imagines his readers appealing to him through Mr. Rambler for sympathy and help, and yet threatening him even as they look for approbation: if she finds him unjust, his correspondent will denounce him as an "insolent dotard" (somewhat unfairly; Johnson was only in his early forties). Toward the end of this letter, Johnson melts away from Parthenia and into his own familiar didactic voice, making "her" invoke a death's head morality: she remarks that vain young mothers should know that "those who are so unwilling to quit the world will soon be driven from it; and that it is therefore their interest to retire while there yet remain a few hours for nobler employments" (3:299). By concluding this way, Johnson quietly bleeds through his shields, Mr. Rambler and Parthenia, although he will duck behind similar devices again as soon as Rambler 57. This vacillation, between embodying and denying his eidolon and readership, runs through the entire body of Rambler epistles. Foregrounding, rather than attempting to overlook or explain away these contradictions, suggests a way for the reader to come to a kind of peace with some of Johnson's most perplexing aspects.
Sixty-five of the two hundred and eight Ramblers are centered on fictitious epistles in which Johnson plays with his relation to and control over his readership. (5) Readers and critics of the Rambler regularly find themselves, even when attempting to survey the Rambler as a whole, focusing doggedly on the "essays professedly serious" (as named in Rambler 208; 5:320). (We also tend to disregard Johnson's caveat, that they are "professedly" serious; even well-intentioned readers are often complicit in perpetuating the Rambler's dreary reputation and ignore any hints of "smiles upon the face of seriousness.") (6) The epistolary essays are profuse enough to merit a category of their own, although their tones and subject matter are appealingly diverse. These letters, because they are (almost) all written by Johnson and generally bear his stylistic stamp, are sometimes dismissed as differing from the other essays only on the surface. As his editors comment, "Naturally, since Johnson is writing periodical essays, at least some of ... the 'exterior' characteristics of the form are present. One is the frequent, and not always felicitous, use of the 'letter to the editor.'" (7) Alternatively, gems from some of the best-known epistolary Ramblers, such as those dealing with the idealized marriage of Hymenaeus and Tranquilla (113, 115, 119, 167), the prostitute Misella (170, 171), or Asper's character sketch of Prospero (200; interesting to biographers because of the alleged blow struck against David Garrick therein), are excerpted, to the neglect of the epistles as a group. It is worthwhile to consider the epistles more closely and as a group, though not in search of a unifying theme or series of strong trends in subject matter, which might, indeed, prove elusive. Rather, it is more useful to look at Johnson's use of his own voice as an author in this unusually mutable format, and to investigate the ways in which Johnson modifies this periodical convention to suit his own purposes and to create, control, and converse with a fantasy readership representing at once both the public and Johnson's own self. The theoretically inflexible Johnson actually adopts and balances a mass of contradictions in these essays regarding his feelings about fictional genres, maintaining a public readership, and the presence of women in his public within an outwardly consistent whole.
Johnson creates a large body of letters written apparently from various persons to Mr. Rambler, but in fact to himself from himself for the benefit of strangers. Many other periodicals make use of fictional letters, ranging from the plausible to the fantastic, but the important, and, I believe, revealing thing about Johnson is that he limits himself almost exclusively to this fictional mode in his epistolary essays. Johnson's imaginary letter writers often share characteristics with him, as in their socioeconomic backgrounds or choices of vocation, but are also often widely distanced from him, as in their frivolous interests, or, more drastically, for example, their being young girls. Actually, a consideration of the letters in which Johnson is engaging in "narrative transvestism," to borrow Madeleine Kahn's term, is particularly helpful in drawing out the tensions within this narrative-costuming format as a whole, and, with other contradictions, will be dealt with later in this essay. (8) Contrary to readings of the epistolary Ramblers in which we are told we see Johnson indulging in moments of levity and holding a private masquerade in a "gallery of masks" all his own (Johnson did not approve of either the fictional or costume-party variety of disguise), we can also read Johnson wavering in the degree to which he subverts his own identity for the benefit of his narrative masking, and the degree to which he will allow his audience to comprehend the tricks he is playing. (9)
A moment should be taken to address the popular conception that the Ramblers were hastily composed and the related implication that Johnson may not have employed serious deliberation in choosing his formats, subjects, and arguments, and thus that any inconsistencies we see therein result from Johnson's carelessness. Probably many of the essays were written directly against a deadline without benefit of forethought or planning, but it seems unlikely that all, or even most, were so written. Johnson himself is in large part responsible for this legend of hasty composition. His stories of such were perpetuated through friends and then reported dutifully by his biographers ("Posterity will be astonished when they are told," coos James Boswell), although Boswell also throws some doubt on the supposed lack of forethought by disclosing that, like Joseph Addison, Johnson kept a notebook on his periodical, "a small duodecimo volume" in which he recorded "a variety of hints for essays on different subjects." (10) Others note that the Rambler's unusual advertisement campaign ran each new essay's motto in a newspaper; the motto at least must have been decided on a few days in advance for this to be possible, and Johnson's essays do pretty closely follow their epigraphs (although occasionally an epigraph differs somewhat from its corresponding ad), belying a habit of generating last-minute, utterly unexamined compositions. (11) Finally, the version of the Rambler favored by scholars today (the Bate and Strauss Yale edition) is based on the 1756 (fourth) edition, the result of two substantial revisions by Johnson (in 1752 and 1756); we know...
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