Samuel Johnson, Periodical Publication, and the Sentimental Reader: Virtue in Distress in The Rambler and The Idler

Like many of the essay serials and magazines published in mid eighteenth-century England, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler (1750–52) and Idler (1758–60) contain numerous melancholy tales of “virtue in distress.” Young women who have lost health, wealth, or innocence reach out to Johnson’s eidolons for the reader’s benefit or their own relief. Despite being linked to the growing market for sentimental literature, Johnson’s periodical portrayals of victimized women are notable for their lack of pathos. In this paper I will suggest that this lack is deliberate. Though these epistles do bear some resemblance to the popular literature of sensibility, their focusing on generic personae rather than specific individuals, their privileging of bare description over tragic declamation, and their disguising of the heroines’ emotions distance them from such literature. Equally important, Johnson’s tales of virtue in distress tend towards poetic justice and the deflation of strong emotions. Johnson’s rationale for limiting the pathos of these stories is multifaceted, but an overlooked reason has to do with his awareness of the difficulty of raising powerful feelings in short, miscellaneous works. In this, Johnson concurs with contemporary theorists such as Adam Smith, who would go on to state in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762–63) that “smaller compositions … have not time nor connexion Sufficient to awaken great emotions.” Instead of avoiding tragic spectacles altogether, however, Johnson makes virtue of necessity by arguing that the most affecting tales are seldom the most useful. Unlike obviously sentimental works of literature, Johnson’s tales do not agitate the passions, but neither do they inhibit the reader’s reformation because of their improbability. Johnson’s curiously muted tales of virtue in distress thus reflect his desire to turn perceived weaknesses of periodical publication into strengths, and, more generally, to solidify the important place of miscellaneous literature in the eighteenth-century literary field. When not avoided by critics altogether, Samuel Johnson’s female correspondents in TheRambler and TheIdler have frequently been approached from a gender studies perspective. Scholars such as Lorraine Eadie, Sarah Morrison, and James Basker have shown how Johnson’s fictional letters from women in the periodicals shed light on his relatively “progressive” attitude towards real women, thus challenging the longstanding perception of Johnson as a misogynist. While valuable, these studies tend to focus on Johnson the man rather than Johnson the writer, and thus tell only part of the story. Johnson’s female fictions do expose the myth of his misogyny, but, when read with an eye to literary-historical context, they also show him to be a shrewd literary projector. As I will go on to suggest, Johnson’s periodical portrayals of distressed women, in particular, should be read in the context of the eighteenth-century demand for sentimental literature, a demand that miscellaneous writers such as Johnson – perennial underdogs in the early modern literary field – met in innovative ways. The eighteenth-century demand for sentimental literature is obvious enough, though the connection between such literature and the figure of the distressed woman needs some clarification. Admittedly, sentimental literature is a broad and at times amorphous category: for the purposes of this argument, it is enough to say that its defining characteristic was “the arousal of pathos through conventional situations, stock familial characters and rhetorical devices,” and that it was in many ways a response to the emergence of a reading audience eager for “empathetic role playing.” As Trevor Ross states, eighteenth-century authors were increasingly aware of, and responsive to, “readers, their judgment, expectations and requirements.” Because the arousal of pathos was a key goal of sentimental literature, images of suffering or distress were bound up with this tradition, …