Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Johnson and Milton
- PART I JOHNSON THE READER/WRITER: APPROPRIATING MILTON'S TEXTS
- 1 Summoning Milton's ghost: Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
- 2 ‘No Miltonian Fire’? Miltonic allusion in Johnson's poetry
- 3 Rasselas: a rewriting of Paradise Lost?
- 4 ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty’: the 1770s tracts
- PART II JOHNSON THE CRITIC: ASSESSING MILTON'S ACHIEVEMENT
- PART III JOHNSON THE BIOGRAPHER: CONSTRUCTING MILTON'S CHARACTER
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
4 - ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty’: the 1770s tracts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Johnson and Milton
- PART I JOHNSON THE READER/WRITER: APPROPRIATING MILTON'S TEXTS
- 1 Summoning Milton's ghost: Miltonic allusion in the periodical essays
- 2 ‘No Miltonian Fire’? Miltonic allusion in Johnson's poetry
- 3 Rasselas: a rewriting of Paradise Lost?
- 4 ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty’: the 1770s tracts
- PART II JOHNSON THE CRITIC: ASSESSING MILTON'S ACHIEVEMENT
- PART III JOHNSON THE BIOGRAPHER: CONSTRUCTING MILTON'S CHARACTER
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Like Milton before him, Johnson voluntarily put his writing talents at the service of contemporary politics. The familiar form of the political pamphlet is virtually a default mode for many early modern writers, but in the case of Milton and Johnson it is a conscious choice that becomes part of their literary – not just their political – identity. Johnson of course starts as a working journalist. In comparison with the body of work produced by Milton in the 1640s and 1650s following the trajectory of the English Revolution, Johnson's political writings are much more miscellaneous, charting the highs and lows of the Hanoverian decades from the 1730s to the 1770s. While Milton, with hindsight, could fashion his prose works into a kind of magnum opus on the subject of liberty – his other epic, as it has been called – Johnson's remain stubbornly occasional, even in one or two cases the product of a one-night stand as it were, unacknowledged by their progenitor. They resist easy classification, even in party-political or ideological terms, and shade off at the edges into his other writing. Milton tends to write from a single viewpoint. Johnson, on the other hand, can inhabit the skin of those whose political ideas clash with his own – a skill honed by his Parliamentary Debates – and, like the barrister manqué he sometimes felt himself to be, he can argue a case from either side.
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- Information
- Johnson's Milton , pp. 82 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010