It is seldom recalled that Johnson pursued his vocation as a writer against the background of repeated attempts to become a teacher. Before arriving in London in 1737 he worked as an usher or assistant schoolmaster in Market Bosworth Grammar School, acted briefly as private tutor in the family of Thomas Whitby, opened a boarding school at Edial near Lichfield, and applied unsuccessfully for at least four teaching posts. From his work as a classroom educator, Johnson brought to his writing career an engagement with the debates of the period regarding pedagogical methods, curricula, and the process of learning generally. His periodical essays often address the moral and social instruction of youth, and Catherine Neal Parke has examined “Rasselas as a parable about how teaching and learning are central to human relationships.” A tour of Scotland enabled him to compare the provision of schooling in two countries, while the theme of education serves as one of the unifying motifs of his biographical writings.

Philosophical fascination

Conceptions of childhood were evolving in the eighteenth century in response to changing social conditions and new ideas of how knowledge was acquired. The belief that the infant was inherently sinful, expressed forcefully by St. Augustine, was increasingly giving way to a developmental model of childhood, founded on John Locke’s theory that children were potentially rational beings as yet uninformed by experience. This view gained ascendancy in the first decades of the century, and proved especially influential with middle-class parents increasingly involved in their children’s education. In the latter half of the century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his widely read Emile (1762), proposed that the naturally moral child should be liberated from the routines of traditional learning and educated in the natural world – a philosophy that had minimal impact on mainstream English education in the period, owing to its focus on private education and later association with French radicalism.