Although he never wrote what modern readers would recognize as a novel, Samuel Johnson produced several kinds of fiction and articulated, both in his critical writings and in his conversations, influential views about the nature of fiction as new styles and approaches to narrative began to manifest themselves in the mid-eighteenth century. Examining his criticism of the novel against his own fictional practice lets us see more clearly some of the major developments in the eighteenth-century English novel.

The hazards of realism

Johnson’s most important critical statement on the new realistic novel appears in Rambler 4, for March 31, 1750: “The works of fiction with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted,” he writes, “are such as exhibit life in its true state … influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.”