Standard accounts of the rise of modern authorship love to dwell on Johnson's famous letter to Chesterfield, and have (from Carlyle onward) assumed that this incident in 1755 may stand as a symbol of the proud Johnson's determination to reject the patronage system and make his way by his wit. The traditional view survives in Alvin Kernan's remark that the letter is “the Magna Carta of the modern author.” But the significance of the incident in Johnson's own life is still misunderstood, despite some careful reconstruction and analysis twenty years ago by Jacob Leed and Paul Korshin. They make it clear that Johnson in the famous letter was not so much coldly declining an offer from a would-be patron as complaining that, having agreed to serve – at Johnson's request – as patron, Chesterfield had not lived up to his part of the bargain. This argument seems not to have compelled assent or even much attention, and most observers dismiss the topic of “Johnson on patronage” with a ready allusion to the famous definition of patron in the Dictionary – “Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery,” to the equally famous line in The Vanity of Human Wishes (revised after the 1755 Chesterfield incident) about the miseries of authorship, “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail,” and to Johnson's apparently dismissive remark to Boswell: “We have done with patronage” (Life of Johnson, vol. v, p. 59).