2 - Johnson: the usurpations of virility

Summary

Tory rather than Whig, Johnson held in common with Thomson and Cowper belief in a society based on the legitimate inheritance of property, on the traditional and established law, and on what he called subordination, like Thomson and Cowper again, he was a self-made writer whose authority derived from his own efforts rather than from inherited wealth or title. As a consequence his writing, like The Seasons and The Task, although in a way more directly assertive than either, forms a drama of different and sometimes conflicting sources of power. Johnson's need to formulate an independent and masterful voice often made him argue with belief in established authorities. He defined himself against them as he did against the powerful aristocrats who would be his patrons, aristocrats whose possession of political power he supported in theory and in a number of combative political essays. Less accommodating than Thomson, Johnson confronted conflicts of loyalty in similar areas without necessarily resolving them. He too supported landowners' power, but often attacked their exercise of it in the landscapes he visited. He wrote in discourses traditionally patronized and read by the nobility (and taken by them to reflect and perpetuate their educated values). And to an unprecedented degree he confronted the difficulty of so doing when his own sense of proper authority arose from his awareness of the independence of his own rhetorical, and other men's actual, deeds.