8 - Johnson and imperialism

Summary

The most infamous evaluation of Samuel Johnson's literary ceuvre is the broad attack launched by Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his Encyclopedia Britannica article of 1856. Macaulay's assessment stands soundly rejected today. Yet what was really at stake in his attack - the discomfort of a Whig historiographer and colonial administrator with the universalist thought of Johnson - is seldom fully understood. Macaulay's views about Johnson's Rasselas thus bear quoting at some length:

Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinians of the eighteenth century; for the Europe which Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century: and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of gravitation which Newton discovered, and which was not fully received even at Cambridge until the eighteenth century. What a real company of Abyssinians would have been may be learned from Bruce's Travels. But Johnson, not content with turning filthy savages, ignorant of their letters and gorged with raw steaks cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly accomplished as Mrs. Lennox or Mrs. Sheridan, transferred the whole domestic system of England to Egypt.