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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In 1734 Edward Cave, founder of the Gentleman's Magazine, received a pseudonymous letter whose writer made a number of suggestions for the improvement of the magazine. The writer, “S. Smith,” was a young man named Samuel Johnson who, four years later, was to take over duties which made him virtually the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine until 1745. During the period from 1738 to 1745, then, Johnson may be assumed to have had full knowledge of all contributions to the magazine as well as no little voice in the selection of those thought worthy of publication. Possibly the implications of this fact have not been fully realized. Johnson probably read most of the contributions with the critical eye of an editor and, I suppose it proper to conjecture, re-read or glanced over the periodical upon its monthly appearances. In short, one can assume Johnson's close familiarity with much of the contents of the Gentleman's Magazine for a number of years, and it is not surprising in view of his remarkable memory that he should sometimes fall back upon this large body of material, consciously or unconsciously, in his own writings. I hope to demonstrate here one such use of the contents of the magazine that led to the writing of Ramblers 186 and 187.
1 See Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill-Powell, i, 532 (all references are to this edition of the Life), and Carlson C. Lennart, The First Magazine (Providence, R. I., 1938), p. 21.
2 Life, iv, 382, and iii, Appendix B.
3 Life, iii, 300; Letters, ed. Hill, i, 166.
4 Life, ii, 377. See also Idler 97.
5 Works (Oxford, 1825), v, 239. Subsequent references are to this edition. Ramblers 186 and 187 are in Volume iii.
6 A prefatory sketch of Egede's life appears in A Description of Greenland, 2nd ed. (London, 1818). Page references are to this edition.
7 See W. P. Courtney and D. Nichol Smith, A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 1915), p. 35.
8 The reader will remember the Greenland Ode from Egede's book (pp. 158-161) that appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine, July 1745.
9 It may be remembered that Johnson objected to the “she sun” and “he moon” in Donne's A Valediction: of Weeping (Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill, i, 26). Had he forgotten Anningait and Ajut, or was that which was permissible in the mythology of Greenland not permissible in the poetry of England?
10 I strongly disagree with the opinion that Ramblers 186 and 187 ridicule the language used by writers of Oriental tales (cf. O. F. Christie, Johnson the Essayist, London, 1924, p. 126).
Since submitting this article for publication I have come upon an earlier discussion of Johnson's use of Egede's book in Curtis B. Bradford's unpublished Yale dissertation (1937), “Samuel Johnson's Rambler.”