Abstract

Dr. Johnson's Letters

This article presents information on the book "Letters of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.," edited by George Birkbeck Hill. The whole number of all sorts of letters, it may be added, which Hill has collected from various quarters and inserted in these two volumes, or the existence of which he has indicated, amounts to over eleven hundred. The work is further enriched by a wealth of annotation which differs from most annotation in being exceedingly readable--in some instances, it must be said, much more readable than the matter it sets out to explain. The letters themselves, as has been intimated, yield frequently in interest to the annotation. The truth is that in this work there lingers a faint but still perceptible echo of the violent social convulsion which shook the literary circles of London towards the end of the last century.