Johnson

Chapter 1 examines how Johnson read and accounted for himself. Johnson was a self-reader, whose exploration of identity involved experimenting with a wide range of literary styles and personae. Johnson’s spiritual self-examination in his diaries owed something to the Puritan life-writing tradition. The Rambler essays, by contrast, were cast in Johnson’s mature, baroque style. In the diaries, Johnson calculated the day’s profit and loss using numbers, payments and lists to impose order on a troubled life and make time count. The Rambler translates the diaries’ concerns into a different rhetorical register, re-framing the notion of self-accounting in the discourse of commerce. The mercantile world of floating debt and paper credit provides a tangible parallel to the amorphous fears besetting the diaries. Accounting for oneself, by contrast, involved establishing a ledger of recorded moments, but Johnson implies that the search for a coherent self may be an elusive exercise.