The Romantic Response

Chapter 4 focuses principally on Hazlitt and Lord Byron’s engagement with Johnson. Many Romantic writers, including William Hazlitt, saw Johnson as epitomising the rules and inflexible certainties of the eighteenth century. Johnson was a writer, however, that Hazlitt could not evade. Hazlitt’s criticisms of Johnson, nonetheless, illuminated his writing by reframing it. Hazlitt believed that Johnson’s style and critical faculties, governed by rule and system, hampered his understanding of writers of genius. Hazlitt misreads Johnson by assimilating him to the philosophers of the industrial age. Byron, by contrast, used Johnson’s authority to challenge Romantic orthodoxy, seeing Romanticism’s focus on ‘sincerity’ and the ‘spontaneous’ as equally constraining as Johnson’s perceived rigidity. Byron’s more rhetorically driven verse and satirical stance were influenced by both Pope and Johnson. Opposing the Romantic emphasis on ‘originality’, Byron shared Johnson’s sense that there was nothing new under the sun, exemplified in ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’(1749). Johnson’s poem particularly influenced Byron’s poem‘Mazeppo’(1819).