Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Test of Time

Abstract This chapter explores the contours of Addison’s afterlife in the eighteenth century by looking carefully at Samuel Johnson’s varied criticism of his works over a lifetime of writing about him. In his final statement in his famous Life of Addison, Johnson declares Addison’s reputation secure from the ups and downs it underwent in the eighteenth century by determining that Addison’s works, like those of Shakespeare, had stood the test of time. In Johnson’s long journey to this conclusion, his work on the Dictionary is perhaps the most important landmark. By citing Addison so frequently and in illustration of so many common words, Johnson demonstrated that Addison’s prose had knit itself into the fabric of English and would therefore endure. Although the enthusiastic cult of Addison that saw him as a perfect Christian had faded by mid-century, Johnson saw his works enduring because they had, almost invisibly, become part of British social discourse, both linguistically and ethically, and thereby ‘given Addison a claim to be numbered among the benefactors of mankind’.