Samuel Johnson: The Last Choices, 1775–1784

‘Context is king’, announced J. G. A. Pocock in surveying the development of what is generally known as the ‘Cambridge school’ of the history of political thought.1 The contexts for study initially proved to be chiefly early modern ones, and as often contexts set by the recovery of ‘discourses’ or ‘languages’ of politics as by ‘historical and political circumstances’.2 Indeed the reinterpretation of ‘political’ texts by replacing them in contexts which had been later obscured or forgotten was the programmatic insight and lasting achievement of a clearly defined group of scholars, beginning with Peter Laslett in his edition of Filmer in 1949, paradigmatically successful in Laslett’s edition of Locke in 1960,3 extending through John Dunn,4 Pocock5 and Quentin Skinner6 to a cohort of historians in a third generation including Justin Champion, Mark Goldie, John Marshall, Richard Tuck and many others. This work is widely known and acknowledged among academic historians; as appreciations of its contribution are written, it is beginning to be understood by scholars of literature, if a little belatedly, that these insights apply to all texts, not just ‘political’ ones.7 In this essay the same methods are applied to invoke a forgotten context for two neglected texts bearing on the same episode, one text written by Samuel Johnson, the other by Mrs Thrale, in order to illuminate their meanings. Such an exercise entails a substantial reinterpretation of Johnson’s religion and politics in the last decade of his life, with wider implications explored here.