'Moving at Times Into Purpose or Direction'

When Dr. Johnson agreed to write The Rambler essays, he told friends they would serve as “relief” from the all-consuming work on his great Dictionary. For two years, beginning March 20, 1750, Johnson turned out essays every Tuesday and Saturday – 201 of them -- while continuing his solitary labor on the dictionary, which wouldn’t be published until 1755. Johnson’s wife died in 1752. 

Anyone who has written to a regular deadline – a column, blog post or review – will understand the peculiarly unremitting nature of the task Johnson assumed. The work nags and readily becomes obsessive. It also lends purpose and structure to one's life. If not writing, you think about what you will write. Johnson was famously plagued by a fear of idleness, which he associated with madness and defined as “laziness; sloth; sluggishness; aversion from labour.”

 

The title of the essays may sound unusual, perhaps even un-Johnsonian, suggesting self-indulgent incoherence, though others had produced The Tatler and The Spectator earlier in the century. The name should not suggest that Johnson wished his prose “to ramble” without direction. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate notes that he “never tired” of three books we still read today – Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe. Bate writes:

 

“Between a pilgrim, who travels with ‘settled direction’ or aim, and the ‘straggler’ he at bottom felt himself to be (‘one who rambles without any settled direction’) – the definitions are from the Dictionary – there was a middle position, a ‘rambler,’ which would not be claiming too much but which would also not preclude moving at times into purpose or direction.”

 

The best essays mingle waywardness with a plan. Nearly anything can find a place in a good essay, including Johnson’s, but the choices can’t be too rigid or too arbitrary. Johnson navigates this deftly in his periodical essays, as do such later practitioners as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, Michael Oakeshott and Guy Davenport. Bate characterizes the distinctive tone of The Rambler as one of “psychological shrewdness and somber elevation, of humor and weight of experience, or irony and compassion.” Consider The Rambler #72, published November 24, 1750:

 

“Without good humour, learning and bravery can only confer that superiority which swells the heart of the lion in the desert, where he roars without reply, and ravages without resistance. Without good humour virtue may awe by its dignity and amaze by its brightness, but must always be viewed at a distance, and will scarcely gain a friend or attract an imitator.”