I just fixed the link to Johnson's Rambler No. 23 (and embedded it there, just now, before the parenthetical you are now reading).
One reason for including this essay is that it opens up a number of avenues for splicing some mini-lectures on C18 literary culture and audiences into discussion and close-reading of this representative C18 text. The keywords I'll be writing on the board on Monday prior to our discussion are
serial/periodical essay (the Spectator)
the public
public sphere
What information does this essay convey to you about any of those terms? As a sample periodical/serial essay (that takes as its subject the writing of such essays) what information does it give you about what that genre is? How does this essay complicate or affirm the understanding of "the public" that emerged in the course of class discussion on Brooke's Preface? Cite a particular phrase or sentence or theme in this essay that fills in your sense of what one of this terms means and why its significant for understanding later C18 literature.
Deadline: Monday (2/16), 10am.
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It seems like Johnson regards the public with a jaundiced eye, not believing that the average person could comprehend much of the literary process. In discussing the attempt to account for all the varied opinions as the serial progresses, he suggests the author would become frustrated. He sees the public as "those who think themselves qualified to give instructions," characterizing their critiques as banal. This seems to track with the previously discussed proliferation of literature. As more people have access to literature, the comments an author would receive are no long strictly those of the educated. As a result Johnson feels an author must feel confident in the work they produce.
I notice that Johnson highlights the difference between how the public receives publications, as compared to manuscripts. According to him, people will accept a publication as "permanent and unalterable", and will passively accept its argument. If the text is not published, then he says that they will "invoke all the powers of criticism" as they can. I interpret this as one of the first public commentaries on the rising authority of published works in the 18th century. Although Johnson himself likes to pass himself off as harassed by the public, he seems to have pointed out that publication had become the new benchmark of a "good" book. The flipside of this paradigm shift is that every literate individual with money became eligible to join the forum of criticism. Before the printing press, it was a great privilege to be literate, and even more so to actually write something that survived to be archived. To me, Johnson is invoking that privilege to remind people that the rise of literacy in his time was not the same as gradually cultivating one's literary abilities.
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