Samuel Johnson: Preface, Lives of the Poets and Exam Traps

Ask a room of English Literature aspirants who wrote the first English dictionary and most hands go up for Samuel Johnson. That answer is wrong. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall came out in 1604, and Nathan Bailey’s dictionary of 1721 was the book Johnson himself worked from. What Johnson produced in 1755 was the first authoritative dictionary of the language, and examiners know the difference. The site’s own question bank words it exactly that way: “credited with the making of the first authoritative Dictionary of the English Language.”

That small word is a good picture of how Johnson is tested. Nobody asks you to admire him. They ask you to separate the Dictionary from the Preface, the Preface from the Lives, Juvenal’s third satire from his tenth, and Samuel Johnson from Ben Jonson. Get those separations clean and Johnson becomes one of the most reliable scoring authors in the criticism section.

Quick answer: Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was the leading English critic, lexicographer and moralist of the mid-eighteenth century. For exams, know the Dictionary (1755), the Preface to Shakespeare (1765) with its defence of mixed drama and attack on the unities of time and place, the Lives of the Poets (1779–81) with the “metaphysical poets” passage in the Life of Cowley, Rasselas (1759) and the two Juvenal imitations.

Samuel Johnson at a glance

Asked in: UGC NET, State SET, GATE, KVS and State PGT/TGT, UP PGT and Assistant Professor exams.

Why examiners keep coming back to him

Johnson sits at a hinge. Behind him is the neoclassical rulebook of Dryden, Pope and Rymer; ahead of him are Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Preface to Shakespeare keeps the neoclassical demand that poetry instruct, yet it throws out the unities of time and place with an argument so simple that later critics treated it as the end of the debate. That is why one site PYQ calls a Johnson passage the “death knell” of neoclassical criticism.

He also hands examiners short, quotable sentences. “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” “Nothing can please many, and please long, but representations of general nature.” “He does not number the streaks of the tulip.” Each of these can be turned into a “who said it” or “which work” question in seconds, and they are.

My advice: give Johnson a full study session, but spend it on three texts, the Preface, the Lives and Rasselas. The periodical essays and the political pamphlets earn you a mark or two at most, mainly as “which of these is not by Johnson” options.

Key works with dates

A dated sequence question from the June 2024 paper asked you to order the Dictionary (1755), The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), the Lives (1779–81), Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) and Southey’s Life of Nelson (1813). If you hold the three Johnson dates in this table, that question answers itself.

The ideas, one at a time

1. General nature over particular manners

Where: Preface to Shakespeare (1765). Meaning: lasting literature shows what is common to all people, not the passing customs of one place. Johnson’s line is “Nothing can please many, and please long, but representations of general nature.” Shakespeare’s characters are “the genuine progeny of common humanity”; in other poets a character is “too often an individual”, in Shakespeare “it is commonly a species.” Example: this is why Johnson brushes aside Rymer’s and Dennis’s complaint that Shakespeare’s Romans are not Roman enough and his kings not royal enough.

2. Mingled drama

Where: Preface. Meaning: Shakespeare’s plays “are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind”, showing “the real state of sublunary nature” where joy and sorrow mix. Johnson defends tragicomedy as truer to life. Example: the June 2026 paper quoted this sentence as one of the true statements about the Preface.

3. The unities of time and place

Where: Preface. Meaning: the unity of action matters and Shakespeare keeps it well; the unities of time and place rest on a false idea of how audiences think. “The spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.” Example: since 1765, place and time have been treated as optional, which is the exact answer to a June 2025 question.

4. Faults stated plainly

Where: Preface. Meaning: the defence is not blind praise. Shakespeare “sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose.” He loves puns: “A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller”, and it was “the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.” Example: any option claiming Johnson “exonerates him of any fault” is false.

5. Instruct by pleasing

Where: Preface. Meaning: “The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.” This is Horace’s old formula, kept by Johnson, and it is why he judges Shakespeare’s moral carelessness a real fault.

6. Metaphysical wit

Where: Life of Cowley, in the Lives. Meaning: “About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets.” Their wit is “discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”, in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Johnson’s use of the term is disapproving. Example: Dryden had earlier said Donne “affects the metaphysics”; Johnson fixed the label.

7. The common reader

Where: Life of Gray. Meaning: “I rejoice to concur with the common reader”, whose sense, “uncorrupted with literary prejudices”, finally decides poetic reputation. Example: Virginia Woolf took the phrase for The Common Reader (1925), and a site PYQ asks which Life she borrowed it from.

8. The species, not the streaks

Where: Rasselas, chapter 10. Meaning: Imlac says the poet must “examine, not the individual, but the species” and “does not number the streaks of the tulip.” This is the fiction version of “general nature” in the Preface.

Who said it: Johnson’s lines and their sources

Famous first lines worth knowing by heart

Opening lines are cheap marks because they are fixed. Three Johnson openings turn up as quotation-identification items or as distractors in other authors’ questions.

• The Vanity of Human Wishes: “Let observation with extensive view, / Survey mankind, from China to Peru”. Heroic couplets, and the poem’s survey of failed ambition (Wolsey, Charles XII of Sweden) follows from this line.
• Rasselas: “Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope…”. The whole tale is a reply to that opening: the “choice of life” never delivers full happiness.
• Rambler No. 4 (1750): “The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted…”. This is Johnson on the new realistic novel, and a useful link if you are asked about early criticism of fiction.

Pair the Rasselas opening with the line quoted in a site PYQ: “while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live.” Both lines belong to the same book.

Pen names and nicknames

The nickname to keep apart is “Rare Ben Jonson”, the epitaph of the seventeenth-century dramatist. If a question spells the name Jonson, or mentions Volpone or The Alchemist (mind map), it is about the other man. Samuel Johnson has no mind maps on the site yet.

Asked in exams: real questions from the site

Every item below is taken from a question page on Limitless Literature. Follow the link to see the full options.

For more practice, work through the Pope, Addison and Dr Johnson MCQs, the full literary criticism previous year questions, the topic-wise PYQ collection and the complete question papers.

Traps that cost marks

1. “First English dictionary.” Wrong. Cawdrey (1604) and Bailey (1721) came first. Johnson’s is the first authoritative one, which is the wording examiners use.
2. Two Juvenal poems, two satires. London (1738) imitates the third satire; The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) imitates the tenth. If the question says “tenth”, the answer is Vanity.
3. Johnson against all three unities. He keeps the unity of action and praises Shakespeare for it. Only time and place are dismissed.
4. Johnson against Dryden on Ben Jonson. “Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil” is Dryden, writing about Ben Jonson, in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy. The June 2025 paper (Q58) set this with Samuel Johnson as a distractor.
5. Who coined “poetic justice”. Thomas Rymer, not Johnson, even though Johnson criticises Shakespeare’s want of it. A site PYQ uses Johnson as the wrong option.
6. Wordsworth in the Lives. He is not there and could not be: the Lives were finished in 1781, when Wordsworth was eleven. Any statement that Johnson left Wordsworth out on purpose is false.

Self-test: five questions

How to study Johnson in one sitting

Read the Preface first, slowly, with a pencil. Mark four things: general nature, mingled drama, the unities, and the list of faults. Then read three Lives in part: Cowley for the metaphysicals, Milton for Lycidas and blank verse, Gray for the common reader. Finish with chapter 10 of Rasselas. That reading covers most of the questions in the table above.

If you are building the whole criticism timeline, read this guide between the Longinus guide and the Matthew Arnold guide, and keep the Aristotle guide open for the unities. For the dramatist Johnson defended, see the Shakespeare guide; for a later essayist in the same periodical tradition, see Charles Lamb. For a reliable biography, the Britannica entry on Samuel Johnson is the place to check dates.

FAQ

Was Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary the first English dictionary?

No. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (1604) and Nathan Bailey’s dictionary (1721) came earlier. Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary is called the first authoritative dictionary of English.

What are the main arguments of the Preface to Shakespeare?

Shakespeare is the poet of general nature; his mixed tragicomedy is true to life; the unities of time and place can be set aside, while the unity of action is kept; and he has real faults, such as moral carelessness and a love of quibbles.

Where did Johnson use the term “metaphysical poets”?

In the Life of Cowley, part of the Lives of the Poets (1779–81). He describes their wit as “discordia concors”, with heterogeneous ideas “yoked by violence together”.

Why is he called Dr Johnson?

He received honorary doctorates from Trinity College Dublin in 1765 and from Oxford in 1775. He had left Oxford in 1729 without taking a degree.