The Rambler Author:Samuel Johnson In 1737 Samuel Johnson and David Garrick rode together on horseback to London. 'In his visionary project of an academy', writes Arthur Murray, 'Johnson had probably wasted his wife's substance; and Garrick's father had little more than his half-pay... In three or four years afterwards Garrick came forth with talents tha... more »t astonished the publick ... Johnson was left to toil in the humble walks of literature.' The Rambler is one of the many products of this period of toil. It is true that by 1750 Johnson had established himself as writer of competence and some distinction. In addition to much hack-work for the The Gentleman's magazine (including his experience as a parliamentary reporter) he had published his Life of Savage; he had gained a succes d'estime by his poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes; he had seen his play Irene produced by Garrick; and above all he had been selected by a large group of booksellers as the man to compile a Dictionary of the English Language.
As a periodical essayist Johnson recognized that he was not, in the first instance, a favorite wite the public. Less than five hundred copies of each Rambler were sold as separate essays, but when they were collected in book form they had a much wider sale and reached their twelfth edition in the year of Johnson's death. Like all collections of periodical essays, they are uneven, and Johnson himself would be the last man to expect that anyone, in his own day or in ours, should read the Rambler continously and in its entirety.« less