The Salon and English Letters Chapters on the Interrelations of Literature and Society, in the Age of Johnson Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Salon and English Letters: Chapters on the Interrelations of Literature and Society, in the Age of Johnson

So long as letters and society retained this intimate relation and men and manners were deemed the all sufficient study of poets, it was natural that authors should gather in the metropolis. The city was to them 'the true scene for a man of letters'; 'the fountain of intelligence and pleasure,' the place for 'splendid society,' and the place where 'a man stored his mind better than anywhere else.' 1 When the old ideal of letters was displaced by a wider and per haps nobler, the supremacy of the metropolis as a literary centre fell with it; but in the Age of Johnson London was still the land of promise, at once a work shop and a club, a discipline and an opportunity. 'a great city is, to be sure,' said Johnson, 'the school for studying life.' Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Sheridan, Beattie, Chat terton, Crabbe, Boswell, and many another went up thither, as their predecessors for generations had done, to seek their literary fortune or to enjoy their new established fame.

The authors' clubs, hardly less popular than in the days of Anne, indicate an even closer centralization.

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