Book Description

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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.