London (Samuel Johnson Poem) - Critical Response

Critical Response

Johnson judged his own poem harshly; he revised it in 1748 and came to depreciate the genre of poetic imitations of which London was an example. Another aspect of the poem that Johnson disliked in his later years was the pastoral bias of the poem, to prefer the countryside to the city. However, his contemporaries did not agree with his later assessment, and Alexander Pope from the first claimed that the author "will soon be déterré", although it did not immediately happen. This would be the second time that Pope directly praised a work of Johnson. Not everyone praised the work, as its political themes did cause controversy within the Hanoverian government and with the supporters of Walpole's administration. Johnson was not to receive recognition as a major literary figure until a few years later when he began to work on his A Dictionary of the English Language.

The printer and bookseller Robert Dodsley bought the copyright from Johnson for £10. Later, London would be rated as his second greatest poem, as The Vanity of Human Wishes would replace it in the eyes of Walter Scott and T. S. Eliot. The later critic, Howard Weinbrot, agreed with Scott's and Eliot's assessment and says "London is well worth reading, but The Vanity of Human Wishes is one of the great poems in the English language." Likewise, Robert Folkenflik says, "It is not Johnson's greatest poem, only because The Vanity of Human Wishes is better". Some critics, like Brean Hammond, only see the poem as "no better than a somewhat mechanical updating of Juvenal's third Satire." Others, like Walter Jackson Bate consider the poem as "masterly in its versification".