expressed aristocratic disdain for the lowborn Johnson, though he never seems to have impinged greatly on Johnson's consciousness. Walpole might be argued to have made a greater impact than Johnson on the following century, in the form of those somewhat dubious legacies the "Gothic" romance and Victorian pseudo-Gothic architecture. But no one has ever suggested calling the later eighteenth century "the Age of Horace Walpole." It is not surprising that the standard bibliographies of studies in eighteenth-century English literature show Johnson to have been their most popular subject, followed at some distance by Swift and Pope, and at a longer one by Fielding, Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, and William Blake, with Walpole an also ran. Johnson's origins were humble, and much of his life was spent in not so genteel poverty. He once boasted, in reply to a complaint that he advocated preserving class distinctions, that he could hardly tell who his grandfather was. That grandfather seems to have been a small tenant farmer or day laborer, one William Johnson. William's son Michael, Samuel's father, was assisted by a charitable society to become apprenticed as a stationer. After serving his time he set up as a bookseller and, in a small way, publisher in the Midlands cathedral city of Lichfield. For a time he prospered, and attained minor civic office. In the poignant small fragment of an autobiography that has survived, Samuel recorded Michael's joy at his birth: "When he [the obstetrician] had me in his arms, he said, 'Here is a brave boy.' ... My father being that year Sheriff of Lichfield, and to ride the ci...
