Dr Samuel Johnson’s literary works are full of variety and interest. They include biographies, essays, political pamphlets, significant poems, a body of literary criticism remarkable for its range and shrewdness, a famous dictionary, and an edition of Shakespeare’s plays.Throughout his life, Johnson suffered from strong feelings of guilt and a very real fear of insanity. These feelings had a strong influence on his writings, forcing him to communicate, to ‘remind’ his readers of th...

First published in 1971, Reinterpretations focusses upon a group of closely related major poems—L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Milton’s companion pieces, and Lycidas, Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, and Johnson’s London. The critical and interpretive light which Professor Hardy brings to bear on these works constitutes a considerable reinterpretation which informs our understanding of seventeenth and eighteent...

Henry Fielding (1933) examines Fielding’s prodigious activity as dramatist, journalist, novelist and magistrate. Though Fielding lived mainly by his pen, the profession he had chosen for himself, and the one in which he ardently desired to succeed, was that of the law, and this book takes the man as a whole in looking at his writings and his success at law.