Johnson, Crime and Punishment, in Four Cases

Thursday 26 March

6.30pm-8pm (Doors open 6pm) £20 / 2 for £36

Crime was rife in Georgian London, but so too was punishment. Hear how Samuel Johnson struggled to reconcile his compassion for people in desperate situations with his unwavering sense of Justice.

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Join us for a fascinating exploration of Samuel Johnson's entanglements with ideas of criminality and causality. Four experts offer their insights into ways in which Johnson wrestled with wrongdoing, his own, as well as those of other people, and tried to stake out the terms of a shift in the way society addressed and corrected them.

Crime was rife in Georgian London, but so too was punishment. In the eighteenth century, you could be hanged for more than 350 offences, including wounding a hawk, fraternizing with gypsies, and defacing some, (but not all) of London's bridges. People were sent to prison for being in debt as was the case with the poet Richard Savage; and street walkers were sent to Bridewells for 'correction', while those who paid them for their services went scot free.

Johnson's writing and actions demonstrate his extraordinary empathy for human suffering, and for what poverty could compel people to do, yet his strong sense of moral justness was also an ever-present feature. All his life, he vied with the difficulty of reconciling these two pillars of his character, and of good society itself. How successful he was, and how far he influenced the shape of the century that followed, will comprise some of the questions that these series of short talks will raise.

Ticket includes a welcome drink and a chance to view Dr Johnson's House.

Doors open & welcome drink: 6pm

Talk & Panel Discussion: 6.30pm-8pm

SPEAKERS:

Professor Paul Davis

Dr Lucy Powell

Professor Henry Power

Miriam Al Jamil

Paul Davis, ‘Johnson and the Unpunished Crimes of Shakespeare’

At the time Samuel Johnson was working on his edition of Shakespeare, between the early 1740s and its eventual publication in 1765, the time-honoured associations between crime and the world of the theatre were not altogether a thing of the past. The early-modern idea of the dramatist as a figure on the edge of the law haunts Johnson’s edition. The preface puts Shakespeare on trial for serial ‘violations’ of the Aristotelian ‘rules’ and—most notoriously—for his apparent flouting of poetic justice. The notes urgently review cases of the innocent being punished in the plays (Cordelia in King Lear) and the guilty getting off scot-free (Falstaff in 1 Henry IV, Angelo in Measure for Measure). In the end, though, Johnson exonerated Shakespeare of (almost) all these charges. This talk explains why, situating Johnson’s critical verdicts on Shakespeare in the wider context of his thinking about providence and divine justice, the pretentions of authors (not least critics) to adjudicate ‘faults’, and above all our general human propensity to indulge in fantasies of crime and punishment.

Paul Davis is Professor of English at University College London and a specialist in the literature of the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’. His most recent books are Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford University Press, 2021), and the forthcoming edition of The Non-Periodical Works of Joseph Addison in 3 volumes, again for Oxford University Press, for which Paul served as general editor and volume editor of the ‘Poems and Translations’. Paul has been giving lectures and papers about Johnson for more than twenty-five years, but so far the ‘Great Cham’ has had only walk-on parts in Paul’s published chapters and articles. He has a bigger presence in the book Paul’s writing now, about hinting in the long eighteenth century.

Lucy Powell, ‘Dr Johnson and Dr Dodd: Fraud, Forgery and the Death of a “macaroni parson”’

“Depend upon it, Sir,” Johnson once remarked, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The man in question was the celebrated preacher William Dodd, priest-in-charge of a Magdalen House for “fallen women”.

Sensationally, in 1777, Dodd was arrested for forging a bank draft for £4,200 in the name of his patron, the Earl of Chesterfield, and sentenced to death by hanging. Based on their shared love of Shakespeare, Dodd appealed to Johnson for help from his Newgate cell, and Johnson responded with a stream of writings that were published under the disgraced priest’s name. Some detected Johnson’s hand in this output, since Dodd had never been so polished or persuasive in ink, but Johnson dodged the accusation. So successful was this act of ventriloquism that a petition for his pardon gathered 23,000 signatures and was presented to the king. It was refused; Dodd was hanged for fraud on the 17th of June, before one of the largest crowds ever assembled at a public execution in England. This talk will unpack the frauds and forgeries of Johnson and Dodd, the strange illogic of state punishment in this era, and the ways in which Johnson tried to change it.

Lucy Powell is a lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, where she researches the cultural lives and afterlives of birds and feathered objects in the global eighteenth century. She studied for her PhD at UCL, and her first monograph, Prison and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Form and Reform was published by CUP in 2025. She is currently editing a new edition of Henry Fielding’s most prison-centred novel, Amelia, for OUP. She is also a New Generation Thinker for the BBC and has made programmes across the network on everything from the art and science of silence, to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to a cultural history of travel.

Henry Power, ‘Pope’s Loathsome Dungeon’

In Tom Jones, Henry Fielding recalls the case of a certain Mr Moore, who plagiarised a few lines from Pope—and was duly punished by imprisonment in the “loathsome dungeon of the Dunciad, where his unhappy memory now remains, and eternally will remain”. This is the central tension of the Dunciad, a poem in which (in Johnson’s description) Pope “endeavoured to sink into contempt all the writers by whom he had been attacked.” In doing so he carefully preserves the memory of hundreds of otherwise forgettable writers. In this talk I’ll look at some of the poem’s most notorious inmates, whose inconsequentiality remains on permanent display.

Henry Power is Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter. His main interest is in the reworking of Greek and Roman texts by English-speaking authors. His books include Epic into Novel (OUP, 2015) and an edition of Pope’s Major Works (OUP, 2025). His next book, Homer-Haunted: The Many Afterlives of an Ancient Poet, will be published by Bloomsbury Continuum in July.

Miriam Al Jamil, ‘A Moral Compass: Johnson Navigates the Streets of London’

How dangerous were the streets of London in the eighteenth century? How do Johnson’s writings and Boswell’s biographical presentation of him contribute to our image of life on the streets, the temptations, vice and desperate remedies to which poverty often resorted? Were his charitable approaches to the poor, afflicted and downtrodden typical of his age or exceptions? His famous sympathy with a ‘woman of the town’ who had collapsed on the street is celebrated as an example of his humanity and understanding, an example which Boswell might have found of personal benefit as he navigated his own nocturnal encounters.

This paper draws on Johnson’s Rambler articles and on other contemporary publications and images to examine what dangers life on the streets might have posed, and how vice and crime related to notions of moral failure.

Miriam Al Jamil has studied at the universities of Cambridge, King's College London and Birkbeck and has MA’s in Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has taught in schools, adult education, and at Universities in the UK and for the British Council in the Middle East. She is a member of the Johnson Society of London and has published on images of Johnson in the Society’s Journal The New Rambler, and more widely on Sculpture, Coade Stone, Grand Tour Collections and Women’s Travel Writing.

Limited capacity. Early booking advised. A small number of priority tickets have been set aside for members.

Accessibility

There is regrettably no step-free access to Dr Johnson's House.

There are seven steps to access the entrance (with a handrail).

The building is a four-storey townhouse with a staircase between each floor.

There are handrails on each side of the staircase and visitor seating in every room.

Toilets are located down a steep set of stairs.