Imagining friendship in the eighteenth century

This talk will take as its starting point Johnson's discussions of various early eighteenth-century authors in his Lives of the Poets and discuss how the idea of friendship was shaped in the 1720s and 1730s. Johnson's perception of the ties between friendship and literature will set the stage for a wider discussion of writers of the earlier period: among others, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay (all of them subjected to Johnson's later scrutiny) evidently prided themselves on their sociable as well as literary accomplishments. By examining their careers alongside Johnson's later assessment of them, the talk will give a sense of the enduring importance of friendship for readers and critics of the day, while also exposing some of the faultlines in the way that friendship was imagined.