Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, leaves the easy life of the Happy Valley, accompanied by his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the much-travelled philosopher Imlac. Their journey takes them to Egypt, where they study the various conditions of men's lives, before returning home in a "conclusion in which nothing is concluded." Johnson's tale is not only a satire on optimism, but also an expression of truth about the human mind and its infinite capacity for hope.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world....

Surprising, colorful, and long-forgotten entries from the most famous dictionary in the history of the English language
Samuel Johnson's best-known work, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), is the most influential and idiosyncratic lexicon ever written and was used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, the Brontes and the Brownings, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. This anthology includes 4,000 of the most representative, entertaining, and historically fascinating entries, covering subjects from fashion to food, science to sex, and given in full with original spelling...

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: "I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets." Always recognized as a major biographical and critical achievement, Samuel Johnson's last literary project is also one of his most readable and entertaining, written with characteristic eloquence and conviction, and at times with combative trenchancy.
Johnson's fifty-two biographies constitute a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to his own time, with extended discussions of Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior,...

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: "I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets." Always recognized as a major biographical and critical achievement, Samuel Johnson's last literary project is also one of his most readable and entertaining, written with characteristic eloquence and conviction, and at times with combative trenchancy.
Johnson's fifty-two biographies constitute a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to his own time, with extended discussions of Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior,...

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: "I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets." Always recognized as a major biographical and critical achievement, Samuel Johnson's last literary project is also one of his most readable and entertaining, written with characteristic eloquence and conviction, and at times with combative trenchancy.
Johnson's fifty-two biographies constitute a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to his own time, with extended discussions of Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior,...

This volume is the first scholarly edition of Samuel Johnson's translation of Jean Pierre de Crousaz's Commentaire sur la traduction en vers de M. Abbe Du Resnel, de l'Essai de M. Pope sur l'homme, published in 1739. Included are notes comparing Johnson's translation with the French original to show his method of translation and historical annotations.
Of special interest are several lengthy footnotes that Johnson added to his translation. Among these are thoughts relating to the problem of evil, particularly the ruling passion and the necessity of free will. Many of the ideas first...

This edition makes available for the first time the largest collection of unpublished material by the great eighteenth-century writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson in existence. For the revised fourth edition (1773) of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson and his amanuensis annotated over one hundred and twenty interleaved folio pages of the first edition, but the printer for unknown reasons failed to include the corrections. These pages, including hundreds of authorial additions and changes to the text, are reproduced here in facsimile, along with a transcription, an...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

'This extremely delightful compendium can never cease to please those who desire intellectual stimulus rather than information, and who can endure the dogmatic expression of an opinion with which they disagree.' Sir Edmund Gosse

The late Sir Walter Raleigh said that 'for every fifty readers of Boswell's Life of Johnson there came out in 1670.has perhaps been only one reader of Johnson himself, but (that) the man who professes a liking for Johnson's prose has found it out for himself, and his talk is good to hear.' This volume contains, among others, essays on Congreve, Gay, Swift, Pope, Thomson, Collins and Gray.Keywords: Sir Walter Raleigh Boswell Liking Prose Pope Thomson Swift Gay Life Of Johnson