This continued in the nineteenth century with a growing reading public, enabled by economic growth, periodicals with long and detailed reviews, and the slow rise of democracy. Johnson was a commercial writer who understood that people would often rather do things other than read he could see the way the market was shaped by new tastes. He says in the Life of Milton, for example, that reading did not used to be such a common pastime. As England became a commercial nation, more people started reading. Johnson observed the common reader phenomenon, he did not invent it. Johnson believed, as a good neoclassicist, that this sort of timeless originality was high art. The original passages feel familiar: “I have never seen the notions in any other place yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them.” This is not a defence of lowering standards or of anything that would be patronisingly called middlebrow. Gray’s images “find a mirrour in every mind”. Johnson gives some hint of all this when he praises the Elegy.

The common reader is also, by implication, someone who wants to read criticism, opinion, and argument. Johnson is writing for someone interested and intelligent but not necessarily educated in literary things, someone who is interested in learning about poetry and its machinery and what makes it good. He is careful to help readers to discover the best writing, and to see how it was done.

Criticism disdains to chase a schoolboy to his common-places.Ĭriticism does not disdain to point to Gray’s technical faults, and a good thing too: “Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily compounded.” This criticism reflects Johnson’s concern for the common reader.

The second stanza, exhibiting Mars’s car and Jove’s eagle, is unworthy of further notice.

Even poems that start off being praised get this sort of dismissive review: Much of the rest of Gray’s writing disappointed Johnson. Johnson said this about Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard. I rejoice to concur with the common reader for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The starting point is Samuel Johnson, who wrote in the Life of Gray :

The second common reader