Question

Analyze Samuel Johnson’s London, as an invigorating reworking of Juvenal’s
third satire as a criticism of the decadence of contemporary Britain

Answer 1

Answer:

London, published in 1738, represents Johnson’s attempt to satirize the grubby world of London and also to rise above it. The poem is an “imitation” of the third Satire of the Roman poet Juvenal, which probably dates to the first century. In this poem, Juvenal imagines a friend of the poet, named Umbricius, who is sick and tired of the city of Rome and is leaving for the countryside for good. In doing what was called an “imitation” of his classical source, Johnson is not simply translating Juvenal’s poem, but updating it, finding modern correlations to the Latin original. Here, London stands in for Rome, “Thales” stands in for Juvenal’s friend Umbricius, and the Tuscan countryside to which Umbricius was headed becomes Wales. Exhausted by the filth, crowds, noise of London, and the difficulty of making a living as a writer, Thales (believed by some scholars to refer to Richard Savage, another hack writer who had become a friend of Johnson’s) in some ways expresses Johnson’s own frustrations. But London itself, published in a handsome folio edition, written in the heroic couplet form that to readers of the 1730s identified the high style of serious poetry, using the form of the imitation to signify its neoclassical aspirations, and hyped in the pages of the Gentleman’s