I came across this book while writing my thesis on Johnson at university. I felt compelled to give it two stars, because the diametricity of its wrongness was what inspired me to explore the most rewarding academic area I have encountered.

Henson (before she (I assume Eithne is a she) moves on to make the comparisons with Cervantes which form the kernel of the book) finds in Johnson's work, particularly A Journey to the Western Isles, a proto-Romantic streak which simply never existed. I leave it to Ms Henson to decide which of my possible conclusions she finds more charitable:

a) She has taken the most predictable critical route possible. That is, she took a body of work about which there was a good hundred years' worth of consensus and headed straight for the opposing view. Samuel Johnson: Last of the Augustans becomes by this process Samuel Johnson: First of the Romantics. This is sheer nonsense. I am not saying she should automatically defer to consensus - but I do think that her 'insights' would have benefitted from thinking about what she'd read. Which brings me to the other possibility...

b) She has drawn the sincere conclusion from reading Johnson's work that he was a fan of primitivism. Since I assume she must, in her research, have read some of his damning pronouncements on Rousseau's faddish theories (to pick one of many clear-cut examples), I am at a loss to put her views down to anything but stupidity.

I invite Ms Henson to choose whichever explanation suits her best. Although I cannot help but expect that, given her critical approach to Johnson, she will find some way of interpreting this review as an endorsement of her ludicrous book.