Even though London, The Vanity of Human Wishes, and Irene had
appeared, The Rambler most definitively established Johnson's
fame. One indication of the series' impact is that during his lifetime
Johnson was more often referred to as "the author of the Rambler,"
"Mr. Rambler," or even "Rambling Sam" than by any other epithet
( Greene, Updated104). Modern readers, who (like their eighteenth-
century counterparts) tend to measure every essay series by the
unparalleled success of The Spectator, may easily underestimate the
significance of The Rambler when they learn that its initial printing
never surpassed five hundred copies for any particular issue, com-
pared to the thousands for The Spectator. ¹ By almost any measure
except that of Addison and Steele, however, The Rambler's initial
circulation was healthy, and its audience steadily expanded. As R.
W. Wiles has shown, the provincial newspapers and urban monthly
magazines often reprinted Ramblers. Since they could print what-
ever they liked, such piracy indicates Johnson's appeal. Indeed, we
know that one essay was even stolen by a French publication and
then noticed by an English editor who, unaware of its origin, trans-
lated it back into English ( Boswell 1:356). The series, in other words,
was no doubt more popular at first than its author realized, and as
its popularity increased it was never out of print during Johnson's
lifetime, enjoying at least ten editions. For a large collection of
didactic essays, even in an age when the publication of sermons
was sometimes profitable, the success of The Rambler is indeed
impressive.

If Johnson, his contemporaries, and even Tetty acknowledged
The Rambler's greatness, and if it is a major work by a major figure
and arguably the masterpiece of one of our greatest writers, at the
center of the eighteenth century chronologically and intellectually,
then we might well expect, especially given the enormous and
expanding interest in Johnson in recent decades, that The Rambler
would be the subject of an outpouring of critical attention in our
day. In fact, we have seen important and innovative studies. But
Donald Greene's observation in 1970, that "analytical study in
depth of [ The Rambler's] contents has not yet been attempted" ( Johnson
139-40), still remains surprisingly accurate today. As Paul Kors-
hin lamented in 1984, The Rambler "has never been the subject of a

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