Poem: London

Overview
Samuel Johnson’s London (1738) is a vigorously satiric poem, cast in heroic couplets, that adapts Juvenal’s Satire III to eighteenth‑century Britain. Using the Roman model of a disillusioned man fleeing a corrupt metropolis, Johnson turns the classical complaint into a pointed indictment of Walpole‑era London, where political venality, fashionable depravity, and social injustice have made civic life intolerable. The result is both a topographical tour of urban ills and a moral diagnosis of a nation that has traded virtue for luxury, independence for patronage, and public spirit for private gain.

Frame and speakers
The poem adopts a dramatic frame: the narrator accompanies his friend Thales to the city’s edge as Thales departs for Wales. Along the way, Thales explains why he must abandon the capital. Johnson uses this persona to vent a broad catalogue of grievances while allowing the narrator’s sympathy to deepen into agreement. The dialogue with the city’s sights and sounds creates movement, but the true journey is ethical: from reluctant attachment to decisive withdrawal.

Portrait of a corrupt capital
Thales paints London as oppressive by day and perilous by night, a place where crowds and noise conceal predation and fear. The streets teem with gamblers, pickpockets, pimps, and parasites; commerce is shadowed by stock‑jobbing and fraud; the theatres flatter power rather than refine taste; and the presses and pens of writers are bent to party ends rather than truth. Fashionable London apes foreign manners, especially French foppery, mistaking polish for virtue and novelty for wisdom. The state, meanwhile, is guided by bribery and influence rather than law and merit, so that offices are bought, votes are managed, and patriotism is performed instead of practiced.

Power, poverty, and the market of talent
Johnson’s satire is anchored in social observation: the poor are surveilled and punished, the rich insulated and indulged. The city’s ascendancy is measured not by justice but by money, so “Slow rises worth, by poverty depress’d.” Honest tradesmen face ruin from arbitrary exactions and unfair competition; debtors’ prisons await the unfortunate; and the arts are rewarded only when they serve faction or flattery. The result is a moral economy inverted, where prudence is mocked, probity is impractical, and the surest path to success is obsequiousness. Even supposed refuges, coffeehouses, parks, assemblies, are shown to be theatres of vanity and snares for the unwary.

Politics and public spirit
Without naming names, the poem clearly targets the long administration that cultivated stability through patronage. Peace has become pretext for complacency; liberty is a slogan that masks surveillance and constraint. Johnson adapts Juvenal’s Roman complaints to a British key: empire and trade have enriched the few while sapping martial vigor and civic duty; law bends to influence; and the press multiplies noise rather than light. The city’s magnificence, its wealth, its crowds, its splendid avenues, only heightens the irony, for grandeur has come to coexist with moral meanness.

Retreat and a conditional hope
Thales chooses exile within the kingdom, seeking in “Cambria’s” remoter valleys a life of modest independence, where scarcity disciplines desire and neighbors replace clients. Rural retreat is not escapism so much as protest: a refusal to be complicit in a system that corrupts both ruler and subject. Yet Johnson closes on more than flight. He allows a flicker of political hope, the dream of a truly patriotic leader who might reform the state, restore the primacy of merit, and make the city fit for virtue again. Until such renewal, the wise will prefer obscurity to servility, and the free air of the hills to the perfumed, perilous air of London.