The Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson contains every word of the twenty-three-volume Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. The Yale Edition begun in 1955 and completed in 2019 is the most comprehensive collection of the works of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Britain’s greatest literary critic, the last great European humanist, and arguably the first modernist, adored by Austen, Woolf, and Beckett, among many others.

The Yale Edition includes virtually everything that Johnson wrote; it is especially complete in presenting his printed works.  His excerpts from other writers in the Dictionary, of other critics in the Plays of Shakespeare, and long excerpts of books he reviewed are almost all that is excluded from his printed works.  Some of the writing Johnson did not intend for publication appears in the Yale Edition, especially in volumes 1 and 6.  Johnson’s letters are readily available in the Hyde Edition, edited by Bruce Redford, 5 volumes (Princeton, 1992-94).  The Second Vinerian Law Lectures, to which he made great but unspecified contributions, are available in two volumes, edited by Thomas Curley (Madison, WI, 1986).

The goal of the Yale Edition was to make Johnson’s invaluable writings available in reliably accurate texts to a wide audience. In general, the texts presented in the Yale Edition represent Johnson’s final revisions of all his writings, while a textual apparatus permits readers to follow his processes of composition from the earliest to the latest authorial versions. The extent of historical and philological commentary provided varies from work to work because the print volumes were prepared by various editors over a long period of time. Although some volumes, notably those containing the Rambler, present texts with sparse commentary, others—Political Writings and Rasselas, for example—provide rich notes on every aspect of the text.