When David Cameron unveiled his plans for a ‘Big Society’, transferring power from ‘the elite in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street’, Ed Miliband accused him of wanting to drag the welfare state back to Victorian times. Presumably he feared a Tory Britain in which a latter-day David Copperfield was left to be thrashed by Mr Murdstone. Actually, though, the idea of the Big Society has other precedents, many of them literary, with different implications. We find it in Samuel Johnson’s journalism.
‘The Benefits of Human Society’, an article written for The Rambler, balances scepticism with an uplifting idealism. Johnson, ‘by poverty deprest’ during his early years and reliant on the generosity of patrons for most of his life, knew very well that society could be a harsh place. In his poem, ‘London’, ‘malice, rapine, accident conspire’.
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