I HAVE been dipping again into odd issues of Dr Johnson’s first magazine, The Rambler, which never fails to offer some worthwhile insight, and is often strikingly relevant to our life in an internet- and media-driven age that Johnson could scarcely have imagined (though you could make the case for The Rambler, with its twice-weekly little essays, reflections, and responses to readers’ queries, as being, in essence, the first blog).
Like most people, I have been harrowed by the nerve-racking roller-coaster of world news, and not least by our obsessive focus on the American President, with “Will he? Won’t he?” speculations on his every move and its possible implications for us, for our economy, and for our alliances.
Seeking some solace and escape from this public psychodrama, I opened The Rambler at random, and dipped into issue number 68 from 10 November 1750, and read these words contrasting public events and private life: “. . . very few are involved in great events, or have their thread of life entwisted with the chain of causes on which armies or nations are suspended; and even those who seem wholly busied in publick affairs, and elevated above low cares, or trivial pleasures, pass the chief part of their time in familiar and domestick scenes; from these they came into publick life, to these they are every hour recalled by passions not to be suppressed; in these they have the reward of their toils, and to these at last they retire.”
“Familiar and domestick scenes”! We could all do with more of those. In fact, in this same piece, Johnson goes on to assert: “The great end of prudence is to give chearfulness to those hours, which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement. . .”
He brings these reflections to a very pithy and quotable conclusion, which is, in fact, common sense, though nowadays nobody ever actually says it: “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.”
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.” If only we could remember that! How many marriages have been ruined, how many families neglected, by men and women in pursuit of wealth, public status, or power, only for them to find that, when they have, in the modern cant, “achieved their goals”, they have no real home to return to, no “familiar and domestick scenes” left for them. They are no longer able, even in retirement, in another of Johnson’s lapidary phrases, to “shrink to their own natural dimensions” and “throw aside all ornaments or disguises”.
“Ornaments and disguises”: that is an acute, if uncomfortable, observation. It perfectly and presciently sums up the endless self-curation, the photo-shopped self- idealisation into which so many are seduced by their lives on social media — young people especially, who cannot “shrink to their natural dimensions”, even at home, but are still constantly on public display through their TikTok accounts.
I think I know which side Dr Johnson would take in the current debate about children’s access to social media.
Join the Revd Dr Malcolm Guite in the ancient splendour of The Temple Church, London, for “Merlin’s Isle: A Journey in Words and Music”, a concert weaving together poetry and song in celebration of his new four-part poetic cycle Merlin’s Isle. Tuesday 17 February 2026 at 7.00 pm. Tickets £15 or £10 for Church Times subscribers, available now at www.canterburypress.co.uk/events