From the “Age of Johnson,” England was born with features that are still recognizably modern, however the nation may now be maturing gradually into a post-modern, post-colonial, even post-British state. It was a nation with a highly subtle and contentious, yet politically decisive, structure of social class. Its female citizens, at least of the middle and upper classes, were playing a more vigorous and public role in English life, though their sphere of influence generally lay outside the parliament, the courts, and the clergy. It had a political party system divided between Tories and Whigs, later Liberals, along philosophical, social, and economic rather than dynastic lines. It had a vigorously engaged public, and a widening though volatile system of political representation. In contrast with the Swiftian bleakness of the early century, it had a proud sense of itself as a modern, powerful, and progressive nation joined politically and culturally in a common mission with the Celtic peripheries. And overseas it had a self-acknowledged empire that, while it has been relaxed into a “commonwealth” today, has left a global imprint of English-speaking people, English political institutions, English literature – including the international reputation of Samuel Johnson. The point of this book has certainly not been that Johnson made all this possible. Nevertheless, in the dialectic between material and cultural forces, we can hardly do better than Johnson as a personality, as a text, for understanding how modern England came about.