In a depiction of a famous story in Boswell's Life of Johnson, the Victorian artist Eyre Crowe portrays the aging literary hero standing, head bowed, in Uttoxeter market-square, doing penance for a wrong committed many years before against his father. As a young man not long returned from Oxford, Johnson had refused to take his dying father's book-stall to Uttoxeter on the usual day. Significantly, modern scholars have tended to focus entirely on Johnson's act of penance: this is the “Johnson Agonistes” favored in our post-Romantic and Freudian age, a figure tormented by family-induced guilt, religious doubts and congenital melancholia. Curiously detached from his era and place, he stands for mental suffering, human courage and literary greatness at all times. Yet the Victorian artist presented Johnson on a wider canvas and in a specific social context. Around him bustles a rather idealized but recognizably eighteenth-century village market. At the author's right a book-seller points out Johnson as a salutary lesson to his son, reminding us that Johnson's sin was as much against the trading class and his own book-market as against his father on earth or in heaven. To Johnson's left, a merchant gestures with a goose in his direction, market-women and shoppers glance towards him curiously, a deputy prepares the stocks for the day's malefactor, and the vigorous orbit of English life and economy whirls on. To the mental eye of the Victorians, Johnson was at the center of that orbit, inseparable from his time and situation.