Kernan places the work and career (especially as presented by Boswell) as central to a profound change from an oral culture to a print culture in the 18th century. One of the consequences, he argues, is that the writer now depends on satisfying a general public rather than relying on aristocratic patronage . A rich picture of the print culture of Johnson's time, the book is marred by a prose style so cluttered that many sentences must be read several times to disentangle them. The book needed a good editor; I have never run into so much repetition of sentences, quotations, and anecdotes in a single book before. In the last chapter Kernan pursues the implications of his thesis into the century focusing on Wordsworth, and somewhat strangely, on Balzac. ( )