Annual Dinner

The focal activity for all dues-paying members of The Samuel Johnson Society of the West (SJSW) is the annual dinner held at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. In addition to the Daniel G. Blum Memorial Lecture, delivered by an internationally recognized scholar or collector of Johnsoniana, the event includes an eighteenth-century inspired meal and an exhibition of works from the Huntington Library’s collection related to the topic of the lecture.

Kate Chisholm will deliver the thirty-first Daniel G. Blum Memorial Lecture 11 October 2026. Ms. Chisholm, radio critic for the Spectator for thirteen years, is the author of Wits and Wives: Dr. Johnson in the Company of Women and Fanny Burney: Her Life. Ms. Chisolm has also published biographical essays on the Burney family (in The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney) and Mary Wollstonecraft (in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context). Most recently, she edited Letters to Sophia: The Afterlives of Hester Thrale. She is a former Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Surrey.

Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1775)