Samuel Johnson James Boswell Popular Books

Samuel Johnson James Boswell Biography & Facts

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) by James Boswell is a biography of English writer Samuel Johnson. The work was from the beginning a critical and popular success, and represents a landmark in the development of the modern genre of biography. It is notable for its extensive reports of Johnson's conversation. Many have called it the greatest biography written in English, but some modern critics object that the work cannot be considered a proper biography. Boswell's personal acquaintance with his subject began in 1763, when Johnson was 54 years old, and Boswell covered the entirety of Johnson's life by means of additional research. The biography takes many critical liberties with Johnson's life, as Boswell makes various changes to Johnson's quotations and even censors many comments. Nonetheless, the book is valued as both an important source of information on Johnson and his times, as well as an important work of literature. Background On 16 May 1763, as a 22-year-old Scot visiting London, Boswell first met Johnson in the book shop of Johnson's friend Tom Davies. They quickly became friends, although for many years they met only when Boswell visited London in the intervals of his law practice in Scotland. From the age of 20, Boswell kept a series of journals thoroughly detailing his day-to-day experience. This journal, when published in the 20th century, filled eighteen volumes, and it was on this large collection of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on Johnson's life. Johnson, in commenting on Boswell's excessive note-taking, playfully wrote to Hester Thrale, "One would think the man had been hired to spy upon me". On 6 August 1773, eleven years after first meeting Boswell, Johnson set out to visit his friend in Scotland, to begin "a journey to the western islands of Scotland", as Johnson's 1775 account of their travels would put it. Boswell's account, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786), published after Johnson's death, was a trial of Boswell's biographical method before commencing his Life of Johnson. With the success of the Journal, Boswell started working on the "vast treasure of his conversations at different times" that he recorded in his journals. His goal was to recreate Johnson's "life in scenes". Because Johnson was 53 when Boswell first met him, the last 20 years of Johnson's life occupy four fifths of the book. Furthermore, as literary critic Donald Greene has pointed out, Boswell could have spent no more than 250 days with Johnson and, therefore, had to have drawn the rest of the material for the Life either from Johnson himself or from secondary sources recounting various incidents. Before Boswell could publish his Life of Johnson, other friends of Johnson's published or prepared their own biographies or collections of anecdotes on Johnson: John Hawkins, Thrale, Frances Burney, Anna Seward, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, and Horace Walpole among many. The last edition Boswell worked on was the third, published after his death, in 1799. Biography There are many biographies and biographers of Samuel Johnson, but James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is the best known and most widely read today. Since first publication it has passed through hundreds of editions and, on account of its great length, many selections and abridgements. Yet opinion among 20th-century Johnson scholars such as Edmund Wilson and Donald Greene is that Boswell's Life "can hardly be termed a biography at all", being merely "a collection of those entries in Boswell's diaries dealing with the occasions during the last twenty-two years of Johnson's life on which they met ... strung together with only a perfunctory effort to fill the gaps". Furthermore, Greene claims that the work "began with a well-organized press campaign, by Boswell and his friends, of puffing and of denigration of his rivals; and was given a boost by one of Macaulay's most memorable pieces of journalistic claptrap". Instead of being called a "biography", Greene suggests that the work should be called an "Ana", a sort of table talk. Boswell's original Life, moreover, "corrects" many of Johnson's quotations, censors many of the more vulgar comments, and largely ignores Johnson's early years. According to American academician William Dowling, the image of Johnson that Boswell creates features elements of "myth": In a sense, the Life's portrayal of Johnson as a moral hero begins in myth ... As the biographical story unfolds, of course, this image dissolves and there emerges the figure of an infinitely more complex and heroic Johnson whose moral wisdom is won through a constant struggle with despair, whose moral sanity is balanced by personal eccentricities too visible to be ignored, and whose moral penetration derives from his own sense of tragic self-deception. Yet the image never dissolves completely, for in the end we realize there has been an essential truth in the myth all along, that the idealized and disembodied image of Johnson existing in the mind of his public ... In this way the myth serves to expand and authenticate the more complex image of Johnson". Modern biographers have since corrected Boswell's errors. This is not to say that Boswell's work is wrong or of no use: scholars such as Walter Jackson Bate appreciate the "detail" and the "treasury of conversation" that it contains. All of Johnson's biographers, according to Bate, have to go through the same "igloo" of material that Boswell had to deal with: limited information about Johnson's first forty years, and an abundance after. Simply put, "Johnson's life continues to hold attention" and "every scrap of evidence relating to Johnson's life has continued to be examined and many more details have been added" because "it is so close to general human experience in a wide variety of ways". Critical response Edmund Burke told King George III that the work entertained him more than any other. Robert Anderson, in his Works of the British Poets (1795), wrote: "With some venial exceptions on the score of egotism and indiscriminate admiration, his work exhibits the most copious, interesting, and finished picture of the life and opinions of an eminent man, that was ever executed; and is justly esteemed one of the most instructive and entertaining books in the English language." John Neal praised Boswell's style in The Portico in 1818. The essay was republished in Emerson's United States Magazine in 1856. Boswell knew that the charm of Biography is a certain capricious levity that follows all the rambling of conversation; that the Biographer should be utterly forgotten; that the reader should feel acquainted with the man of whom he reads, without remembering a single word that he has read: — but in the execution of these just conceptions, Boswell is continually jogging your elbow, and begging you to forget him; he is incessantly crowding upon your notice. 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