The Life of Samuel JohnsonPenguin UK, 2008 M10 30 - 1312 pages In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality. While Johnson’s Dictionary remains a monument of scholarship, and his essays and criticism command continuing respect, we owe our knowledge of the man himself to this biography. Through a series of wonderfully detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure with a huge appetite for life, crossing swords with other great eighteenth-century luminaries, from Garrick and Goldsmith to Burney and Burke – even his long-suffering friend and disciple James Boswell. Yet Johnson had a vulnerable, even tragic, side and anxieties and obsessions haunted his private hours. Boswell’s sensitivity and insight into every facet of his subject’s character ultimately make this biography as moving as it is entertaining. |
From inside the book
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... Johnson. At the time, Boswell recorded Johnson's arrival with these words: I drank tea at Davies's in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr. Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr. Davies introduced me to ...
... Johnson and Boswell's friendship. It was also the seed of Boswell's Life of Johnson, and it is therefore appropriate that Boswell should have folded into his account of that primal scene a reference to the book which would result from ...
... Johnson's imagination, to throw a lustre upon his other qualities; and, in a short time, the moral, pious Johnson, and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk, were companions. 'What a coalition! (said Garrick, when he heard of this;) I shall ...
... Johnson's life he became much dejected with gloomy apprehensions respecting his reception in a future world.'30 The object of Johnson's melancholy was futurity, but its cause may have been more earthly. The Revd William Adams ascribed ...
... Johnson's dearest friend.34 There is no mention of Boswell in Johnson's will – an oversight which roused anger and disappointment in friends of Boswell such as William Johnson Temple and Mary Adey.35 To Mrs Piozzi, Johnson asserted that ...