WikiPortallus: Life of Johnson.html

The Life of Samuel Johnson or The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D. (1791) is a biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson written by James Boswell. It is regarded as an important stage in the development of the modern genre of biography; many have claimed it as the greatest biography written in English.

While Boswell's personal acquaintance with his subject only began in 1763, when Johnson was 54 years old, Boswell covered the entirety of Johnson's life by means of additional research. The most admired and best remembered portions of the book though are Boswell's first-hand accounts of Johnson from the last twenty-one years of the subject's life.

Background

On 16 May 1763, Johnson met 22-year-old Boswell, the man who would later become Johnson's first major biographer, for the first time in the book shop of Johnson's friend, Tom Davies.¹ They quickly became friends, although Boswell would return to his home in Scotland or travel abroad for months at a time.¹ During his life, Boswell kept a series of journals that detailed the various moments that Boswell felt were important.¹ This journal, when published in the 20th century, filled eighteen volumes, and it was from this large collection of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on Johnson's life.¹ 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".²

On 6 August 1773, eleven years after first meeting Boswell, Johnson set out to visit his friend in Scotland, in order to begin "a journey to the western islands of Scotland", as Johnson's 1775 account of their travels would put it.³ Boswell's account, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786), was a preliminary attempt at a biography before his Life of Johnson.⁴ With the success of that work, Boswell started working on the "vast treasure of his conversations at different times" that he recorded in his journals.⁵ His goal was to recreate Johnson's "life in Scenes".⁵ However, Boswell suffered the problem of having not met Johnson until Johnson was 53, and this created an imbalance on what portions of Johnson's life were actually discussed.⁶ Furthermore, as Donald Greene has pointed out, Boswell's works only describe 250 days that Boswell could actually have been present with Johnson, the rest of the information having to come from either Johnson himself or from secondary sources recounting various incidents.⁷

Before Boswell could publish his biography of Johnson, there were many other friends of Johnson's that published or in the middle of publishing their own biographies or collections or anecdotes on Johnson: Hawkins, Hester Thrale/Piozzi, Fanny Burney, Anna Seward, Mrs Montagu, Hannah More, and Horace Walpole among many.⁸ The last edition Boswell worked on was the third, published in 1799.⁹

Biography

There are many biographies and biographers of Samuel Johnson, but James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is the one best known to the general reader.¹⁰ 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".¹⁰ 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".¹⁰ Instead of being called a "biography", Greene suggests that the work should be called an "Ana", a sort of table talk.¹¹

The cause for concern is that Boswell's original Life "corrects" many of Johnson's quotations, censors many of the more vulgar comments, and largely ignores Johnson's early years.¹² In particular, Boswell creates a somewhat mythic version of Johnson, as William Dowling puts it:

Modern biographers have since corrected Boswell's errors.¹⁴ However, 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.¹⁵ 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 from Johnson's first forty years and an extreme amount for those after.¹⁵ 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".¹⁶

Critical response

After the work was first published, Boswell received criticism from Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay and Lockhart over what they perceived was the harsh way the way the Life reveals Johnson's and others' personal lives.¹⁷ However, not everyone agreed and Edmund Burke told King George III that the work entertained him more than any other.¹⁸ Robert Anderson, in his Works of the British Poets (1795), wrote:

A reviewer claimed of Croker's edition of Boswell: "We know him [Johnson], not as he was known to men of his own generation, but as he was known to men whose father he might have been".²⁰ A century later, Thomas Carylyle described the work as "the best possible resemblance of a Reality; like the very image thereof in a clear mirror".²¹

In the 20th century, critics have been mostly positive; Frederick Pottle suggests that "the crowning achievement of an artist who for more than twenty five years had been deliberately disciplining himself for such a task."²² W. K. Wimsatt argues, "the correct response to Boswell is to value the man through the artist, the artist in the man".²³ Leopold Damrosch claims that the work is of a type that "do not lend themselves very easily to the usual categories by which the critic explains and justifies his admiration".²⁴ Walter Jackson Bate emphasized the uniqueness of the work when he says "nothing comparable to it had existed. Nor has anything comparable been written since, because that special union of talents, opportunities, and subject matter has never been duplicated."⁵

However, many critics disagree with the positive assessment of the work as a biography; Leopold Damrosch explains the potential problems with Boswell's Life:

Brady Frank describes the mixed feelings that critics have in regards to The Life of Samuel Johnson when he says, "Though Boswell is the world’s greatest, critics have consistently patronized Boswell the man."²⁶ Although Donald Greene thought that Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides is a "splendid performance", he felt that the Life was inadequate and Johnson's later years deserved a more accurate biography.¹¹

Notes

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Bate 1977, p. 360
^ Johnson 1952 "Johnson’s letter to Mrs Thrale 11 June 1775" p. 42
^ Bate 1977, p. 463
^ Bate 1977, p. 468
^ ^a ^b ^c Bate 1977, p. 364
^ Damrosch 1973 p. 494
^ Greene 1979 p. 129
^ Brady 1972 p. 548
^ Boswell 1986, p. 17
^ ^a ^b ^c Boswell 1986, p. 7
^ ^a ^b Greene 1979 p. 130
^ Boswell 1986, p. 25
^ Dowling 1980 pp. 478-479
^ Boswell 1986, p. 26
^ ^a ^b Bate 1977, p. xx
^ Bate 1977, p. 3
^ Brady 1972 p. 547
^ Burke "Boswell to Burke 16 July 1791" pp. 297-298
^ Anderson 1795 p. 780
^ Eidenburgh Review September 1831.
^ Carlyle 1869 p. 39
^ Pottle 1929 p. xxi
^ Wimsatt 1965 p. 183
^ Damrosch 1973 p. 486
^ Damrosch 1973 pp. 493–494
^ Brady 1972 p. 545

References

Anderson, Robert ed. Works of the British Poets. Vol XI London, 1795. XI
Bate, Walter Jackson (1977), Samuel Johnson, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN 0151792607 .
Boswell, James (1986), Hibbert, Christopher, ed., The Life of Samuel Johnson, New York: Penguin Classics, ISBN 0140431160 .
Brady, Frank. "Boswell's Self-Presentation and His Critics." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 12, No. 3, (Summer, 1972), pp. 545-555
Burke, Edmund. Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Vol. VI ed. Alfred Cobban and R. A. Smith. Chicago, 1958-1968.
Carlyle, Thomas. "Boswell's Life of Johnson", in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays Vol. IV, ed. Thomas Carlyle. London, 1869.
Damrosch, Leopold. "The Life of Johnson: An Anti-Theory." Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, (Summer, 1973), pp. 486-505
Dowling, William. "Biographer, Hero, and Audience in Boswell’s Life of Johnson." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer, 1980), pp. 475-491
Greene, Donald. "Do We Need a Biography of Johnson’s "Boswell" Years?" Modern Language Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, (Autumn 1979), pp. 128-136
Johnson, Samuel. Letters of Samuel Johnson Vol II, ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.
Lustig, Irma S. "Boswell’s Literary Criticism in the Life of Johnson" Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 Vol 6, No 3 (Summer 1966) pp. 529-541
Pottle, Frederick. The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esquire. Oxford, 1929.
Wimsatt, W. K. "The Fact Imagined: James Boswell, in Hateful Contraries, ed. William K Wimsatt. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1965

Life of Johnson.html

Contents

Background

Biography

Critical response

Notes

References

Further reading

External links