The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell is a 1791 biography of English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson. The work was from the beginning a universal critical and popular success, and represents a landmark in the development of the modern genre of biography. Many have called it the greatest biography written in English, one of the greatest biographies ever written, and among the greatest nonfiction books of all time. The book is valued as both an important source of information on Johnson and his times, as well as an important and enduring work of literature.

Background

thumb|right|[[James Boswell at 25, by George Willison]]

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.

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 (1785), 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". 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

thumb|right|[[Samuel Johnson in his later years]]

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". 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":

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.

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. <blockquote>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. In making you intimately acquainted with his hero, Boswell is not satisfied with telling you, when Samuel Johnson is not like other men upon any occasion; but he overwhelms you with his proofs, that he is like other men, on occasions when every man, hero or not hero, must act like his neighbour. Boswell is not only the Biographer of Johnson in his closet; but he is the biographer of the human species in their most secret retirement.</blockquote>

19th-century criticism

Macaulay's critique in the Edinburgh Review was highly influential and established a way of thinking of Boswell and his Life of Johnson which was to prevail for many years. Macaulay was damning of Croker's editing: "This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed". with the second, 'Boswell's Life of Johnson', in issue 28. Carlyle wanted more than facts from histories and biographies: "The thing I want to see is not Redbook Lists and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers, but the LIFE OF MAN in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its inward principle; how and what it was; whence it proceeded, whither it was tending." W. K. Wimsatt argues, "the correct response to Boswell is to value the man through the artist, the artist in the man". Leopold Damrosch claims that the work is of those that "do not lend themselves very easily to the usual categories by which the critic explains and justifies his admiration". Walter Jackson Bate emphasised 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." Similarly, although Donald Greene thought that Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides a "splendid performance", he felt that the Life was inadequate and Johnson's later years deserved a more accurate biography. This second edition was augmented by "many valuable additions", which were appended to the 1791 text; according to Boswell's own "Advertisement": "These have I ordered to be printed separately in quarto, for the accommodation of the purchasers of the first edition." The third edition, appearing in 1799 after Boswell's death, was the responsibility of Edmond Malone, who had been instrumental in the preparation of the previous editions. Malone inserted the additions in the text, adding some bracketed and credited notes by himself and other contributors, including Boswell's son James. This third edition has been regarded as definitive by many editors. Malone brought out further editions in 1804, 1807, and 1811.

In 1831, John Wilson Croker produced a new edition which was swiftly condemned in reviews by Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. The weakness of Croker's notes, criticised by both reviewers, is acknowledged by George Birkbeck Hill: "His remarks and criticisms far too often deserve the contempt that Macaulay so liberally poured on them. Without being deeply versed in books, he was shallow in himself." exactly at his own convenience; giving Boswell the credit of the whole! By what art-magic, our readers ask, has he united them? By the simplest of all: by Brackets. Never before was the full virtue of the Bracket made manifest. You begin a sentence under Boswell's guidance, thinking to be carried happily through it by the same: but no; in the middle, perhaps after your semicolon, and some consequent 'for,'—starts up one of these Bracket-ligatures, and stitches you in from half a page to twenty or thirty pages of a Hawkins, Tyers, Murphy, Piozzi; so that often one must make the old sad reflection, Where we are, we know; whither we are going, no man knoweth!</blockquote>A new edition by George Birkbeck Hill was published in 1887 and returned to the standard of the third edition text.

The Everyman's Library was launched on 15 February 1906 with the publication of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.

In 1917, Charles Grosvenor Osgood (1871–1964) published an abridged edition, which is available via Project Gutenberg.

References

General and cited references and further reading

  • Anderson, Robert, ed. Works of the British Poets. Vol. XI. London, 1795.
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  • Brady, Frank. "Boswell's Self-Presentation and His Critics." SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1972), pp. 545–555.
  • Burke, Edmund. Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Vol. VI, Alfred Cobban and R. A. Smith, eds. Chicago, 1958–1968.
  • 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." SEL: 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" SEL: 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.
  • Tankard, Paul, ed. "The Lives of Johnson." Facts and Inventions: Selections from the Journalism of James Boswell. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. .
  • Wimsatt, W. K. "The Fact Imagined: James Boswell, in Hateful Contraries, ed. William K Wimsatt. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1965.
  • Scan of 1791 first edition from Google Books: Volume I and Volume II.
  • (Abridged edition)
  • Librivox (free, public domain) audiobook recordings of The Life of Samuel Johnson