Life of Samuel Johnson

"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 in his 54th year, 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, a man who would later become Johnson's first major biographer, for the first time in the book shop of Johnson's friend, Tom Davies.Harvnb|Bate|1977|p=360] They quickly became friends, although Boswell would return to his home in Scotland or travel abroad for months at a time. During his life, Boswell kept a series of journals that detailed the various moments that Boswell felt were important. 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. 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". [Johnson 1952 "Johnson’s letter to Mrs Thrale 11 June 1775" p. 42]

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. [Harvnb|Bate|1977|p=463] Boswell's account, "The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" (1786), was a preliminary attempt at a biography before his "Life of Johnson".Harvnb|Bate|1977|p=468] 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.Harvnb|Bate|1977|p=364] His goal was to recreate Johnson's "life in Scenes". 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. [Damrosch 1973 p. 494] 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. [Greene 1979 p. 129]

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. [Brady 1972 p. 548] The last edition Boswell worked on was the third, published in 1799.Harvnb|Boswell|1986|p=17]

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.Harvnb|Boswell|1986|p= 7] 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.Greene 1979 p. 130]

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. [Harvnb|Boswell|1986|p= 25] In particular, Boswell creates a somewhat mythic version of Johnson, as William Dowling puts it:

"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". [Dowling 1980 pp. 478-479]

Modern biographers have since corrected Boswell's errors. [Harvnb|Boswell|1986|p= 26] 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.Harvnb|Bate|1977|p=xx] 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. 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". [Harvnb|Bate|1977|p=3]

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. [Brady 1972 p. 547] However, not everyone agreed and Edmund Burke told King George III that the work entertained him more than any other. [Burke "Boswell to Burke 16 July 1791" pp. 297-298] 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." [Anderson 1795 p. 780]

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". ["Eidenburgh Review" September 1831.] 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". [Carlyle 1869 p. 39]

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." [Pottle 1929 p. xxi] W. K. Wimsatt argues, "the correct response to Boswell is to "value" the man through the artist, the artist in the man". [Wimsatt 1965 p. 183] 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". [Damrosch 1973 p. 486] 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."

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

"But the usual claim that it is the world’s greatest "biography" seems to me seriously misleading. In the first place, it has real defects of organization and structure; in the second place (and more importantly) it leaves much to be desired as the comprehensive interpretation of a life." [Damrosch 1973 pp. 493–494]

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." [Brady 1972 p. 545] 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.

Notes

References

* Anderson, Robert ed. "Works of the British Poets". Vol XI London, 1795. XI
*.
*.
* 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

External links

*gutenberg|no=1564|name=Life of Johnson
* [http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%28james%20boswell%29%20AND%20title%3A%28life%20johnson%29%20AND%20-contributor%3Agutenberg%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts "Life of Johnson"] , available at Internet Archive. Scanned books.
* [http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/BLJ/ Edition of Life of Johnson broken down by year]