The Life of Samuel Johnson

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James Boswell

Biography & Memoir

Sep 4, 2018

Samuel Johnson’s celebrated Lives of the Poets led James Boswell to acknowledge at the outset that “To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others [. . .] may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.” A hard-drinking ne’er-do-well, Boswell ended up taking seven years to accomplish it. Having met Johnson in 1763, he focused his biography on his subject’s life from that point on. Thus Johnson’s first fifty-three years take up less than one-fifth of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), whereas the rest is animated with Boswell’s day-to-day proximity to the esteemed man, producing a sociability rare in lives of the great. The narrative is further enlivened by the contrast between the two men: Their differences in age, temperament, politics, and religion might have ended their relationship if they hadn’t been so congenial in other respects—especially in their mutual appetite for conversation. Thanks to Boswell’s service as an early oral historian, Johnson’s incomparable talk fills the Life’s thousand-plus pages; just as he commanded the attention of his contemporaries, so Johnson still commands ours, speaking to us “in a clear and forcible manner,” as Boswell writes, “so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom.”

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roppenhe

Feb 18, 2019

A massive investment of time, but how well-spent that time will be, and in what good company!

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