The Life of Samuel Johnson
Page 6
Wherever narrative is necessary to explain, connect, and supply, I furnish it to the best of my abilities; but in the chronological series of Johnson’s life, which I trace as distinctly as I can, year by year, I produce, wherever it is in my power, his own minutes, letters or conversation, being convinced that this mode is more lively, and will make my readers better acquainted with him, than even most of those were who actually knew him, but could know him only partially…
Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to ‘live o’er each scene’ with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life.161
It is the unmediated (although framed, arranged, and set) incorporation of particularity which is the cornerstone of Boswell’s practice in the Life. ‘Minute particulars are frequently characteristick’: this is Boswell’s creed.162 It is a principle which receives a surprisingly modern echo. Roland Barthes said (with what seriousness, however, it is impossible to judge) that ‘were I a writer, and dead, how I would like my life to be reduced, by the attentions of a friendly, carefree biographer, to a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections; let’s say, “biographemes”.’163 The massive inclus-iveness of the Life is plainly at odds with the feline Barthes’s decadent, astringent preference for ‘a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections’; but otherwise, in its prizing of the grit of a life, Barthes’s playful formulation is not at complete variance with Boswell. There are so many tantalizing, unconstrued details in the Life of Johnson. Which reader would not want to know more about Elizabeth Blaney, who died of unrequited love for Johnson’s father?164 Who is not intrigued to be told of Johnson’s perpetual fondness ‘for chymical experiments’?165 When Johnson refers in passing to ‘all my Lincolnshire friends’, who does not wish to know who they were, and when Johnson met them?166 Who has not wondered to what purpose Johnson put the dried orange peel he sedulously collected at meetings of the Club?167 Would we not wish to know more about the Mr Ballow from whom Johnson learned law?168 Is there not almost endless resonance in the conjunctions of posture and occupation in some of Boswell’s recollections of Johnson? ‘He was for a considerable time occupied in reading Memoires de Fontenelle, leaning and swinging upon the low gate into the court, without his hat.’169 The collocation of that book, that state of undress, that pose and movement: the mind could dwell upon it almost without end. And in which reader does not Boswell’s late revelation of Johnson’s youthful recourse to prostitutes start reflections about the hidden life of Johnson?170 And, finally, there are all those unwritten Johnsonian works which are, as it were, embryonically preserved in the narrative of the Life: the edition of Bacon, the edition of the Biographia Britannica, the ‘Tory History of his country’, the life of Cromwell, the family history of the Boswells, the translation of de Thou and the life of Spenser which Johnson toyed with when virtually on his deathbed, all the projects contained in the catalogue of literary schemes which Johnson gave to Bennet Langton, and most of all perhaps the ‘two quarto volumes, containing a full, fair, and most particular account of his own life’, which Boswell supposes were consumed in the bonfire of Johnson’s personal papers in December 1784.171 These frequent alleyways leading from the written life to the life as lived, the existence of which we can register but which we cannot follow to their end and fully explore, keep the Life of Johnson supple and living, make it the receptacle of our keen, imaginative involvement, and prevent it from ever declining into something as unmoving (in all senses) as an embalming of Johnson.
Boswell places an instance of misplaced literary confidence close to the opening of his narrative, when he records Johnson’s amused recollection of the vanity of the nevertheless human wishes of an early teacher: ‘His next instructor in English was a master, whom, when he spoke of him to me, he familiarly called Tom Brown, who, said he, “published a spelling-book, and dedicated it to the Universe; but, I fear, no copy of it can now be had.”172 By keeping his aspirations closer to the soil, Boswell ensured a very different fate for his own book.
St Catherine’s College, Oxford, 2007
Further Reading
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clifford, J. L., and Greene, D. J., Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970)
Fleeman, J. D., A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
Greene, D. J., and Vance, J. A., A Bibliography of Johnson Studies, 1970– 1985 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, BC, 1987)
BIOGRAPHY
Bate, W. J., Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977)
Clifford, J. L., Young Sam Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1955)
––––– Dictionary Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1979)
De Maria, Robert, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993)
Kaminski, T., The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
Kelly, R. E., and Brack, O. M., Samuel Johnson’s Early Biographers (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1971)
Lipking, L., Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1998)
GENERAL STUDIES
Bate, W. J., The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955)
Boulton, J. T., Johnson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971)
De Maria, Robert, Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
–––––– Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Engell, James, ed., Johnson and his Age (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1984)
Fussell, Paul, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972)
Greene, D. J., ed., Samuel Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965)
Korshin, Paul, ed., The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual (New York: AMS Press, 1987-)
Turberville, A. S., ed., Johnson’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of his Age, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933)
Voitle, R., Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1961)
Wimsatt, W. K., The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1941)
STUDIES OF THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON
Baldwin, Louis, ‘The Conversation in Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 51 (1952), 492-506
Bell, Robert H., ‘Boswell’s Notes toward a Supreme Fiction: From London Journal to Life of Johnson’, Modern Language Quarterly, 38 (1977), 132-48
Berglund, Lisa, ‘ “Look, my Lord, it Comes”: The Approach of Death in the Life of Johnson’, 1650-1850, 7 (2002), 239-55
Bloom, Harold, ed., James Boswell’s ‘Life of Samuel Johnson’ (New York: Chelsea House, 1986)
Bradham, Jo Allen, ‘Boswell’s Narratives of Oliver Edwards’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 8 (1978), 176-84
––––– ‘Comic Fragments in the Life of Johnson’, Biography, 3 (1980), 95-104
Brady, Frank, ‘Boswell’s Self-Presentation and his Critics’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 12, 3 (summer 1972), 545-55
Brown, Terence, ‘America and Americans as Seen in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., and in the Letters of Johnson and Boswell’, New Rambler: Journal of the Johnson Society of London, 6 (1969), 44-51
Browning, John D., ed., Biography in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1980)
Buchanan, David, The Treasure of Auchinleck: The Story of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974)
Burke, John J., Jr, ‘Talk, Dialogu
e, Conversation, and Other Kinds of Speech Acts in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson’, in Kevin L. Cope, ed., Compendious Conversations: The Method of Dialogue in the Early Enlightenment (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992)
Butt, John, Biography in the Hands of Walton, Johnson, and Boswell (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966)
Campbell, Ian, ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, Transactions of the Johnson Society (1996), 1-10
Chapman, R. W., Johnsonian and Other Essays and Reviews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953) Chapman, R. W., Powell, L. F. and Smith, D. Nichol, Johnson and Boswell Revised by Themselves and Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928)
Chesterton, G. K., ‘Boswell’s “Johnson”’, Good Words, 44 (November 1903), 774-7
Clifford, James L., ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Boswell’s Life of Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970)
Clingham, Greg, ed., New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of The Life of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
––––– James Boswell: The Life of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
–––––‘Double Writing: The Erotics of Narrative in Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, in Donald J. Newman, ed., James Boswell: Psychological Interpretations (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995)
Coleman, William H., ‘The Johnsonian Conversational Formula’, Quarterly Review, 282 (1944), 432-45
Damrosch, Leopold, Jr, ‘The Life of Johnson: An Anti-Theory’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 6 (1973), 486-505
Dowling, William C, ‘The Boswellian Hero’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 10 (1972), 79-93
–––––‘Boswell and the Problem of Biography’, in Daniel Aaron, ed., Studies in Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978)
––––– The Boswellian Hero (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1979)
–––––‘Biographer, Hero, and Audience in Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 20, 3 (summer 1980),475-91
––––– Language and Logos in Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
––––– ‘Solipsism and Despair in the Life of Johnson’, Prose Studies, 5 (1982), 294-308
––––– ‘Structure and Absence in Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, in Leopold Damrosch, Jr, ed., Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Epstein, William H., ‘Bios and Logos: Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Recent Literary Theory’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 82 (1983), 246-55
Greene, Donald J., “‘’Tis a Pretty Book, Mr. Boswell, but—”’, Georgia Review, 32 (1978), 17-43
Greene, Donald J., and Waingrow, Marshall, ‘The Making of Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, Studies in Burke and his Time: A Journal Devoted to British, American, and Continental Culture, 1750-1800,12 (1970-71), 1812–20
Hart, Edward, ‘The Contributions of John Nichols to Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 67, 4 (June 1952), 391–410
Hart, Paxton, ‘The Presentation of Oliver Goldsmith in Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, Re: Artes Liberales, 3, 2 (1970), 4-15
Hartley, Lodovic, ‘A Late Augustan Circus: Macaulay on Johnson, Boswell, and Walpole’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 67 (1968), 513–26
Hilles, Frederick W., ed., The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to C. B. Tinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949)
Horne, Colin J., ‘Boswell, Burke, and the “Life of Johnson”’, Notes and Queries, 195 (November 1950), 498-9
Ingram, Allan, Boswell’s Creative Gloom: A Study of Imagery and Melancholy in the Writings of James Boswell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982)
Kinsella, Thomas E., ‘The Conventions of Authenticity: Boswell’s Revision of Dialogue in The Life of Johnson’, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 6 (1994), 237–63
Kirkley, Harriet, ‘Boswell’s Life of the Poet’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 9 (1979), 21–32
Lambert, Elizabeth, ‘Boswell’s Burke; The Literary Consequences of Ambivalence’, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 9 (1998), 201–35
Lonsdale, Roger, ‘Dr Burney and the Integrity of Boswell’s Quotations’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 53 (1959), 327–31
Lustig, Irma S., ‘Boswell on Politics in the Life of Johnson’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 80 (1965), 387–93
––––– ‘Boswell’s Literary Criticism in The Life of Johnson’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 6, 3 (summer 1966), 529–41
––––– ‘Boswell at Work: The “Animadversions” on Mrs Piozzi’, Modern Language Review, 67 (January 1972), 11–30
––––– ‘The Friendship of Johnson and Boswell: Some Biographical Considerations’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 6 (1977), 199–214
––––– ed., Boswell: Citizen of the World, Man of Letters (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995)
McAdam, Edward Lippincott, Johnson and Boswell: A Survey of their Writings (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1969)
Molin, Sven Eric, ‘Boswell’s Account of the Johnson-Wilkes Meeting’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 3, 3 (summer 1963), 307–22
Mudrick, Marvin, ‘The Entertainer’, Hudson Review, 30 (1977), 270–78
Newman, Donald J., ‘Disability, Disease, and the “Philosophical Heroism” of Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, 6, 1 (spring 1991), 8-16
Nicolson, Harold, ‘The Boswell Formula, 1791’, The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1928)
Novak, Maximillian E., ‘James Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, in Jeffrey Meyers, ed., The Biographer’s Art: New Essays (Basingstoke: Mac-millan, 1987)
Nussbaum, Felicity A., ‘Boswell’s Treatment of Johnson’s Temper: “A Warm West-Indian Climate” ‘, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 14, 3 (summer 1974), 421–33
Palmer, Joyce Arline Cornette, Boswell’s Life of Johnson as Literary History (Knoxville, Tenn.: Palmer, 1967)
Parke, Catherine N., “’The Hero Being Dead”: Evasive Explanation in Biography: The Case of Boswell’, Philological Quarterly, 68, 3 (summer 1989), 343–62
Passler, David, Time, Form, and Style in Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)
Pettit, H., ‘Boswell and Young’s Night Thoughts’, Notes and Queries, 210 (January 1965), 21
Pottle, Frederick A., ‘Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” ‘, Notes and Queries, 178 (January 1940), 50–51
––––– Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982)
Radner, John B., ‘ “A Very Exact Picture of his Life”: Johnson’s Role in Writing The Life of Johnson’, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 7 (1996), 299–342
Redford, Bruce, Designing the Life of Johnson: The Lyell Lectures, 2001-2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Reichard, Hugo M., ‘Boswell’s Johnson, the Hero Made by Committee’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 95, 2 (March 1980), 225–33
Rewa, Michael, ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson, IV, 420–421’, Notes and Queries, 212 (November 1967), 411–12
Roberts, S. C, The Story of Doctor Johnson: Being an Introduction to Boswell’s Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919)
Scanlan, J. T., ‘The Example of Edmond Malone: Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Patterns of Scholarly and Legal Prose’, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 4 (1991), 115–35
Schwalm, David E., ‘The Life of Johnson: Boswell’s Rhetoric and Reputation’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities, 18 (1976), 240–89
Schwartz, Richard B., Boswell’s Johnson: A Preface to the ‘Life’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)<
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Scott, Geoffrey, ‘The Making of The Life of Johnson’, Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle in the Collection of Lt.-Colonel Ralph Heywood Isham, vol. 6 (Mount Vernon, New York: privately printed, 1929)
Siebenschuh, William R., Form and Purpose in Boswell’s Biographical Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972)
–––––‘The Relationship between Factual Accuracy and Literary Art in the Life of Johnson’, Modern Philology, 74 (1977), 273–88
––––––‘Who is Boswell’s Johnson?’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 10 (1981), 347–60
–––––– Fictional Techniques and Factual Works (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1983)
Sisman, Adam, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (London: Hamish Hamilton, and New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000)
Vance, John A., ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson: New Questions, New Answers (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1985)
Woolley, James D., ‘Johnson as Despot: Anna Seward’s Rejected Contribution to Boswell’s Life’, Modern Philology, 70 (1972), 140–45
A Note on the Text
The Life of Samuel Johnson was first published in two volumes in 1791. A second edition, ‘revised and augmented’, followed in 1793. At virtually the same time, shortly after 9 August 1793, a slim companion volume, The Principal Corrections and Additions to the First Edition of Mr. Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson, was published, the purpose of which was to supply purchasers of the first edition with all the additional material incorporated into the second edition.
Boswell continued to collect material relevant to the Life, but after his death in 1795 it fell to Edmond Malone, who had played a crucial role in the publication of the Life from the very beginning (see above, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv, and p. xli, n. 10), to bring out in 1799 a four-volume edition of the Life, once more described as ‘revised and augmented’.
The copy-text for this edition is the third edition of 1799. Minor errors have been silently corrected, and certain aspects of presentation have been regularized when to do so posed no threat to meaning: specifically, un-spaced em dashes have been replaced by spaced en dashes; an em dash has been used to indicate names or parts of names omitted in the text; a two-em dash has been used to indicate omissions in passages of poetry; and punctuation after a word or phrase in italics has always been made roman. Unless otherwise indicated, footnotes in square brackets are Malone’s; other material in square brackets is Boswell’s, and material in curly brackets is editorial. Footnote reference numbers have been replaced by letters, to avoid confusion with endnote references.