Life of Samuel Johnson

Overview

The Life of Samuel Johnson is fourteen hundred pages, published in 1791, seven years after its subject died. It is the most read biography in English and it is not a book anybody should feel obliged to read entire. It is designed to be opened anywhere.

The proportions are peculiar and they explain the method. Johnson was fifty-four and famous when Boswell first met him in a bookshop in 1763. The first quarter of the book covers those fifty-four years, from documents, letters and other people’s recollections, and it is the dullest part. Everything after is Boswell present, and the pages fill with dialogue.

Boswell’s practice is the point. He kept a journal all his life, wrote up conversations the same night or within a day or two, and later worked those entries into the book. He was with Johnson for perhaps four hundred days in total over twenty-one years, which is not very many, and the book gives the impression of constant company because he recorded so densely when he was there.

The obvious objection, made since publication, is that Boswell put himself at the centre of another man’s life and left out everything he did not see. Both are true. He also produced a portrait so vivid that Johnson has been more alive to posterity than anyone else in his century.

What happens

The early life, 1709 to 1763. Johnson born in Lichfield, son of a bookseller, scarred by scrofula and nearly blind in one eye. Oxford for thirteen months and no degree, because the money ran out. A failed school. The walk to London with David Garrick, who became the greatest actor of the age. Grub Street: parliamentary reports written from notes smuggled out of the gallery, a life of the poet Savage, the poem London and then The Vanity of Human Wishes. His marriage to Elizabeth Porter, twenty years older, whom he called Tetty and mourned for the rest of his life.

Then the Dictionary, nine years of work with six assistants in a garret in Gough Square, and the incident Boswell tells best: Lord Chesterfield, having ignored Johnson for years, praised the book as it was about to appear, and received a letter declining the patronage of a man who watched a struggling swimmer with unconcern and encumbered him with help when he had reached the ground. Then the Rambler essays, Rasselas written in a week to pay for his mother’s funeral, and in 1762 a royal pension of three hundred pounds that ended the poverty.

The meeting, 1763. Boswell, twenty-two, Scottish, ambitious and self-dramatising, is introduced in the back parlour of a bookshop. Johnson’s first words to him are a rebuke about being Scottish, and Boswell handles it well enough to be tolerated and eventually loved.

The rest. The book becomes a record of occasions. The Club, founded with Reynolds, and its members: Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Sheridan. Dinners at the Thrales’ house at Streatham, where Hester Thrale kept Johnson for years and whose own memoir is the great rival source. The tour of the Hebrides in 1773, which both men wrote up separately and which Boswell published first.

And the talk. Johnson on almost everything, usually in reply, often knocking a proposition down with a phrase. On Scotland repeatedly and unfairly. On the imminence of death, which frightened him profoundly. On the American colonies, where he was harsh and on slavery where he was ahead of nearly everyone, proposing a toast to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies. On literature, where his judgements are still worth arguing with. On Berkeley’s immaterialism, which he refuted by kicking a large stone, a refutation that is not one but is unforgettable.

The domestic detail is where the book’s affection shows. Johnson’s household contained a blind poet, a former prostitute, an unlicensed doctor and a freed slave named Francis Barber to whom he left most of his estate, and they quarrelled constantly and he kept them all.

The last hundred pages are the dying: the fear, the final illness, the request to his physician to tell him plainly, the calm at the end.

How to read it

Do not start at page one. Start in 1763 when Boswell arrives, or get an abridgement. The Oxford World’s Classics selection and Christopher Hibbert’s Penguin abridgement both keep the conversation and cut the documents.

Read it in pieces. A dinner, an argument, a letter. The book has no plot and rewards browsing more than any other biography.

Read the Chesterfield letter and Johnson’s letter to Macpherson about the Ossian forgeries. They are two of the best short pieces of controlled contempt in the language.

Watch what Boswell does with himself. He appears constantly, asks leading questions to provoke Johnson, records his own humiliations, and stages scenes, most famously by contriving to get Johnson and the radical John Wilkes into the same dinner party to see what would happen. The book is partly a performance about its own making.

Then read Hester Thrale’s Anecdotes for the corrective. She knew Johnson far better and longer, saw him in the conditions Boswell did not, and her Johnson is recognisably the same man in a different light.

The standing question is how accurate the conversation is. Boswell wrote from notes made soon after, and where his journals survive they can be compared with the published text; he tightens, cuts and improves. The talk is therefore not a transcript and is not invention either.

Questions it raises

• Can a biography be true if its subject is reported only by someone who was present a fraction of the time?
• Boswell improved the conversation from his notes. At what point does editing a man’s speech become writing it?
• Johnson was a great writer, and the book is mostly about his talk. Has Boswell preserved him or replaced him?
• The Life made Johnson the best-known Englishman of his century. What does that say about the power of the form?
• Boswell is a character in the book and often a ridiculous one. Is the self-exposure honesty or another kind of vanity?
• Johnson was terrified of death all his life and devout throughout. Does the book explain that, or only record it?