Customer Reviews

Life of Johnson

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Boswell was not the obvious choice to write the best biography about Samuel Johnson, much less one of the greatest biographies in world literature. He had much less contact with Johnson than Mrs. Thrale, for many years a close friend of Johnson who spent much more time with him than did Boswell. In fact, Boswell spent perhaps 400 days with Johnson over a period of many years. He also was not Johnson's literary executor. Finally, Boswell was regarded by many of his day, and afterwards, as something of an 18th Century celebrity hound. He made a point of meeting every famous person he could (Voltaire, Rousseau), and went to great efforts to make himself famous. Nevertheless, in his Life of Johnson, Boswell succeeded in portraying Johnson and his circle so vividly that more than 200 years later they come across as real human beings. He did this by breaking the convention of concentrating only on the most favorable aspects of his subject's life, and instead describing Johnson's eccentricities of dress, behavior, etc. Moreover, Boswell did not neglect to include incidents that make himself appear ridiculous. The book is both extremely funny and moving. If you read this, you will want to immediatley get a copy of Boswell's book on the trip that Johnson and he took to the Hebrides.

Ah, Ol' Sam, the Great Cham as somebody called him (it's an 18th century misreading of "Khan", fact fans). My opinion of Johnson the writer fluctuates over the years; sometimes he seems a long-winded authoritarian, at other times his juggernaut sentences seem possessed of a superhuman vitality. Whatever. This isn't Johnson the writer we're concerned with, so much as Johnson the talker - the gruff, ridiculously prejudiced, gloomy, scrofulous clubman, holding forth from the biggest chair in the room, wisecracking, bullying, brooding and sulking.

Johnson was as lucky to have Boswell, as Boswell was to have Johnson. The conversations of great men tend not to be much fun; Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe" is fascinating, all right, but Goethe's mixture of gossipy cattiness and Olympian pomposity gets to you after a while (Donald Barthelme wrote an evil parody of it). With Boswell's Johnson it's different. He seems at once painfully real and a caricature of himself. Boswell captures both the readiness to pontificate about anything under the sun and the panicky vulnerability. Eckermann's Goethe leaves the room when he's upset (nothing must ruffle the patrician facade) but Boswell's Johnson stays in his chair - we can see his reaction.

Of course there are drawbacks, in that half of the book covers the last ten or so years of Johnson's life, but there really isn't that much hard evidence about Johnson's early life beyond what Boswell himself collected. I reserve my doubts about Johnson's cultural politics, but the rolling, rumbling figure that Boswell sets down is one of my favourite characters in literature. Swift has a darker and more perplexing fascination for me, but you wouldn't have got the 44-year-old Swift out of bed at 3AM for a ramble. He'd have hurled his bedpan at you.

Why is it a great airport book? Because there's a lot of it, it's unfailingly entertaining and informative, and it's guaranteed not to include a description of an air crash.

Needless to say, Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON is one of the preeminent works of biography and should be read by anyone interested in Johnson or the genre. It is a great book (also great is W. Jackson Bate's SAMUEL JOHNSON [1st published 1975]which is a MUST for anyone interested in Johnson). But although I love the Everyman's Library, I do not recommend this edition of Boswell. Unlike the usual quality of the Everyman's Library, its Boswell is rife with typographical errors (there's even missing text!). Though it's the only edition of Boswell I've read, I regret that a correct edition is not on my bookshelf. That being said, if this is the only affordable hardcover version you can find -- and you buy only hardcovers -- go ahead and purchase the Everyman's despite the numerous and distracting errors.

I chose the 1,000 or so page Wordsworth Classics paperback edition of The Life Of Johnson (ISBN 1 85326 797 x) and was very pleased I did. The book had a nice heft to it, and the print was large enough for a comfortable read. My only major beef with this edition is that Boswell's text is replete with quotations from a variety of languages including Latin, Greek, French, Italian and others, and very few of them are translated into English. Whether the editor assumed that the average modern reader is a polyglot, or was unable to provide the translations for some other reason, I feel deprived at not having had access to this portion of the book's material, particularly as the quotes are most often used to gild the lily of one of Johnson's witticisms. Nevertheless, the book rewards the diligent reader with a wealth of intellectual stimulation, and offers a fascinating look into the England of the period including: polite London society, Oxford University, and jaunts around the British and Scottish countryside. Johnson's somewhat eccentric life and personal habits are lovingly and affectionately relayed by his close friend Boswell, who somehow managed to preserve a vast amount of Johnson's conversation without the aid of a tape recorder. With everyday life as a backdrop, we see how Johnson, a self-described lazy man, managed to produce such an abundant literary legacy, not the least of which was his groundbreaking dictionary. I recommend this book highly to people with an interest in 18th century England, the literary society of the period, or who simply love a great biography.

This is the abridged version! Don't get this!

I love Boswell's Life of Johnson, it is one of my favorite books in the world. (Definitely in the top five).

It has altered my outlook on life, the universe, and everything.... in a permanently positive manner.

But I absolutely hate, loath, and despise all pitiful "abridged" versions.

And I could not find anywhere on Amazon's page that this is abridged!

Now I have to send it back! What a pain!

Charged with everything from homosexuality to hatred of his subject, Boswell gives us a great gift in this monumental work. What must be the greatest document of a friendship besides being a fine piece of biography and an important resource for social historians, The Life of Johnson should not be missed by any student of eighteenth-century English literature. Other than Johnson's literary opinions, you can learn about his days's thoughts on anxiety and religious doubts. So turn your TV off for a month and read a great book and become acquainted with some truly interesting and intellectual people.

I'm no expert on 18th-century English literature, or on the famous work I'm being so daring as to review. I did, however, read every line of it, and I can say, I liked it.

I started reading this work---oft cited as the greatest biography in the English language, and surely the one where the subject was most un-objectively represented by his fawning chronicler---when I was a sixteen-year-old sophomore in an honors seminar. I finished it literally today, some eleven years and perhaps twenty-two starts and stops later.

What remains most strongly in memory, above the man about whom this was penned, is the era itself, which was captured in full dimension here by a scribe whose entire being seemed concentrated upon gulping down those scraps of notice sent his way by the movers and shakers, the "A-listers," of his century.

As a straightforward biography, this work is oddly paced, anything but impartial, and since it concentrates most of its scope on a relatively brief period in Johnson's life and career, curiously uneven. This is not unusual in biographies, of course, which tend to select moments that most closely define the subject's celebrity, but the pacing in the coverage does stick out at me. It also surprised me to find out that Boswell was around the great Johnson about a year's time, and the rest of his work, in all its ever-excusing hero-worshipping, anecdote-dribbling glory, is the result of his being privy to gossip, to making use of the facts known about Johnson, and by his, frankly, inventing whole sections in a kind of "non-fiction-fiction."

What forgives all that (if forgiveness is needed) is the thing I mentioned above; namely, no other writer from any era does quite so complete a job of making a person centuries in the future feel THERE for the scenes he's describing. To have wrung as much as he did from Johnson, the greatest "talker" of his time, shows that Boswell had the reporter's gift for conversation as a means of LISTENING. And all that is why this is the 18th century's finest life story, and also why I came to like this book so much in the years between when it was assigned to me, and when I finally finished it as a pleasure read in the year 2006.

Boswell took as his subject, the person called ' the greatest talker the English language has ever known'. He went around with him, goaded him here and there, and allowed him to talk.In return Johnson said countless wise, provocative, interesting, and offensive but above all humorous things. Boswell wrote down these , and also wrote down , or reconstructed conversations of Johnson with his friends. All of this helped make his subject ' alive' to his readers in a way no detailed recording of his every action from minute one of his life to minute zero at the end of his life could. He had the sense and intuition to help bring out what is most interesting in his subject. And so he presents the subject not only in a realistic way but in a sense in a most appealing way. This made Boswell the pioneer in a form of biography , or in one of the techniques of biography which is central to it. Boswell himself with all his much self- regretted dissolution was also an interesting apprentice, a writer too after all who learned from the Master. Johnson is a great and central figure , for many the greatest critic the English language has ever known but he is too an acquaintance and friend of Garrick, Hume others of distinction .Boswell listens to them also .Johnson was something of a curmudgeon a lovable kind of character who in his anger and outbursts amuses us. He was also a moral teacher although apparently he did not give much attention to the stricture regarding the wrongness of needlessly defaming others.Together these two are one of literature's great teams, not equal to the Knight of LeMancha and Sancho but up there on the top.
Like all works of genius this work has its fanatical followers and its petty demeanors. It is better in these cases to trust the first .For a work like this enriches our common humanity as all the truly great books do.

'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,' Samuel Johnson.
Sorry, it is a hobby.

Samuel Johnson the writer of the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, which was a very big deal in his day as the elite felt the English language was in decline due to it being influenced by so many foreign influences and the marvel of Samuel Johnson's efforts and method of writing made him, according to Lord Chesterfield Lord Chesterfield's Letters (Oxford World's Classics), as someone to be deferred to as the "Caesar" of the English language. Samuel Johnson, along with his friend and former pupil David Garrick, helped place Shakespeare as the permanent king of the English language; further, Johnson was a great and singular essayist and has an eternal place as a minor poet of the English language. His dictionary shot Johnson into the inner circle of elite in English society.

Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson" is a fascinating read as Boswell traces Johnson's life story. Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, a friend of his, and together the center of English political and cultural life with the 'Literary Club' that they had both started were big players in forming the English reaction to the major liberal events going on in their day and could be said to be the fathers of modern conservatism. They were alive to face the genesis of modern liberalism, in the form of Jean Jacque Rousseau along with the American Revolution, theirs was the conservative response. 'What hypocrites are the drivers of negroes to be demanding liberty,' Johnson in reference to the Americans. (It is funny that Samuel Johnson was against slavery while the more liberal Boswell was for it). Although, I know Edmund Burke felt England to be in the reconcilable wrong with the American Revolution Edmund Burke's Speech on conciliation with the American colonies,: Delivered in the House of commons, March 22, 1775; ed., with notes and a study plan ... I. Crane (Twentieth century text-books) the Doctor, Samuel Johnson, did not and felt the Revolutionaries hypocritical ingrates. What is good about conservatism lays with these two fellows, Burke and Johnson. It is also amusing that Johnson's conservativism included the observation that countries should be judged by the condition in which their poor lived, disapprobation given to the worse.

Samuel Johnson came from very humble roots and his early life was spent in modest means, fortunately he was surrounded by books. His first years in London were quite a struggle, near pennyless, sometimes sleeping on the streets. The money he ended up getting for writing the dictionary wasn't much in the end, it was the fame that got him some wealth.

A marvelous read. Giving advice about the legal profession, education: his advice - just do it; habits form early and habits are hard to break... lots of interesting views from how to conduct oneself socially (Boswell seemed in constant search of this) to political commentary (one of my favorite was his advice on being weary of those that wrap themselves in the flag)... too much to write about. Boswell, when he first meets Johnson is so filled with awe and reverance but it mellows out some, he even starts playing games with the Doctor; however, he always greatly respects him but the idolitry disipates.

Although Samuel Johnson's conservativeness and strong opinions might turn people off I find it refreshing compared to the stealth tactics of politics today. Politicians don't say what they mean and that is also probably why the Doctor was discouraged from entering politics in his day by some close friends with ties in that area, somethings change only by degree. James Boswell, the author, didn't agree with the Doctor all the time but appreciated the hard, realistic way of looking at things and amusingly delivered (mostly by quirky analogies) that Samuel Johnson did.

Then Boswell is a story in himself. Boswell's Rousseau-ist fever for the notions of the 'Noble Savage, Natural Man' The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762 was interesting also; his generation caught it and he had strong sentiments towards it despite Johnson's arguments against its reasoning. This fever also, at the least, lent cover to the American Revolution.

Johnson could only afford one year of college. Received an honarary Doctorate for his dictionary.

One of the books one should read before they turn 20.

The best synopsis of Rousseau and in his own words is probably 'Creed of a Priest of Savoy' The Essential Rousseau (Essentials)

I own the Penguins Classics edition but no matter. The story is wonderfully rich. Boswell really is a master story teller because at no point did the story become dry. I literally read and savored every single word.

All I knew of Johnson is that he wrote the first English Dictionary. But I had no idea this man was full of wit. He had a temper no doubt and definitely went through periods of what sound like moderate to severe depression followed by periods of bursting with energy, joy and wit and incredibly prolific and productive in those bursts, enough so that he surprised most people with his abilities in those bursts of creative genius. I am biased as I am a psychiatric physician but it sound like bipolar disorder to me.

Whatever the case may be, I drank this book up. I'm still reading it, have about 40 pages left and haven't put it down since I picked it up.

A must read just because of the sheer wonderful story contained within!