Samuel Johnson
A Biography
by Peter Martin
Harvard, 640 pp., $35
Samuel Johnson
The Struggle
by Jeffrey Meyers
Basic Books, 552 pp., $35
Samuel Johnson
A Life
by David Nokes
Henry Holt, 448 pp., $32
James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) may be the greatest biography ever written, but it is also uneven, unbalanced, and anything but definitive. In the last 60 years many Johnsonians have rounded out Boswell's account. James Clifford re-created his pugnacious youth; Walter Jackson Bate explored his moral vision; Donald Greene took up his politics; Jonathan Clark meticulously delineated his essential Toryism; Robert DeMaria reassessed his literary achievement; Henry Hitchings revisited his lexicographical innovations; and Ian McIntyre just completed a study of his relationship with Hester Thrale.
Now, to mark Johnson's 300th birthday, Peter Martin, Jeffrey Meyers, and David Nokes have written new biographies of the poet, lexicographer, essayist, critic, biographer, and editor who dominated the late 18th century, and has fascinated readers ever since.
Johnson's life can be seen best as a study in indomitability. Born in the cathedral town of Lichfield in 1709, half-blind and scarred with scrofula, he later recalled that he "was born almost dead and could not cry for some time." His father was a bookseller and his mother a peevish, implacable woman. At Lichfield Grammar School, he had Latin beaten into him by a schoolmaster who would cry out as he thrashed his charges: "I do this to save you from the gallows."
Johnson escaped the gallows but not debtor's prison. Poverty dogged him all
his days until George III awarded him a pension in his fifties. He could only afford to spend a year at Oxford, and when he returned dejectedly to Lichfield, he suffered the first of his two crack-ups, which nearly relieved him of his sanity. After failing to make a living as a schoolmaster, he moved to London and put himself to school in the arts of Grub Street, where he gradually established himself as "that great Cham of literature," as Tobias Smollet called him.
The works on which Johnson's literary reputation is based include the pioneering Life of Savage (1744); the long poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), which T.S. Eliot thought superior to Gray's Elegy and "the perfect theme for his abilities"; his great Dictionary (1755), on which Noah Webster and James Murray based their dictionaries; Rasselas: The Prince of Abyssinia (1759), an Oriental tale featuring some of Johnson's wittiest prose, which he dashed off in two weeks to bury his mother; A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775), a caustic account of his trip to the Hebrides with Boswell; a fascinating edition of the works of Shakespeare (1765); and his magnificent Lives of the English Poets (1779-81), which Oxford recently released in a superb four-volume set edited by Roger Lonsdale. Johnson also wrote some of the greatest essays in the language, including a series of moral essays for a periodical called The Rambler (1750-52) and a series of more lighthearted essays for two other periodicals, The Adventurer (1754) and The Idler (1758-1760).
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