Description

BOSWELL'S LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON! Complete in 2 volumes. Printed in 1920. "Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is the best [biography] in the language." [DNB] This set is 100 years old! Bound in full leather bindings. Full leather bindings are more expensive to produce and are highly desirable. These are the original bindings. Bound in limp leather bindings that are softer than hardcovers. Gilded lettering on spine. Gilt embossed crest on cover. Ornately illustrated title page. Top edge gilded. These books measure 6.75 inches tall. Complete two volume set. Intricate title page motif. Everyman's Library. J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London. Printed in 1920. CONDITION: Complete in 2 volumes. Very Good condition overall, exceptionally fresh and well preserved internally, with some wear to the bindings. Hinges strongly attached, with extremity starting. Some general external rubbing and micro chipping to the extremities as visible in the pictures, still a nice antiquarian set. These bindings are 100 years old. Clean interior. Appears free of any trace of foxing. These are limp leather bindings, meaning that the covers are softer. Printed on thin India style paper that is fresh, supple, and well preserved. No writing or signs of previous ownership. A gorgeous set. A particularly nice set of the most celebrated biography in English literature. Each book will be individually wrapped and well protected for shipping. #3409 Life of Samuel Johnson From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search This article is about the book written by James Boswell. For the work written by John Hawkins, see Life of Samuel Johnson (1787) . Life of Samuel Johnson Author James Boswell Original title The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Country United Kingdom Language English Subject Samuel Johnson Genre Biography Publication date 1791 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) by James Boswell is a biography of English writer Dr. Samuel Johnson . The work was from the beginning a critical and popular success, and represents a landmark in the development of the modern genre of biography. It is notable for its extensive reports of Johnson's conversation. Many have claimed it as the greatest biography written in English, but some modern critics object that the work cannot be considered a proper biography. Boswell's personal acquaintance with his subject began in 1763, when Johnson was 54 years old, and Boswell covered the entirety of Johnson's life by means of additional research. The biography takes many critical liberties with Johnson's life, as Boswell makes various changes to Johnson's quotations and even censors many comments. Nonetheless, the book is valued as both an important source of information on Johnson and his times, as well as an important work of literature. Contents 1 Background 2 Biography 3 Critical response 4 Notable Editions 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links James Boswell at 25, by George Willison On 16 May 1763, as a 22-year-old Scot visiting London, Boswell first met Johnson in the book shop of Johnson's friend, Tom Davies. [1] They quickly became friends, although Boswell would for many years only see Johnson when he visited London in the intervals of his law practice in Scotland. [1] From the age of 20, Boswell kept a series of journals thoroughly detailing his day to day experience. [1] This journal, when published in the 20th century, filled eighteen volumes, and it was from this large collection of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on Johnson's life. [1] Johnson, in commenting on Boswell's excessive note taking playfully wrote to Hester Thrale , "One would think the man had been hired to spy upon me". [2] On 6 August 1773, eleven years after first meeting Boswell, Johnson set out to visit his friend in Scotland, to begin "a journey to the western islands of Scotland", as Johnson's 1775 account of their travels would put it. [3] Boswell's account, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786), which was not published until after Johnson's death, was a trial of his biographical method before commencing his Life of Johnson . [4] With the success of that work, Boswell started working on the "vast treasure of his conversations at different times" that he recorded in his journals. [5] His goal was to recreate Johnson's "life in scenes". [5] Because Johnson was 53 when Boswell first met him, the last 20 years of his life occupy four fifths of the book. [6] Furthermore, as literary critic Donald Greene has pointed out, Boswell's works only describe 250 days that Boswell could have actually been present with Johnson, the rest of the information having to come from either Johnson himself or from secondary sources recounting various incidents. [7] Before Boswell could publish his biography of Johnson, there were many other friends of Johnson's who published or were in the middle of publishing their own biographies or collections or anecdotes on Johnson: John Hawkins , Thrale, Frances Burney , Anna Seward , Elizabeth Montagu , Hannah More , and Horace Walpole among many. [8] The last edition Boswell worked on was the third, published after his death, in 1799. [9] Samuel Johnson in his later years There are many biographies and biographers of Samuel Johnson, but James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is the one best known to the general reader. [10] Since first publication it has passed through literally hundreds of editions, as well as (on account of its great length) many selections and abridgements. Yet opinion among 20th-century Johnson scholars such as Edmund Wilson and Donald Greene is that Boswell's Life "can hardly be termed a biography at all", being merely "a collection of those entries in Boswell's diaries dealing with the occasions during the last twenty-two years of Johnson's life on which they met ... strung together with only a perfunctory effort to fill the gaps". [10] Furthermore, Greene claims that the work "began with a well-organized press campaign, by Boswell and his friends, of puffing and of denigration of his rivals; and was given a boost by one of Macaulay's most memorable pieces of journalistic claptrap". [10] Instead of being called a "biography", Greene suggests that the work should be called an "Ana", a sort of table talk . [11] The cause for concern is that Boswell's original Life "corrects" many of Johnson's quotations, censors many of the more vulgar comments, and largely ignores Johnson's early years. [12] In particular, Boswell creates a somewhat mythic version of Johnson, as William Dowling puts it: Modern biographers have since corrected Boswell's errors. [14] This is not to say that Boswell's work is wrong or of no use: scholars such as Walter Jackson Bate appreciate the "detail" and the "treasury of conversation" that it contains. [15] All of Johnson's biographers, according to Bate, have to go through the same "igloo" of material that Boswell had to deal with: limited information from Johnson's first forty years and an extreme amount for those after. [15] Simply put, "Johnson's life continues to hold attention" and "every scrap of evidence relating to Johnson's life has continued to be examined and many more details have been added" because "it is so close to general human experience in a wide variety of ways". [16] Edmund Burke told King George III that the work entertained him more than any other. [17] Robert Anderson, in his Works of the British Poets (1795), wrote: "With some venial exceptions on the score of egotism and indiscriminate admiration, his work exhibits the most copious, interesting, and finished picture of the life and opinions of an eminent man, that was ever executed; and is justly esteemed one of the most instructive and entertaining books in the English language." [18] Macaulay 's critique in the Edinburgh Review [19] was highly influential and established a way of thinking of Boswell and his Life of Johnson which was to prevail for many years. He was damning of Croker's editing: "This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed", [19] and held a mixed opinion of Boswell: "Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London[;] ... such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be". [19] Macaulay also claimed "Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them". [19] Macaulay also criticised (as did Lockhart) what he saw as a lack of discretion in the way the Life reveals Johnson's and others' personal lives, foibles, habits and private conversation; but recognised that it was this that made the Life of Johnson a great biography. Macaulay noted that Boswell could only give a detailed account of Johnson in his later years: "We know him [Johnson], not as he was known to men of his own generation, but as he was known to men whose father he might have been" [19] and that long after Johnson's own works had been forgotten, he would be remembered through Boswell's Life . Thomas Carlyle wrote two essays in Fraser's Magazine in 1832 in review of Croker's edition; his essay on 'Biography' in issue 27 [20] was followed by 'Boswell's Life of Johnson' in issue 28. [21] Carlyle wanted more than facts from histories and biographies "The thing I want to see is not Redbook Lists and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers, but the LIFE OF MAN in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its inward principle; how and what it was; whence it proceeded, whether it was tending" [21] and this he found in Boswell even (or especially) in the simplest anecdote "Some slight, perhaps mean and even ugly incident if real and well presented, will fix itself in a susceptive memory and lie ennobled there [20] ". Consequently, "This Book of Boswell’s will give us more real insight into the History of England during those days that twenty other Books, falsely entitled “Histories” which take to themselves that special aim". [21] "How comes it" he asked "that in England we have simply one good Biography, this Boswell’s Johnson ?" [20] He shared Macaulay's unfavourable verdict on Croker's efforts of Boswell: "there is simply no edition of Boswell to which this last would seem preferable" [21] but not his view of Boswell. For all his faults Boswell (in part " a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit" [21] ) had had the great good sense to admire and attach himself to Dr Johnson (an attachment which had little to offer materially) and the open loving heart which Carlyle thought indispensable for knowing and vividly uttering forth . [20] More recent critics have been mostly positive. Frederick Pottle calls it "the crowning achievement of an artist who for more than twenty five years had been deliberately disciplining himself for such a task." [22] W. K. Wimsatt argues, "the correct response to Boswell is to value the man through the artist, the artist in the man". [23] Leopold Damrosch claims that the work is of a type that "do not lend themselves very easily to the usual categories by which the critic explains and justifies his admiration". [24] Walter Jackson Bate emphasised the uniqueness of the work when he says "nothing comparable to it had existed. Nor has anything comparable been written since, because that special union of talents, opportunities, and subject matter has never been duplicated." [5] However, Leopold Damrosch sees problems with Boswell's Life if viewed as a conventional biography: "[T]he usual claim that it is the world's greatest biography seems to me seriously misleading. In the first place, it has real defects of organization and structure; in the second place (and more importantly) it leaves much to be desired as the comprehensive interpretation of a life." [25] Similarly, although Donald Greene thought that Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides a "splendid performance", he felt that the Life was inadequate and Johnson's later years deserved a more accurate biography. [11] The first edition of Boswell's work appeared on May 16, 1791, in two quarto volumes, with 1,750 copies printed. Once this was exhausted, a second edition in three octavo volumes was published in July 1793. [26] This second edition was augmented by "many valuable additions," which were appended to the 1791 text; according to Boswell's own "Advertisement," "These have I ordered to be printed separately in quarto, for the accommodation of the purchasers of the first edition." [27] The third edition, appearing in 1799 after Boswell's death, was the responsibility of Edmond Malone , who had been instrumental in the preparation of the previous editions. Malone inserted the additions in their appropriate places in the text, adding some (suitably bracketed and credited) notes by himself and other contributors, including Boswell's son James . [28] This third edition has been regarded as definitive by many editors. [29] [30] Malone brought out further editions in 1804, 1807, and 1811. [31] In 1831, John Wilson Croker produced a new edition which was swiftly condemned in reviews by Thomas Macaulay [32] and Thomas Carlyle . [33] The weakness of Croker's notes, criticized by both reviewers, is acknowledged by George Birkbeck Hill : "His remarks and criticisms far too often deserve the contempt that Macaulay so liberally poured on them. Without being deeply versed in books, he was shallow in himself." [30] More objectionably, Croker interpolated into his Boswell text from the contemporaneous rival biographies of Johnson. Carlyle reviews and denounces the editor's procedure as follows: A new edition by George Birkbeck Hill was published in 1887 and returned to the standard of the third edition text. [36] [30] Hill's work in six volumes is copiously annotated, and became standard to such an extent that when in the 20th century, L. F. Powell was commissioned to revise it (1934-64), Hill's pagination was retained. The single-volume edition by R. W. Chapman (1953) also remains in print, published by Oxford University Press. [37] In 1917, Charles Grosvenor Osgood (1871–1964) [38] published an abridged edition, [39] which is available via Project Gutenberg . [40]