The Quest of the Historical Johnson

Boswell’s Life of Johnson is a great book, but not a very good life of Johnson. One critic, Donald J. Greene, goes so far as to deny that it is a biography at all: he calls it “an edited diary,” a (merely) “minor masterpiece.” Boswell gives only a fifth of his book to Johnson’s 53 years before their meeting, and the other four fifths are largely a condensed transcript of their conversations, scattered over three hundred days of the remaining 22 years. Even this is full of errors, gaps, distortions, suppressions, and occasional fibs. The seams show. The Johnson it portrays isn’t the whole man: parts of Johnson, like his riotously silly humor, seem to have eluded (or were they concealed from?) Boswell. Greene even thinks Boswell was driven by an oedipal resentment of this “father figure” that led him to insert a number of feline debunking touches.

Until fairly recently, Boswell’s close ness to Johnson has intimidated attempts at a more comprehensive biography. Joseph Wood Krutch’s Samuel Johnson (1944) is essentially a meditation on the available data, with nearly full deference to Boswell; as Johnson might put it, he tried to “collect a system”—deduce a world-view—from Johnson’s widely distributed remarks. James L. Clifford’s Young Sam Johnson (1955) painstakingly reconstructed most of the pre-Boswell period: at once laconic, imaginative, and dense with fact, it was a real advance in Johnson scholarship, but it still amounted to a supplement to Boswell. John Wain’s recent Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1973) is more or less in Krutch’s vein, incorporating work like Clifford’s in a popular biography that is full of personal reflections.

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

Boswell’s Life of Johnson is a great book, but not a very good life of Johnson. One critic, Donald J. Greene, goes so far as to deny that it is a biography at all: he calls it “an edited diary,” a (merely) “minor masterpiece.” Boswell gives only a fifth of his book to Johnson’s 53 years before their meeting, and the other four fifths are largely a condensed transcript of their conversations, scattered over three hundred days of the remaining 22 years. Even this is full of errors, gaps, distortions, suppressions, and occasional fibs. The seams show. The Johnson it portrays isn’t the whole man: parts of Johnson, like his riotously silly humor, seem to have eluded (or were they concealed from?) Boswell. Greene even thinks Boswell was driven by an oedipal resentment of this “father figure” that led him to insert a number of feline debunking touches.

Until fairly recently, Boswell’s close ness to Johnson has intimidated attempts at a more comprehensive biography. Joseph Wood Krutch’s Samuel Johnson (1944) is essentially a meditation on the available data, with nearly full deference to Boswell; as Johnson might put it, he tried to “collect a system”—deduce a world-view—from Johnson’s widely distributed remarks. James L. Clifford’s Young Sam Johnson (1955) painstakingly reconstructed most of the pre-Boswell period: at once laconic, imaginative, and dense with fact, it was a real advance in Johnson scholarship, but it still amounted to a supplement to Boswell. John Wain’s recent Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1973) is more or less in Krutch’s vein, incorporating work like Clifford’s in a popular biography that is full of personal reflections.