Re-examining a literary giant
da: The New York Times
Samuel Johnson is one of those figures whom everyone quotes and no one reads. Google brings up the “Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page,” “Samuel Johnson Quotes” and “Samuel Johnson — Wikiquote,” followed by a link to James Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Himself a biographer, Johnson is better remembered as a character in a book by someone else. On the eve of Johnson’s 300th birthday, celebrated this year, two new biographies — Peter Martin’s “Samuel Johnson: A Biography” and Jeffrey Meyers’s “Samuel Johnson: The Struggle”— remind us how rich Boswell’s raw material was. Both authors contrast Johnson’s abject youth with his adult fame, his physical awkwardness with his conversational fluency, his self-diagnosed “indolence” with his superhuman literary output. Both feature a politically correct hero who opposed slavery, protected animals and encouraged women writers. Both give shorter shrift to political issues that might bore 21st-century readers (Johnson’s Jacobite sympathies) or repel them (his attacks on republicanism and religious dissent).
No one who had ever seen Samuel Johnson in his infancy (as Jane Austen might have put it) would have predicted that he would interest a biographer. The son of an obscure provincial bookseller, Johnson was precociously learned but otherwise a late bloomer. After leaving Oxford without…
