Old
Dr. Johnson and
His Boswell
His Great Fame Due to His Admirer's Biography—Boswell's Work Makes the Doctor the Best Known Literary Man of His Age.
The last of the worthies of old English literature is Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose monumental figure casts a long shadow over most of his contemporaries. The man whom Boswell immortalized and made as real to us today as though he actually lived and worked and browbeat his associates in our own time, is really the last of the great eighteenth century writers in style, in ways of thought and in feeling. Gibbon, who was his contemporary, appears far more modern than Johnson because, in his religious views and in his way of appraising historical characters, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a hundred years in advance of his time. Dr. Johnson therefore may be regarded as the last of the worthies who have made English literature memorable in the eighteenth century, and his work may fittingly conclude this series of articles on the good old books.
Portrait of Dr. Johnson
from the Original Picture by
Sir Joshua Reynolds owned by Boswell
This Engraving formed the Frontispiece of
the First Edition
of Boswell's Famous "Life"
Yet in considering Dr. Johnson's work we have the curious anomaly of a man who is not only far greater than anything he ever wrote, but who depends for his fame upon a biographer much inferior to himself in scholarship and in literary ability. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell Esquire is the title of the book that has preserved for us one of the most interesting figures in all literature. Commonly it is known as Boswell's Johnson. Though written over a hundred years ago, it still stands unrivaled among the world's great biographies.
Boswell had in him the makings of a great reporter, for no detail of Johnson's life, appearance, talk or manner escaped his keen eye, and for years it was his custom to set down every night in notebooks all the table talk and other conversation of the great man whom he worshiped. In this way Boswell gathered little by little a mass of material which he afterward recast into his great work. Jotted down when every word was fresh in his memory, these conversations by the old doctor are full of meat.
If Johnson was ever worsted in the wit combats that took place at his favorite club, then Boswell fails to record it; but hundreds of instances are given of the doughty old Englishman's rough usage of an adversary when he found himself hard pressed. As Goldsmith aptly put it: "If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end."