Life of Samuel Johnson - Background

Background

On 16 May 1763, Johnson met 24-year-old Boswell, the man who would later become Johnson's first major biographer, for the first time in the book shop of Johnson's friend, Tom Davies. They quickly became friends, although Boswell would return to his home in Scotland or travel abroad for months at a time. During his life, Boswell kept a series of journals that detailed the various moments that he felt were important. 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. 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".

On 6 August 1773, eleven years after first meeting Boswell, Johnson set out to visit his friend in Scotland, in order to begin "a journey to the western islands of Scotland", as Johnson's 1775 account of their travels would put it. Boswell's account, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786), was a preliminary attempt at a biography before his Life of Johnson. 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. His goal was to recreate Johnson's "life in Scenes". However, Boswell suffered the problem of having not met Johnson until Johnson was 53, and this created an imbalance on what portions of Johnson's life were actually discussed. 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.

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. The last edition Boswell worked on was the third, published in 1799.

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