Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism - Biography

Biography

In terms of biography, Johnson did not agree with Plutarch's model of using biographies to teach morals and compliment the subjects. Instead, Johnson believed in portraying the subjects accurately, including any negative aspects of an individual's life. Although revolutionary and more accurate as a biographer, Johnson had to struggle with his beliefs against a society that was unwilling to hear of details that may be viewed as tarnishing a reputation. In Rambler 60, Johnson put forth why he thought society could not be comfortable with hearing the negative truth of individuals that they admire:

All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of imagination that realizes the event, however fictitious, or approximates it, however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate, so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves... Our passions are therefore more strongly moved, in proportion as we can more readily adopt the pains or pleasure proposed to our minds, by recognizing them as once our own.

Also, Johnson did not feel that biography should be limited to the most important people, but felt that the lives of lesser individuals could be deemed the most significant. In his Lives of the Poets, he chose great and lesser poets, and throughout all of his biographies, he always insisted on including what others may consider as trivial details in order to fully describe the lives of his subjects. When it came to autobiography, and diaries including his own, Johnson considered that genre of work as one having the most significance; he explains this in Idler 84, when he described how a writer of an autobiography would be the least likely to distort their own life.