Background
Johnson began writing his "lives", or individual biographical pieces, in 1740. His first "lives" were of Jean-Philippe Baratier, Robert Blake, and Francis Drake. In 1744, he wrote his first serious "life", the Life of Mr Richard Savage, in honour of his friend, Richard Savage. Between 1737 and 1739, Johnson became close to Savage. In 1743, Savage found himself in debtors' prison and stayed there until his death shortly after. A year later, Johnson wrote Life of Savage (1744), a "moving" work that, according to Walter Jackson Bate, "remains one of the innovative works in the history of biography".
In 1773, publishers in Edinburgh started producing editions of the collected works of various English poets. In order to compete with this project, Johnson was asked by Tom Davies, William Strahan and Thomas Cadell to create this final major work, the Lives of the English Poets. He began this project and, on 3 May 1777, he wrote to James Boswell that he was busy preparing a "little Lives" and "little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets". Johnson asked for 200 guineas, an amount significantly lower than the price he could have demanded. Johnson wrote many biographies over the next few years and reproduced his Life of Savage for the collection.
The original work was, however, supposed to comprise the first ten volumes of a sixty-volume work. Johnson's volumes were originally titled Prefaces, Biographical and Critical to the Works of the English Poets. After volumes I-IV were published in 1779 and V-X in 1781, the publishers decided to reprint them as The Lives of the English Poets, or Lives of the Poets, and sell them as an independent work. These were finished in March 1781 and the new collection was published in six volumes.
Read more about this topic: Lives Of The Most Eminent English Poets
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