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The Life of Samuel Johnson (Penguin Classics) Kindle Edition
In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality. While Johnson’s Dictionary remains a monument of scholarship, and his essays and criticism command continuing respect, we owe our knowledge of the man himself to this biography. Through a series of wonderfully detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure with a huge appetite for life, crossing swords with other great eighteenth-century luminaries, from Garrick and Goldsmith to Burney and Burke – even his long-suffering friend and disciple James Boswell. Yet Johnson had a vulnerable, even tragic, side and anxieties and obsessions haunted his private hours. Boswell’s sensitivity and insight into every facet of his subject’s character ultimately make this biography as moving as it is entertaining.
Based on the 1799 edition, Christopher Hibbert’s abridgement preserves the integrity of the original, while his fascinating introduction sets Boswell’s view of Samuel Johnson against that of others of the time.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin
- Publication dateOctober 4, 2009
- File size2740 KB
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About the Author
David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. For Penguin he has edited Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Augustan Critical Writing, Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, and Samuel Johnson's Selected Essays.
Product details
- ASIN : B002RI97QG
- Publisher : Penguin; Unabridged edition (October 4, 2009)
- Publication date : October 4, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 2740 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 1132 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #213,484 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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The result is that Johnson comes across as a pompous but often hilarious windbag who seemingly could prattle for hours on virtually any subject, even taking contradictory stands just to keep conversations lively. Boswell admits on page 504 that Johnson saw “conversation as a contest.” Indeed, Johnson treated conversation as jazzmen do cutting contests, and he played to win even if it meant verbally zinging friends as well as foes.
Johnson was a staunch Tory devoted to king and country who hated Americans even before the Revolution. On page 693 Boswell notes in 1778 that Johnson “attacked the Americans with intemperate vehemence of abuse.” (No one would ever charge Johnson with being a liberal, though he was against slavery; curiously, fawning acolyte Boswell disagreed and saw slavery as sanctioned in the Bible.) Johnson was also devoted to the Church of England (on page 230 we find Voltaire referring to Johnson as “a superstitious dog”). But set him at a tavern table with a group of other loquacious gents, and the verbiage flew like shrapnel. (Johnson on page 505: “...there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness has been produced as by a good tavern or inn.”) One of their literary group, Colly Cibber, wrote in a play, “There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.”
Johnson’s often antique opinions can be startling, whether on the subject of women, marriage, politics (p. 716, on whether public officials should be appointed by seniority or voted for: “...there is no more reason to suppose that the choice of a rabble will be right, than that chance will be right”), the existence of witches and ghosts, or his belief that teachers should be free to beat their pupils. P. 344: “...a schoolmaster has a prescriptive right to beat; and that an action of assault and battery cannot be admitted against him, unless there is some great excess, some barbarity...In our schools in England, many boys have been maimed, yet I never heard of an action against a schoolmaster on that account.” Johnson’s defense of this is that it was done to him as a boy and he turned out all right.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has about nine pages of quotes attributed to Samuel Johnson. Such collections are fine as shortcuts, but if you want the context of those remarks, as well as many, many others (along with a fascinating look at 18th century London life), Boswell’s biography is without peer as an entertaining history.
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Those were the days when Benjamin Franklin will show up for dinner, or when David Hume was always around in the pubs looking for someone to play chess with. Or when the debates on current events via the newspapers were between Voltaire and Dr Johnson. Those were the days indeed, and James Boswell deals with the characters, the events and the history with astonishing ease, and sublime prose, and not for one line - along 1000 pages - making the tale less interesting.
And then, of course, the book deals with the like of the immense Samuel Johnson and in such a way that this is still - almost 250 years after being published - the best biography of a man subject of thousands of essays, studies and biographies; and the writer that was, according to Harold Bloom, the best book reviewer ever.
Samuel Johnson, reviewing a Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, wrote that its author made a wonderful volume, as he had "the gift of embellishing all he touches". Not that the life of the Doctor needed any embellishment, but that comment can be applied quite justly, to this "Life of Samuel Johnson".
El papel de la edición es un goce, muy fino.
Uno de los mayores placeres que puede dar la lectura, acerca de uno de los hombres de letras más distinguidos que ha habido.
Recomendaría una compra de cualquiera de esta serie.
10/10.
M. E. zu Recht eine der größten literarischen Biographien aller Zeiten!