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- During their 21-year friendship, Boswell recorded many of Johnson’s sayings and activities using a self-invented form of shorthand. He eventually worked these notes into the massive biography which he published seven years after Johnson’s death.
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The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) by James Boswell is a biography of English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson. The work was from the beginning a universal critical and popular success, and represents a landmark in the development of the modern genre of biography.
Boswell, a 22-year-old lawyer from Scotland, first met the 53-year-old Samuel Johnson in 1763, and they were friends for the 21 remaining years of Johnson’s life. From the beginning, using a self-invented system of shorthand, Boswell kept a record of Johnson’s conversations.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Using a mixture of narration, stretches of dialogue, and letters, Boswell portrays Johnson as a literary man and witty conversationalist in London society. About a third of the way through the book, Boswell enters Johnson’s life and takes an active role in the events depicted.
May 12, 2006 · Some think that Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, did not sufficiently realize his duty of self-effacement. He is too much in evidence, too bustling, too anxious that his own opinion, though comparatively unimportant, should get a hearing.
Those who feel that Boswell intrudes too much into the work possibly overlook the fact that during Johnson’s life, Boswell was Johnson’s friend and spent from four hundred to five hundred...
Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson lets us see how madness and melancholy were talked about in Georgian Britain. Compared with today, there are differences but also many similarities in the way people thought about and tried to remedy mental affliction.
It was in 1764, while Boswell was traveling in Europe, that Johnson and his friends founded the Literary Club, meeting weekly at the Turk’s Head. Using Johnson’s daily journal as his guide, Boswell records Johnson’s growing dissatisfaction with his own laziness since receiving the pension.
