The Life of Samuel Johnson

The subtractive test bites hard, and that is what holds this axis lowest of the twelve. A great deal could go without loss: the annual catalogues of Johnson’s publications and of pieces wrongly ascribed to him; letters printed because Boswell had them rather than because the life needs them; the running quarrels with Hawkins and Mrs Piozzi; Boswell’s own vanities set into the record. The years before 1763 are thin and partly compiled, and the proportion follows what the biographer happened to see. Against that, the core resists removal: the conversations are the life, and in the great scenes nothing is idle. The method is accumulation, and the man appears only through the mass. Still, the book admitted far more than its argument needed.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What the book brings into the open is a great mind living with its own terrors. Its Johnson is not the oracle only: he is a man of convulsive tics and gestures, of an indolence he reproaches in his prayers, of a dread of death and madness so strong that talk of annihilation drives him to anger, of charity kept up in a house of dependants, Levet, Mrs Williams and Frank Barber. The disclosure is articulated and holds: wit and certainty can be a defence raised against despair, and greatness and weakness are one character seen from two sides. The book also shows, almost for the first time in English, a private life written down without panegyric. Below Anna Karenina’s 9.5: it discloses one man’s condition, not a social order.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The register is comic and conversational, and its delight is constant; elevation in this axis’s sense is rarer. The book rises where Johnson’s own voice is at its height: the letter to Lord Chesterfield of 1755, with its patron who “encumbers him with help”; the talk on the fear of death; the prayers and late meditations; the account of the death gathered from others and rendered with restraint. The Wilkes dinner, a reconciliation contrived that becomes real pleasure, has a comic grandeur of design. But many pages are flat, catalogue, correspondence and the biographer recording his own questions, and the heights that come are owed largely to Johnson’s words, which Boswell transmits. Height is real; its frequency is moderate.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The book builds, not merely evokes, an old and load bearing pattern: the master and the disciple who records him, the sage known through his sayings, as Socrates is known through Plato and Xenophon. The disciple’s devotion, his provocations, his humiliations and his persistence are the frame through which the master is seen, and the structure depends on it. Johnson becomes a figure of type while remaining particular to the last tic: the Great Cham, the Christian stoic who fears death, the giant of London. The Doctor Johnson the culture knows is largely this book’s making. What holds the axis here is that the archetype is a single relation rather than a world of figures, and much of the book does not carry it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance was the eulogy, the short Life prefixed to an author’s works, the funeral sermon, and Johnson’s own critical biography in the Lives of the Poets, with his Rambler essay on biography, which argued for domestic detail but practised it briefly. Boswell turned biography into dramatised record: the subject’s talk in direct speech, scene by scene, with its interruptions and its setting; the biographer present as a character; the man shown in his worst habits beside his best. The stake was real and was paid. He was mocked in print as a toady and an eavesdropper, friends of Johnson thought the disclosures a betrayal, and his own folly is on view throughout. A tenth above Infinite Jest’s 8.9: the turn made a genre.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Change the form and the book stops being able to say what it knows. Johnson known through summary is the Johnson of Hawkins; Johnson known through scenes of talk, set in dated order so that habits, fears and opinions recur and accumulate, is a living man. The annalistic frame gives the life as time, and the dramatic scene gives it as presence; together they are the instrument of the knowledge, and the reader learns Johnson as Boswell did, by acquaintance. The form is also partly a container. The letters, the lists of works and the controversies sit in it as matter stored rather than shaped, and the chronology is weakest exactly where the biographer’s own presence fails, before 1763 and at the death.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The evidence is strong. The book has been read without a break for more than two centuries and keeps yielding: as a portrait of Johnson; as a portrait of Boswell, who emerges, partly unintended, as its second great character; as the record of a society of talk; as a case in the ethics and truth of biography. The recovery of Boswell’s own papers at Malahide Castle and Fettercairn House in the twentieth century reopened it entirely, since readers could now watch the conversations being made from notes and test what was shaped, cut and arranged; where record ends and art begins is still an open question. It yields more to a second reading of the scenes than of the compilation.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The field is English prose of the eighteenth century, where the book has few equals in reach. Its intrinsic force is large: it reorganised what a biography could be in English, from monument to the record of a living person, and its method of conversation reported in scene was a new possibility in prose. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the full nineteenth century Life descends from it, Lockhart’s Life of Scott (1837 to 1838) most directly, and the Victorian life and letters; Froude’s Carlyle carried its frankness into scandal; the essays of Macaulay (1831) and Carlyle (1832) fixed its place; Strachey’s revolt against the Victorian Life was a revolt against what came from it. And Johnson himself is now read through it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

A text of two hundred and thirty five years, whole, never lost, continuously in print, read, taught and quoted. On form nothing is charged: the text survives as Boswell left it. Presence is wide, since the book is the source of most of the Johnson the common reader knows: “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”; “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. The figure takes the foot of the step for centuries and adds nothing for presence. The book is two centuries old, not millennia; its surface is in part fixed to its moment, the London of the 1770s, the quarrels with Hawkins and Piozzi, the politics of Wilkes and America; and its full reading has narrowed while its sayings travel without it.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Boswell’s prose is plain, lucid and controlled, with a Latinate formality learned partly from Johnson and sometimes stiff. His great craft is dramatic: he sets a scene in a few lines, times the entrance of a speaker, and lets Johnson’s sentence fall with its full weight: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs.” The Wilkes dinner is a comic structure of the first order, built from preparation, approach, alarm and release; the meeting in Davies’s shop is told with a novelist’s timing. Against that, the management of the whole is uneven, documents are often inserted rather than shaped, and the late volumes slacken into notes. The making carries the scenes and is only competent in the compilation.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs: the life of one man, in dated order, seen through one observer and the witnesses he gathers. Take the two most distant elements, the farce of the Wilkes dinner and the prayers and the fear of death: they obey the same law, because both are Johnson’s character in action, and the book never treats the comic and the dreadful as different kinds. The range is wide, from tavern banter to theology. The law strains in places. The polemic against Hawkins and Piozzi turns the record into a brief for its author; the borrowed accounts of the youth and the death work under a different physics from the witnessed scenes; and Boswell’s self-display at times takes the stage for its own sake.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The book holds a great deal in one structure. The life of letters as labour: Grub Street, the Dictionary, the pension, and “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”. The church, and the faith of a man who fears damnation. The state, in Johnson’s Toryism, Wilkes, the American war and Scotland. The law, through Boswell’s own profession. A whole society of London talk, in taverns and the Club, with Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick. Consciousness, in melancholy and the fear of madness; death, at the end and throughout. The family is thinner: Tetty is a shadow and Boswell’s own family is offstage. The natural order is barely present. It is integrated through one man, not held as a world in its own right.

Score: 8.6 / 10