Warwick's Reviews > Life of Johnson

Someone at the time – I think it was Anna Letitia Barbauld – said that reading the Life of Johnson was like taking a walk in Ranelagh pleasure gardens: everyone you knew was there. That remains the best reason for reading it: the book is a bit like a huge chunk of amber, in which a slice of eighteenth-century London has been perfectly preserved, in all its chaotic splendour.

And this is just as well, since although the Life tells you a great deal about what Johnson was like, it doesn't actually tell you much about, well, his life. Boswell hurtles through Johnson's first fifty-three years in just 250 pages – or to put it another way, knocks out 70 percent of his subject's life in the first 18 percent of the biography. Boswell simply could not give a shit about the early years, which he wasn't there to see. As far as he was concerned, his own life began on the fateful day in 1763 when he met his hero, and that's when his Life really gets underway.

From then on, the pace drops to an unbelievable level of detail, with Boswell showing (as he admits) an ‘almost superstitious reverence’ for preserving everything his subject ever wrote or said in his presence, no matter how seemingly trivial. Thank-you letters, new year's resolutions, assorted prayers, comments on obscure court cases – a place is found here for all of them. It's a wonder that so much of it is as interesting as it is. But Boswell had found the subject of a lifetime, and Johnson emerges here in all his often grotesque detail, to demand attention. He must have been a striking figure – very tall for his time, with a shambling walk and a strong West Midlands accent, he dressed shabbily and was constantly in motion with a variety of tics and convulsive articulations:

while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometime protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, too, too, too: all this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile.

But he delivered his views with flair and aggression, preferring to argue against whatever everyone else was saying. Underneath his love of contradiction, his outlook was dominated by several settled opinions: Toryism, monarchism, High-Church piety, a hatred of democracy and republicanism, a love of classical quotation. In many cases, he and his biographer were on different sides of these issues: Johnson condemned the slave trade, while Boswell defended it; Boswell was a supporter of the American revolution, whereas Johnson was not (‘Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging’).

It was already clear that his fame would rest above all on his Dictionary, which really was a monumental achievement. Boswell gathers a lot of the discussions from the early days of that project, which are fascinating:

Aᴅᴀᴍs. This is a great work, Sir. How are you to get all the etymologies? Jᴏʜɴsᴏɴ. Why, Sir, here is a shelf with Junius, and Skinner, and others; and there is a Welch gentleman who has published a collection of Welch proverbs, who will help me with the Welch. Aᴅᴀᴍs. But, Sir, how can you do this in three years? Jᴏʜɴsᴏɴ. Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years. Aᴅᴀᴍs. But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary. Jᴏʜɴsᴏɴ. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

As this shows, Johnson could often be witty (generally at others' expense). However, he hated to be the butt of a joke, and was extremely sensitive to any hint that someone might be making fun of him, in print, on the stage, or in conversation. Boswell tells a wonderful story about Johnson making a passing reference, in mixed company, to an acquaintance's wife, and concluding that

‘the woman had a bottom of good sense.’ The word bottom thus introduced, was so ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear tittering and laughing; though I recollect that the Bishop of Killaloe kept his countenance with perfect steadiness, while Miss Hannah More slyly hid her face behind a lady's back who sat on the same settee with her. His pride could not bear that any expression of his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it; he therefore resolved to assume and exercise despotick power, glanced sternly around, and called out in a strong tone, ‘Where's the merriment?’ Then collecting himself, and looking aweful, to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced, ‘I say the woman was fundamentally sensible;’ as if he had said, hear this now, and laugh if you dare. We all sat composed as at a funeral.

His religiosity, which Boswell takes great pains to stress, is perhaps the more surprising for how little consolation it seems to have brought him. In fact, it was rather the opposite: he was utterly terrified by thoughts of death right until the end, and often in fits of anxiety about divine punishment. Even at the time, this was taking things a bit more literally than was considered proper. ‘I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be damned,’ he said, at one dinner-party in his seventies. ‘What do you mean by damned?’ one of his fellow diners asked timidly. Johnson barked back, ‘Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly!’ This lent a moody cast to much of his character:

From the subject of death we passed to discourse of life, whether it was upon the whole more happy or miserable. Johnson was decidedly for the balance of misery…

…although this did not seem to make him any more sympathetic to the miseries of others. When Boswell is going through one of his own periodic bouts of depression, Johnson writes to say: ‘Of the exaltations and depressions of your mind you delight to talk, and I hate to hear.’ Gee, thanks. You get the impression that Johnson was often heartily sick of Boswell's fawning attention, which Boswell often carried so far as to hover right behind Johnson's chair while in company, so that he never missed a choice bon mot.

The results of this obsession are exhaustive, not to say exhausting. The level of detail almost puts you in mind of an early AI experiment, where the accumulation of data seems designed to reproduce an entire personality in textual form. ‘The character of Samuel Johnson has, I trust, been so developed in the course of this work,’ Boswell says at the end, ‘that they who have honoured it with a perusal, may be considered as well acquainted with him.’ Others who read it agreed, including plenty who had no love for Boswell.

If you just want an introduction to these people and this time, Leo Damrosch's The Club may be a better choice; while a shorter (and often more entertaining) contemporary biography showing London society is JT Smith's vicious Nollekens And His Times. But this is something else, a kind of genus unto itself. Perhaps ironically, almost no one reads Johnson himself anymore; he is famous for being a subject of someone else's book. But like Socrates in Plato, he looms out of it with enough presence to tower over his student, and indeed the rest of his contemporaries too. He is bigger than the amber that preserves him; it's a neat trick.