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The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson

Part of the Studies in Modern History Book Series

Editors: Clark, Jonathan; Erskine-Hill, Howard

DOI: 10.1057/9781137264725

ISBN: 978-1-349-34729-2

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK - Springer Journals

Nov 23, 2015

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Chapter 1Introduction

Erskine-Hill, Howard

Pages: 1 –10

[There is a problem and a paradox in Johnsonian studies. Many critics want to discover that Johnson was in many ways like themselves. It is good for the vanity to discover that when you were, formally speaking, writing about Johnson, you were in some part writing about yourself. The inner psyche...
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Chapter 2Planning a Life of Johnson

Lock, F. P.

Pages: 11 –42

[Samuel Johnson ranks among the most alluring of biographical subjects. His life is recorded more richly than that of any earlier Englishman, and more fully than the lives of most writers before the twentieth century. Soon after his death, several of those who had known him rushed their...
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Chapter 3Attack and Mask: James Boswell’s Indebtedness to Sir John Hawkins’ Life of Samuel Johnson

Brack, O. M.

Pages: 43 –71

[James Boswell’s (1740–95) attack on the authority, content and style of Sir John Hawkins’ (1719–89) Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787) is, in fact, a mask to disguise his heavy indebtedness to it in his own Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791). In A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)...
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Chapter 4Boswell and the Making of Johnson

Pittock, Murray

Pages: 72 –83

[Despite the massive scholarly enterprise of the Yale Boswell, and the large initial sales of Boswell’s London Journal, his most salacious piece of self-representation, following its first appearance in 1951, Boswell’s reputation still rests to a very great extent on the Life of Johnson (1791)....
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Chapter 5‘The Casuistical Question’: Oaths and Hypocrisy in the Writings of Johnson and Bolingbroke

Lashmore-Davies, Adrian

Pages: 84 –119

[Jonathan Clark has made a persuasive case for the continuing importance of oaths in eighteenth-century society and their relevance to Samuel Johnson’s politics. ‘Between public assent and public refusal’, writes Clark, there ‘lay a wide spectrum of possibilities’ ranging from avoidance of oaths...
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Chapter 6Fire under the Ashes: Johnson’s Lives of the Poets as Narratives of History

Erskine-Hill, Howard

Pages: 120 –164

[In Johnson’s ‘Life of Addison’, at the point where strict biography ends and the survey of works begins, he reminds himself of the hazards of writing about ‘contemporaries’ or near contemporaries. ‘I begin to feel myself walking upon ashes under which fire is not extinguished, and coming to the...
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Chapter 7Johnson, Macpherson and the Memoirs of the Marshal Duke of Berwick

MacKenzie, Niall

Pages: 165 –201

[This essay proposes a connection between two episodes on opposite ends of the familiarity scale. Johnson’s feud with James Macpherson brought out one of Johnson’s most extensively discussed intellectual and personal antipathies. That feud supplies the more familiar of my two episodes. The less...
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Chapter 8Conclusion

Clark, Jonathan

Pages: 202 –223

[The steps of historical method that may be taken to contextualize evidence and draw inferences about Johnson have been reviewed in this and our companion volume, The Politics of Samuel Johnson; but such steps have been dismissed as ‘speculation’ or ‘conjecture’ by those who evidently employ...

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