Samuel Johnson: A Biography

There are a lot of biographies and critical books about Dr. Johnson, but Wain's, though not "scholarly", is the best for the common reader, in part because Wain, being a novelist, knows how to tell a story.Also worth looking up is Wain's volume of selections from Boswell's Diaries, which are too voluminous to be read entire.Surprisingly, Wain's novels are not very good. Even HURRY ON DOWN, his most successful, is so dated now as to be almost unreadable. Compare it with Kingsley Amis' LUCKY JIM, which is still a very good read, and you'll see what I mean.Would that more second-rate novelists would tackle literary criticism and biography. Angus Wilson is probably the best example of a minor novelist who wrote first-rate critical biographies (on Dickens and Kipling especially), but C.P. Snow is excellent on Trollope, as is V.S. Pritchett on Turgenev and Balzac.

Wonderful biography!

This was a wonderful history, weaving in biography and history. The author did a great job og showing both the strengths and weaknesses of Samuel Johnson, all without a critical attitude.

I liked the pace and style of it; clear, cogent, and well researched. I would have liked to have tea with the author.

Samuel Johnson was very much the provincial Englishman of his age: monarchist, Tory, pious Anglican, defender of aristocracy. Though inhabiting an island, he first glimpsed the ocean at age 50. He never ventured farther from London than The Hebrides, except for one short sojourn to France at age 68 whose main effect was that he "appreciated England the more." Unlike his friend Burke, he opposed the American Revolution as subversive of natural order. Justifying hereditary aristocracy, he held that "there would be a perpetual struggle for precedence, were there no fixed invariable rules for the distinction of rank...."Do we have any use for such a musty figure? Yes we do, a lot.Johnson is the antidote to the singular characteristic of the age of video games, Facebook, and Twitter--superficiality. He had a Shakespearean understanding of human nature. Though blind in one eye, he saw everthing around him, ruminated deeply, and wrote out his ruminations with the profoundest clarity. Spend an afternoon reading "The Rambler" instead of surfing the Web and you will re-set your sensibilities.Wain, a novelist and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, presents Johnson to us in a delightfully easy and personal style.We find that the imposing figure we remember from school suffered from depression and long spells of indolence; had a powerful sex drive but was riven by guilt; was slovenly in dress; and had an almost superhuman memory. Contrary to his austere image, Johnson was, according to Wain, "as benevolent as any man who ever lived." He could be cranky, but seems to have been incapable of malice, was filled with compassion and what we would today call "empathy." He had a huge number of friends, most of them lasting a lifetime.We all remember "The Rambler" and the famous Dictionary, but we might have forgotten "The Lives of the Poets", "Notes to Shakespeare", "Journey to the Western Isles", and "Rassalas, Prince of Abyssinia." When we feel our converation getting stale, we can just dip into these, and be energized again.

Perhaps as much a novel as a biography, this is still the most enjoyable introduction to Dr. Johnson I have found. I loved it, and it is still on my shelf 45 years later. Read and enjoy, and do not over-analyze. Dr. Johnson will repay you to the end of your life.

the best biography I have read of Johnson, apart from Boswell's, and one of the best biographies ever. The book is very well written. The writer likes Johnson without idolatry. He notes his subject's imperfections. The reader gets to love Johnson. Wain gives us lots of information on how he lived and worked, his circle of friends, rich and poor, his "family" composed of Frank, the african boy Johnson more or less adopted, and the others that he supported and took care of, and what life was like in eighteenth century England. We imagine Johnson sitting among others, holding forth. We grieve when he grieves. He was very funny, very witty, and very astute about the human condition.

This book was my introduction to Johnson forty-some years ago and it's still on my shelf. I've read other books about Johnson, but this is the one that I'm thinking of re-reading.

Quality

Enjoyed the book very much

John Wain's take on Johnson's life should be read by anyone interested in the great man. Not so much because it makes redundant other biographies but as a warning to be skeptical about what you read. Wain see's too much of Johnson and his time through the lens of "psycho-babble", an approach which would have enraged his subject had he been alive to read it.There is much good solid biography in this book and for this reason alone it is worth reading but a whole bundle of quack Freudian theories are trotted out without the author seeming to be aware that amateur psychologist's are a bane when it comes to biography but an amateur psychologist who seems not to know that discredited theories applied to a writer who died about two hundred and fifty years ago is some-what ludicrous.Johnson's odd relationship with the Thrales is explored with relish but the suggestion that Mrs.Thrale had a sexual fling with Johnson is hard to take and backed by no evidence what-so ever. To then go on and suggest that she also flogged an ageing Johnson during their sex games is the sort of mumbo-jumbo that has made most people, rightly so, very wary of Freud and his ideas.That aside,if you dicount the many excursions into the pseudo-science beloved by pschoanalysts there is much worth reading in this book.Refreshingly the author gives due credit to Boswell's great contribution to our knowledge of Johnson rather than following the modern trend of rubishing him. For that we owe some thanks to Mr.Wain. A book to be recommended but with caution when it comes to facts as against flights of fancy.