Samuel Johnson: A Biography

by Peter Martin

Overview

Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary tics, opinionated, powered in his conversation by a prodigious memory and intellect, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was in his life a literary and social icon as no other age has produced. “Johnsonianissimus,” as Boswell called him, became in the hands of his first biographers the rationalist epitome and sage of Enlightenment. These clichés—though they contain elements of truth—distort the complexity of the public and private Johnson. Peter Martin portrays a Johnson wracked by recriminations, self-doubt, and depression—a man whose religious faith seems only to have deepened his fears. His essays, scholarship, biography, journalism, travel writing, sermons, fables, as well as other forms of prose and poetry in which he probed himself and the world around him, Martin shows, constituted rational triumphs against despair and depression. It is precisely the combination of enormous intelligence and frank personal weakness that makes Johnson’s writing so compelling.

Benefiting from recent critical scholarship that has explored new attitudes toward Johnson, Martin’s biography gives us a human and sympathetic portrait of Dr. Johnson. Johnson’s criticism of colonial expansion, his advocacy for the abolition of slavery, his encouragement of women writers, his treatment of his female friends as equals, and his concern for the underprivileged and poor make him a very “modern” figure. The Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography, published for the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth, is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable, flawed, and sympathetic figure than has been previously known.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674057371
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2010
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Peter Martin has taught English on both sides of the Atlantic and is the author of A Life of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson: A Biography.

Table of Contents

• Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface

Part One, Staffordshire Youth

1. Anecdotes of Beggary
2. Stepping on the Duckling
3. Leaping over the Rail
4. Two Benefactors

Part Two, Despondency and Hope

5. Oxford: Wielding a Scholar’s Weapon
6. Horrible Imaginings
7. Stirrings in Birmingham
8. Taking a Wife

Part Three, Slow Rises Worth

9. Stranger in London
10. Sons of Misery: Finding Richard Savage
11. ‘Slow Rises Worth by Poverty Depress’d’
12. Wandering in the Midlands

Part Four, Triumph: The Dictionary Years

13. London Revived: A Lion in Harness
14. A Lifeline: The Dictionary
15. Poetic Interludes
16. Tetty and ‘Amorous Propensities’
17. The Triumph of the Moralist
18. Darkness Falls
19. Once More unto the Breach: Back to the Dictionary

Part Five, Depression, Shakespeare, Travel and Anger

20. Stalled
21. ‘Suffering Chimeras’
22. ‘Vain and Corrupt Imaginations’
23. Boswell and Mrs Thrale
24. Shakespeare and the Living World
25. Coliseum of Beasts
26. Back to Shakespeare and the Dictionary
27. The Road to the Hebrides
28. Politics and Travel

Part Six, Biography and ‘The Race with Death’

29. ‘A Very Poor Creeper upon the Earth’
30. Biographical Straitjacket
31. Losing Ground
32. The Last Days

• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Peter Martin's biography of Samuel Johnson is a profoundly poignant and eloquent account of the Western world's greatest literary critic. It is superior even to Martin's valuable biography of Boswell.

Harold Bloom

Peter Martin's biography of Samuel Johnson is a profoundly poignant and eloquent account of the Western world's greatest literary critic. It is superior even to Martin's valuable biography of Boswell.

Robert Folkenflik

As Johnson's three hundredth birthday approaches, the time is ripe for a new biography that takes into account all we have learned about Johnson in this century and the later years of the last. Martin knows and tells. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed book that should find a broad and appreciative audience.
— Robert Folkenflik, University of California, Irvine

Henry Hitchings

Building on his previous work on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson's most celebrated biographer, Peter Martin has written a humane, coherent and accessible life of the great eighteenth-century polymath, deftly and sympathetically exploring his personal relationships and psyche while also locating him in the literary culture of his age.
— Henry Hitchings, author of Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World

Editorial Reviews

Modern biographers are aware of the competition. They have to write a first-rate book about Johnson or hear from critics that they’ve foolishly entered the wrong league. And a number of scholars, notably Paul Fussell and W. Jackson Bate, have given us remarkable portraits. They’re now joined by Peter Martin, whose Samuel Johnson: A Biography is a model of its kind: a deeply felt, beautifully written account of a personality about whom we cannot know enough.

Wall Street Journal - George Sim Johnston

As author also of A Life of James Boswell, Martin knows the territory and obviously enjoys it… The tercentenary of the birth of so large a figure is more than enough reason for new perspectives, and Martin’s work is worthwhile.

Choice - G. Shivel

Peter Martin’s biography of Samuel Johnson is a profoundly poignant and eloquent account of the Western world’s greatest literary critic. It is superior even to Martin’s valuable biography of Boswell.

Harold Bloom

Building on his previous work on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s most celebrated biographer, Peter Martin has written a humane, coherent and accessible life of the great eighteenth-century polymath, deftly and sympathetically exploring his personal relationships and psyche while also locating him in the literary culture of his age.

Henry Hitchings

Martin brings alive with novelistic detail such famous scenes as Johnson’s youthful ride to London to be touched by Queen Anne for ‘the king’s evil’—scrofula, which was believed to be curable by a touch from royalty; his public rejection of the Earl of Chesterfield’s 11th-hour patronage of his dictionary; and the actor David Garrick’s keyhole spying on (and later parody of) Johnson’s amorous pursuit of Mrs. Johnson. For a man who bragged and twitched and stank, Johnson had a lot of friends, and Martin superintends them like a film director: poet Charlotte Lennox, painter Joshua Reynolds, novelist Fanny Burney and, of course, future laird and biographer James Boswell.

Michael Sims Book World

[An] outstanding new biography.

The Atlantic - Christopher Hitchens

A fetching new version of the life of Samuel Johnson.

Chicago Tribune - Julia Keller

The story is well told, quotations from Boswell and Johnson are frequent and judicious, the anecdotes (familiar to some) are enlivening, and a picture of the fierce, complicated, manically eccentric genius emerges that will provoke admiration and wonder.

Globe and Mail - Rex Murphy

Meticulously researched and well written.

Washington Times - James Srodes

[Martin] is a literary conduit, bringing Johnson from the 18th-century English Tory world of letters down to the modern reader… [He is] an author who writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity… He shows why the man is still so influential and—important this—still read.

National Post - Michael Coren

Martin offers a convincing psychological study.

Leah Price

As Johnson’s three hundredth birthday approaches, the time is ripe for a new biography that takes into account all we have learned about Johnson in this century and the later years of the last. Martin knows and tells. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed book that should find a broad and appreciative audience.

Robert Folkenflik

Martin has spent a lifetime steeped in Johnson’s world, having written definitive biographies of Boswell and of Edmond Malone, the Irish Shakespearean scholar without whose help the unstable Boswell might never have finished his massive biography… As a character, Johnson turns out to be not only funny and wildly eccentric—as we always knew he was—but deeply poignant. I was moved to tears by Martin’s biography.

Brooke Allen

A lively new biography, a book well seasoned with good stories, most of which do not seek always to show the Doctor in a better light… Martin is sympathetic to Johnson and equally sympathetic to the truth about him. He has hitherto written excellent biographies of both Boswell and Edmond Malone—two of the Doctor’s brightest satellites—and he turns to Johnson with a strong and nuanced sense of how he was, as much as anything, the figment of a great many busy pens, not least his own.

New York Review of Books - Andrew O’Hagan

[Samuel Johnson] will give readers a good sense of this extraordinary individual. For those who already know a fair bit about the subject, Martin will fill out the picture more amply.

New Criterion - Pat Rogers

Martin brings alive with novelistic detail such famous scenes as Johnson’s youthful ride to London to be touched by Queen Anne for ‘the king’s evil’—scrofula, which was believed to be curable by a touch from royalty; his public rejection of the Earl of Chesterfield’s 11th-hour patronage of his dictionary; and the actor David Garrick’s keyhole spying on (and later parody of) Johnson’s amorous pursuit of Mrs. Johnson. For a man who bragged and twitched and stank, Johnson had a lot of friends, and Martin superintends them like a film director: poet Charlotte Lennox, painter Joshua Reynolds, novelist Fanny Burney and, of course, future laird and biographer James Boswell.

Washington Post Book World - Michael Sims

A lively new biography, a book well seasoned with good stories, most of which do not seek always to show the Doctor in a better light… Martin is sympathetic to Johnson and equally sympathetic to the truth about him. He has hitherto written excellent biographies of both Boswell and Edmond Malone—two of the Doctor’s brightest satellites—and he turns to Johnson with a strong and nuanced sense of how he was, as much as anything, the figment of a great many busy pens, not least his own.

New York Review of Books - Andrew O’Hagan

A lively new biography, a book well seasoned with good stories, most of which do not seek always to show the Doctor in a better light...Martin is sympathetic to Johnson and equally sympathetic to the truth about him. He has hitherto written excellent biographies of both Boswell and Edmond Malone--two of the Doctor's brightest satellites--and he turns to Johnson with a strong and nuanced sense of how he was, as much as anything, the figment of a great many busy pens, not least his own.

New York Review of Books - Andrew O'Hagan

[Martin] writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity. Martin is strikingly good...on Johnson's literary achievement. He shows why the man is still so influential and—important this—still read.
— Michael Coren

Ottawa Citizen

[Martin] is a literary conduit, bringing Johnson from the 18th-century English Tory world of letters down to the modern reader...[He is] an author who writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity...He shows why the man is still so influential and—important this—still read.
— Michael Coren

National Post

A lively new biography, a book well seasoned with good stories, most of which do not seek always to show the Doctor in a better light...Martin is sympathetic to Johnson and equally sympathetic to the truth about him. He has hitherto written excellent biographies of both Boswell and Edmond Malone—two of the Doctor's brightest satellites—and he turns to Johnson with a strong and nuanced sense of how he was, as much as anything, the figment of a great many busy pens, not least his own.
— Andrew O'Hagan

New York Review of Books

As author also of A Life of James Boswell, Martin knows the territory and obviously enjoys it...The tercentenary of the birth of so large a figure is more than enough reason for new perspectives, and Martin's work is worthwhile.
— G. Shivel

Choice

[Samuel Johnson] will give readers a good sense of this extraordinary individual. For those who already know a fair bit about the subject, Martin will fill out the picture more amply.
— Pat Rogers

New Criterion

Martin offers a convincing psychological study.
— Leah Price

New York Times Review of Books

The story is well told, quotations from Boswell and Johnson are frequent and judicious, the anecdotes (familiar to some) are enlivening, and a picture of the fierce, complicated, manically eccentric genius emerges that will provoke admiration and wonder.
— Rex Murphy

Globe and Mail

[An] outstanding new biography.
— Christopher Hitchens

The Atlantic

Martin has spent a lifetime steeped in Johnson's world, having written definitive biographies of Boswell and of Edmond Malone, the Irish Shakespearean scholar without whose help the unstable Boswell might never have finished his massive biography...As a character, Johnson turns out to be not only funny and wildly eccentric—as we always knew he was—but deeply poignant. I was moved to tears by Martin's biography.
— Brooke Allen

Wilson Quarterly

Meticulously researched and well written.
— James Srodes

Washington Times

Martin brings alive with novelistic detail such famous scenes as Johnson's youthful ride to London to be touched by Queen Anne for "the king's evil"—scrofula, which was believed to be curable by a touch from royalty; his public rejection of the Earl of Chesterfield's 11th-hour patronage of his dictionary; and the actor David Garrick's keyhole spying on (and later parody of) Johnson's amorous pursuit of Mrs. Johnson. For a man who bragged and twitched and stank, Johnson had a lot of friends, and Martin superintends them like a film director: poet Charlotte Lennox, painter Joshua Reynolds, novelist Fanny Burney and, of course, future laird and biographer James Boswell.
— Michael Sims

Washington Post Book World

A fetching new version of the life of Samuel Johnson.
— Julia Keller

Chicago Tribune

Modern biographers are aware of the competition. They have to write a first-rate book about Johnson or hear from critics that they've foolishly entered the wrong league. And a number of scholars, notably Paul Fussell and W. Jackson Bate, have given us remarkable portraits. They're now joined by Peter Martin, whose Samuel Johnson: A Biography is a model of its kind: a deeply felt, beautifully written account of a personality about whom we cannot know enough.
— George Sim Johnston

Wall Street Journal

Reliable, readable life of 18th-century England's most celebrated intellectual, lexicographer, poet, critic, biographer, essayist, Tory, travel writer and-perhaps most of all-Personality. Few writers can approach Johnson (1709-84) more surely than Martin, biographer of the Great Man's own famous biographer (A Life of James Boswell, 2000, etc.). He does so in conventional fashion, beginning with a sketch of Johnson's hometown, Lichfield, and ending with the funeral and burial, discussing intervening events more or less chronologically. There are few surprises. Martin does argue that Johnson was, perhaps, not so adamantine a Tory as others have portrayed him, more than once declaring that it's unproductive and inaccurate to view Whig v. Tory as a simplistic struggle merely mirroring today's Right v. Left. Yet he acknowledges that Johnson strongly opposed U.S. independence (famously dismissing the principal American champions of freedom as "drivers of Negroes"), accepted a pension from George III and enjoyed the honorary Oxford doctorate arranged by a grateful government when he published a pamphlet attacking the American rebels' position on taxation. Politics aside, Martin ably shows us the enormous depths of Johnson's humanity. He was hideously scarred by scrofula, nearly blind, subject to violent twitching that suggests Tourette's, big and clumsy and taurine, often unkempt and always impecunious. Yet Johnson nonetheless married (with uneven result), had devoted friends (to whom he was fiercely devoted), opened his home to those in need, enjoyed the company of the famous (Joshua Reynolds, hometown buddy David Garrick) but also the unknown. He battled melancholy continually, railed againsthis own sometimes dilatory ways, yet when ready to work was immensely productive in a very short time, his pen flashing across the page, his mind remembering the vast libraries he'd read, his imagination soaring where few had ever gone, or ever will go, not least of all in the astonishing Dictionary. From the ordinary clay of words, Martin sculpts an impressive image of an extraordinary man.

Kirkus Reviews