James Boswell's 'The Life of Samuel Johnson'

By: Ian Mackean
Submitted: 2007-01-17 11:24:30
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James Boswell's 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' is perhaps the best-known biography in English literature, and it marked a turning point in the art of biography writing. Through Boswell's prose Johnson comes across as a wholly believable man. We do not get just an account of his life, but feel we have been there with Boswell and seen and heard Johnson for ourselves.

Boswell revolutionised the art of biography, and was well aware that he was doing so. At the time he was writing there were two traditions of biography, the ethical (deriving from Plutarch's 'Parallel Lives'), in which incidents were shown for the moral instruction of the reader, and the anecdotal (deriving from Xenophon's 'Memorabilia of Socrates'), in which incidents were shown for their own sake, without moral lessons being attached.

Boswell's achievement in this field was to combine the two traditions. He portrays incidents without necessarily weighing them down with a moral lesson, but at the same time there is a clear intention to present Johnson as a moral hero. This underlying moral stance saved Boswell from the charge which was levelled against anecdotal biography in the eighteenth century, which was that it pandered to idle curiosity.

Boswell was also revolutionary in portraying his material in dramatic scenes, in contrast, for example, to Johnson's own 'Lives of the Poets', which are presented as judgmental commentaries. The result is that the people portrayed are as real to us as characters in the work of the best novelists, and we feel we know them almost as if we had met them. Boswell has combined the mimetic skill of the novelist with the accuracy of the diarist, and has been called the first 'mimetic biographer'.

So Boswell was much more of a conscious artist than may appear at first glance. It is said that he employs 'the art which conceals art', and he wrote in a letter: 'I am absolutely certain that my mode of biography is the most perfect that can be conceived'. There may be a case for arguing, as some critics do, that the Johnson we read about is a character created by Boswell, but at the same time there is little doubt that the character is true to life, or that Boswell has lived up to his claim that Johnson 'will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived'. (Advertisement to 'The Life'.)

Bibliography. Brady, Frank. 'James Boswell, the later years 1769-1795'. Heinemann.

More English Literature Essays: http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/

Ian Mackean runs the sites http://www.literature-study-online.com, which features a substantial collection of Resources and Essays, (and where his site on Short Story Writing can also be found,) and http://www.Booksmadeintomovies.com. He is the editor of The Essentials of Literature in English post-1914, ISBN 0340882689, which was published by Hodder Arnold in 2005. When not writing about literature or short story writing he is a keen amateur photographer, and has made a site of his photography at http://www.photo-zen.com

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