Samuel Johnson: A Biography - Hardcover

Martin, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674031601 ISBN 13: 9780674031609

Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Martin has taught English literature on both sides of the Atlantic and is the author of A Life of James Boswell.

Review:

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

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

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

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)... From the ordinary clay of words, Martin sculpts an impressive image of an extraordinary man. (Kirkus Reviews 2008-07-01)

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) remains one of the most-quoted and carefully observed authors who ever lived. On the occasion of Johnson's tercentenary, Martin searches out the psychological elements covered up by Boswell and others: the immense insecurities, bouts of deep depression, corrosive self-doubt and, in his last days, despair for his very soul...Martin admirably succeeds in giving a new generation Dr. Johnson, warts and all, from the inside. (Publishers Weekly 2008-07-21)

Martin's book emphasizes aspects of Johnson not covered by any previously published biographies--including excellent ones by W. Jackson Bate, James L. Clifford, John Wain, and, of course, James Boswell--notably Johnson's deep depressions; his liberal views on women writers, slavery, and poverty (he was not the complete Tory that others have painted him); and Johnson as a writer whose works deserve to be better known by the general public...Written in an engaging manner and featuring many quotations from Johnson and his friends and acquaintances, this new portrait of a complex, multifaceted writer and thinker is highly recommended.
--Morris Hounion (Library Journal 2008-09-01)

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 2008-09-18)

A fetching new version of the life of Samuel Johnson.
--Julia Keller (Chicago Tribune 2008-10-19)

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 2008-12-21)

Meticulously researched and well written.
--James Srodes (Washington Times 2009-01-25)

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0674031601
• ISBN 13: 9780674031609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 640