Samuel Johnson - Softcover

Peter Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753825929 ISBN 13: 9780753825921

Publisher: Phoenix, 2009

Synopsis

Poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, critic, conversationalist and wit, Dr Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare. This new biography illuminates the unknown Johnson: the awkward youth, the unsuccessful schoolmaster, the eccentric marriage, his early years in London in the 1740s scratching a living, the epic struggle to produce the Dictionary. Using material unknown to previous biographers, Peter Martin describes the psychological knife-edge on which Johnson felt he lived, caused by his severe melancholia and his physical diseases. The Samuel Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable and sympathetic figure than the one that Boswell so memorably portrayed.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Martin was born in Argentina of English parents and educated there and in America. He has taught English literature in both England and America and written extensively on 18th-century British and American literature and culture. He divides his time between southern Spain and West Sussex.

From Booklist

Fifty years ago, the sobriquet literary dictator was still applied to figures so eminent as to make all their contemporaries seem lesser. The greatest was Samuel Johnson (1709–84), who devoted much of his life to three projects—a general dictionary, a critical edition of Shakespeare, and The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets—that comprehensively defined English and its literature and set standards for subsequent lexicography and literary criticism. In a big book that is a patchwork of quotations but never loses momentum or fascination, Martin shows that the long gestations of Johnson’s major achievements owed as much to his lifelong battle with depression as to their size and complexity. Proceeding as chronologically as possible, Martin thoroughly recounts Johnson’s rise from poverty to preeminence because of an intellectual distinction so commanding that it overpowered a vast array of physical and temperamental infelicities. Martin demonstrates, too, that though now regarded as a conservative forefather, Johnson was, in his stances against slavery and empire and with the poor, decidedly liberal. He would have said Christian. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Phoenix
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0753825929
• ISBN 13: 9780753825921
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 568