Samuel Johnson: The Struggle

Dr. Samuel Johnson deserves to be called a larger-than-life personality.Johnson was a man of many contrasts and these are exactly the things that make him the ideal man for this wonderful biography,written by Jefferey Meyers. Johnson was half-deaf and half-blind.He was both energetic and lazy ,aggressive yet tender.He suffered from bouts of melancholy (or what one would call "The Black Dog" -a term used by the great Churchill who was himself victim of this sort of depression)but waas also wiity and full of energy and zest for life.Johnson was extremely curious about anything and was generous to the poor and the homeless.He rescued prostitutes,defended condemned criminals and was against slavery ot the exploitation of indigenious peoples.Despite his mental and physical handicaps,Dr. Johnson became famous as poet,novelist,biographer, essayist,critic, editor and lexicographer.All his life to his last breath was a struggle-thus the subtitle of the book.Indolent and sloppy, he experienced humiliating povery at Oxford and left without a degree.At an older age he got married to a much older woman and after her death,he remained celibate for more than thirty years.He gave generously to homeless children and beggars,and also secured clothes for French prisoners of war.He saw life as an endless contest.This showed also in the way he battled from book to book and struggled against formidable obstructions.His violence and surprising athletic feats were essential outlets for his frustration,his anger and his sexual passion.He always enjoyed a fight. This biography offers new interpretations of Johnson's life and works.Johnson's two monumental projects, the Dictionary of the English Language and his eight-volume edition of Shakespeare's plays had occupied him for twenty years. Meyers is extremely good and generous when describing Johnson's friends in London-among them Burke,Gibbon,Sir Reynolds,Boswell,the actor Garrick and Oliver Smith. Boswell, for example, shaped Johnson's life by luring him to Scotland.When in France, Johnson somehow admired the French but eventually came to the conclusion that"there is no happy middle state as in England".After he returned to London he wrote that"the French have a clear air and a fruitful soil,but their mode of common life is gross,and incommodious, and disgusting.In short, he confirmed his belief in the superiority of the English. Johnson also wrote about famous English poets, among them:Milton,Pope,Dryden and Swift.He took care to deliniate each poet's character and express authorittative judgement onn his poetry.Of "Paradise Lost" he wrote:"None ever wished it longer than it is". This biography merits five points because it is written in a dynamic and interesting style,serious yey light, and the reader will get a panoramic picture not only of Johnson but also about the events and personalities and the common people that were part of the eighteenth century- one which considered among the best literary epoch of the Engli

This is a readable and entertaining biography of Samuel Johnson. It is well written and expertly organized. As with other Meyers biographies, however, the research is sometimes sloppy. I suspect that Meyers does not do all his research himself but farms it out to others who are not that knowledgeable in the field. This results in the kinds of factual errors that crop up in this volume. I'll cite just two examples. Meyers writes on page 293 that James Boswell met Johnson "in the back room of Tom Davies' bookshop at 8 Great Russell Street, near what is now the British Museum." The problem is, Davies' bookshop was not in GREAT Russell Street near the British Museum, but in Russell Street, Covent Garden--similar names but entirely different streets about half a mile apart. On page 441 Meyers states that Johnson is buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey under Shakespeare's monument, "[David] Garrick at his right hand and [Oliver] Goldsmith just opposite." But Goldsmith is not buried in Westminster Abbey. He is buried in the Temple, just off Fleet Street, near the north-east side of Temple Church, under a white, weather-worn stone, shaped like a coffin lid. The stone bears the inscription "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith." In the Poets' Corner hangs a memorial tablet and portrait of Goldsmith executed in marble by Joseph Nollekens and containing an inscription in Latin by Johnson. Sir Joshua Reynolds had the memorial placed above the door leading into St. Faith's Chapel, opposite to where Johnson and Garrick are buried. This cenotaph might lead the unsuspecting to think Goldsmith buried nearby, but he isn't.

Samuel Johnson belongs to another age, but his biography by James Boswell will be with us for as long as people are interested in reading about other people. Johnson's literary hits, his poems, plays, and essays, were well known in their time, but are fairly well limited now to academic study only. His splendid dictionary is long out of date, though his lexicographic principles are still regarded as exemplary by editors of, say, _The Oxford English Dictionary_. But in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ we have a memorable character, funny, brilliant, and quirky; it was the first biography that brought forth the subject's personality, and Johnson will live in it forever. Boswell's portrait, for all its depth and magnificence, didn't get everything in. As Jeffrey Meyers, a previous biographer of many literary characters, points out in _Samuel Johnson: The Struggle_ (Basic Books), Boswell only knew Johnson in the latter part of his life, and devotes only a fifth of his biography to Johnson's first fifty-five years. Boswell knew of Johnson's diaries, but barely got a glimpse of them. Boswell was frank about recording his own sexual details in his journals, and knew something of Johnson's sexual enthusiasm, but did not see fit to write about it. He also suppressed details about Johnson's use of profanity, his excesses in eating and drinking, and his lapses into a depression bordering on madness. He didn't know anything of Johnson's fondness for whips, chains, and padlocks to be used upon him sexually. Meyers knows all these things, and tells them, and the result is a detailed, sympathetic portrait that will, of course, never replace the original, but will deepen the appreciation of just how much of a struggle it was to be Samuel Johnson, and how successfully the struggle was waged. Among Johnson's difficulties was that he was ugly; his face had been scarred by scrofula, which had also left him blind in one eye and deaf. He also had wriggling and obsessive movement. It is possible that he had Tourette's disorder. When William Hogarth first saw him at a distance, he "perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner." Hogarth concluded that he was an idiot, and was astonished thereafter to be addressed by him with surpassing eloquence. It was the eloquence and literary brilliance, of course, that was to be the making of Johnson in London, but only after years of failing as a schoolmaster in his own home region. He took hack work at first, and his peculiar appearance and movements didn't make a difference in his capacity to write, and scholarly and illustrious talkers like Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith easily learned how deep a fund of knowledge and elevated jocularity were within the bizarre-looking person. He worked hard, but constantly reproached himself for indolence. Johnson practiced so many of the Christian virtues (for instan

Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was a Renaissance man living in the Augustan Age of the late eighteenth century. He was a literary genius who produced among many other works: 1. The famous Dictonary of the English Language published in 1755. Dr. Johnson and a team of assistants produced this great work of scholarship after many years of labor.Johnson's Dictionary is still used today and is notable for its literary quotes and idiosyncratic definitions. 2. He produced such outstanding poetic classics as "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes." Johnson's only play "Irene" was a dismal failure. He produced an excellent editon of Shakespeare based on the first folio as well as "Lives of the English Poets" completed in his autumnal years. 3. Johnson wrote voluminously for such magazines as "The Rambler", "The Adventurer" and "The Idler." His essays are masterpieces of English prose. 4. Johnson is the subject of the first modern biography which is James Boswell's "The Life of Johnson." Boswell was a Presbyterian rake but loved Johnson the devout member of the Church of England. 5, Johnson is one of the most erudite English authors. He left Oxford without a degree but knew French, Latin and ancient poets like the back of his large hands. 6. He suffered from many bodily woes such as being blind in one eye; deaf in one ear and horribly scared by smallpox. Johnson was nearly six feet tall and was mobidly obese. He suffered such maladies as dropsy, heart, kidney and liver problems. In addition to his physical afflictons, he was melancholic and gloomy. He feared hell fire and suffered from sexual problems (his good friend Hester Thrale beat him with whips to satisfy his urge to suffer flagellation due to what he considered his many sins.) He married a much older woman "Tettie"; was inconsolable when she died and never married though he was sexually attracted to other women. He was in love with the aristocratic Hester Thrale but she had no interest in becoming the second Mrs. Johnson. Johnson was an ardent anglophile who hated Scotland, Americans and the French. He was a xenophobic Tory who met Queen Anne,George III and the French King Louis XVI while touring Paris. He had many prejudices. Johnson was, despite his rudeness a kind man. He hated chattel slavery, cruelty to animals, capital punishment for minor crimes and warfare. He could be abrasive but helped many people with the gift of money or a shoulder to lean on it times of trouble. Several of these wretches were allowed to live in his home including prostitutes and foreigners. Mrs. Anne Wlliams lived with him for years. She was blind. He cared for Jamaican born Frances Barber who he got mustered out of the navy. Johnson could live in any social setting. Among his many joys was intellectual companionship with such famous figures as painter Joshua Reynolds, authors Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Richards, Fanny Burney and Hannah Moore. He was friendly with David Garrick the famous actor who came from Johns

I have read the other Johnson biography of the season, Peter Martin's, and would suggest this effort by Jeffery Meyers is the more entertaining and pleasant to read. While both biographies are good, if I were asked to recommend one of the two to a friend who was a general reader, I would not hesitate to recommend Meyers'. Jeffery Meyers brings Dr. Johnson to life for the person of our times by wisely using the great man's own words and those of others who were close to him, including Mrs. Thrale and James Boswell. Those who enjoy the art of writing will find this book instructive, both from the direct quotations from Dr. Johnson and the author's own intelligent and informative asides.