Samuel Johnson
A Biography
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Descripción editorial
The first new biography for a generation of one of the great figures of English literature
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. Our view of Johnson has been overwhelmingly shaped by James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, the most famous biography in the English language. But invaluable as Boswell is as a source, he should not be the last word.
This new biography illuminates the Johnson that Boswell never knew: 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. Very much the outsider, rather than the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense.
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. He explores Johnson's role in the publishing and printing world of the time and he reveals how important women were to Johnson throughout his life.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Famed for his dictionary, "Rambler" essays and The Lives of the English Poets, 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 (A Life of James Boswell) 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. He grew up the illness-wracked, nearly blind son of a backwater bookseller. Martin shows how Johnson's distant relationships with his family came to haunt him on the death of each member. Likewise, Johnson's strange mannerisms and disfigurement, marriage to a woman twice his age and poverty early in his career further shaped his psyche. Through all this, Martin says, Johnson was also a bit of a ladies' man, and notes in Johnson's journal references to the practice or condition of "M.," which, Martin speculates, stands for masturbation or defecation. Martin admirably succeeds in giving a new generation Dr. Johnson, warts and all, from the inside, though in prose that remains only serviceable. 30 b&w illus., map.
