Book description
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. 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.
