Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Boswell's ambiguities
- Part I BOSWELL AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH CULTURE
- Part II CONTEXTS FOR THE LIFE OF JOHNSON
- Part III THE LIFE OF JOHNSON RECONSIDERED
- 10 The originality of Boswell's version of Johnson's quarrel with Lord Chesterfield
- 11 Self-restraint and self-display in the authorial comments in the Life of Johnson
- 12 Johnson's conversation in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 13 Remembering the hero in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 14 Truth and artifice in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- Index
13 - Remembering the hero in Boswell's Life of Johnson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Boswell's ambiguities
- Part I BOSWELL AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH CULTURE
- Part II CONTEXTS FOR THE LIFE OF JOHNSON
- Part III THE LIFE OF JOHNSON RECONSIDERED
- 10 The originality of Boswell's version of Johnson's quarrel with Lord Chesterfield
- 11 Self-restraint and self-display in the authorial comments in the Life of Johnson
- 12 Johnson's conversation in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 13 Remembering the hero in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 14 Truth and artifice in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- Index
Summary
The Doctor's bones must be acknowledged to be the bones of a giant, or there would be poor picking, after their having furnished Caledonian haggis, and a dish of Italian Macaroni, besides slices innumerable cut off from the body [by] Magazine mongers, anecdote merchants and rhyme stringers.
This vision of cannibalistic writers steadily carving away at the body of Samuel Johnson indicates clearly “the Doctor's” fate in the years following his death. Most immediately, it gives the reader a sense of the grimly competitive “industry” that grew up around the figure of Johnson. At least seven accounts of Johnson's life had been published even before his death in 1784, and at that point, production increased dramatically. Two new biographies of Johnson came out that very month, one in the Gentleman's Magazine and one in the European Magazine. 1785 saw the publication of William Cook's Life of Samuel Johnson and William Shaw's Memoirs of Samuel Johnson, as well as Boswell's own Tour to the Hebrides, with its announcement of a full-scale life of Johnson to follow. In 1786 appeared Joseph Towers's “Essay” on Johnson, and the first of two major texts that would stand in opposition to Boswell's work: Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson, which Boswell attacked in print, making good on a promise he had made to Malone, to “trim her recitativo and all her airs.” It was when Sir John Hawkins's “official” biography of Johnson appeared in 1787, however, that Boswell really asserted himself, not simply disparaging the work of his rivals (though he did that too), but mapping out where his own work stood in relation to these others.
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- New Light on BoswellCritical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicententary of the 'Life' of Johnson, pp. 194 - 206Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991