Samuel Johnson: his times and his circle

Abstract

The Samuel Johnson most familiar to us is the man shaped by James Boswell (1740–95) in his Life, first published in 1791. Boswell saw Johnson, despite his many weaknesses, as a great moralist, as a person who held to certain beliefs with an assurance that seemed lacking in those of his own generation. And Boswell tended to think of Johnson as a representative of that more assured past. It was with these ideas in mind that he shaped his character of Johnson. Although Boswell was one of the first writers who, through his journals, gives us the vision of the self as something constantly in flux, something to be ordered only with the greatest effort of will, he wanted to see in the great men he sought out — Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, the Corsican Patriot, Paoli (1725–1807) — more stability of character than he possessed. He showed Johnson with many of his virtues and (what made the work scandalous to contemporaries) many of his faults, but he tended to show him consistent — more like a character in a novel than the living, breathing Johnson.