ABSTRACT
No personality in the history of English literature is more powerful than Samuel Johnson (1709-84). The magnetism of the man reaches us through two channels, that of his own work, and that of the greatest biography in our language by James Boswell (1740-95). The Life of Johnson is strictly outside our immediate period in that it was not published until 1791, well after Johnson’s death. But we cannot ignore it in looking at Johnson; and the fidelity of Boswell’s reportage is such that one can allow it to fill out the picture as naturally as one allows Keats’s letters to colour one’s reading of his poems. Even so one must remember that Boswell’s first meeting with Johnson, in 1763, occurred when Johnson was already fifty-four and had acquired the eminence and freedom from financial cares which it had taken him over thirty years to purchase.
