ABSTRACT
The great original biography of Samuel Johnson’s early career, the Life of Richard Savage , the profligate, self-destructive writer and friend of Johnson, appeared just two years after the last of the earlier journalistic lives was published. In the tradition of Plutarch, Johnson distinguishes the “general and rapid narratives of history” from the educative specificity of biography, introducing the key observation that “there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.” In 1750 and again in 1759, Johnson wrote two important essays on biography. The first essay, Rambler No. 60, examines biography from ethical, psychological, and rhetorical points of view, in this order of importance, interweaving the operations of these three elements while establishing clearly a hierarchy among them. Johnson’s second essay on biography, Idler No. 84, elaborates the previous discussion of how the genre’s imaginative appeal derives from readers recognizing its applicability to their own lives.
