ABSTRACT
No personality in the history of English literature is more powerful than Samuel Johnson. 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. The Life of Johnson is outside our immediate period in that it was not published until 1791, well after Johnson’s death. Johnson survives in verbal and visual portraiture at the centre of the famous club which included Sir Joshua Reynolds, Burke and Goldsmith. These, and men of the quality of Garrick, Dr Burney and Boswell, gathered round the table to leave behind them mythology of conversational brilliance in which theme after theme is crowned by the master’s sage and spontaneous virtuosity. The son of a provincial bookseller, ex-schoolmaster, and married to widow twenty years his senior, Johnson came from Lichfield with his former pupil, David Garrick, both of them to impose themselves on the capital’s cultural and social scene.
