Life of JohnsonJames Boswell

Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) is built out of twenty-one years of note-taking. Boswell met Samuel Johnson in 1763 in the back parlor of a Covent Garden bookshop, kept journals of their talk from that evening onward, and after Johnson's death in 1784 gathered the letters, dated the anecdotes, and cross-examined witnesses to fix the record.

The result is a biography written from inside conversation. Johnson argues about the immortality of the soul, the Highland economy, the slave trade, the discipline of children, Shakespeare's violations of the unities, whether a man may lawfully be idle. He refutes Berkeley by kicking a stone. He calls a second marriage the triumph of hope over experience, defines a lexicographer as a harmless drudge, and pronounces on subjects he has just heard of with the same finality he brings to those he has studied for decades. Boswell records the defeats along with the victories, including his own.

Because Johnson talked about nearly everything, the Life enters the Great Conversation at nearly every door. Adler cites it under Happiness, Death, Religion, Labor, Wealth, Education, Poetry, Slavery, and Government, usually for a judgment delivered in one sentence over dinner rather than an argument developed at length.

Boswell also fixed the form biography would take after him. Instead of summarizing a life from outside it, he accumulated a man's own words until the mind that produced them becomes visible.