The Life of Samuel Johnson

James Boswell (1740-1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh. He is best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson. Boswell is renowned for his meticulous note-taking during his grand tour of Europe as a young nobleman and his subsequent tour of Scotland with Johnson. He also documented meetings and conversations with prominent figures of ‘The Club,’ including David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, and Oliver Goldsmith.

Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709 and received his education at Lichfield Grammar School and briefly at Pembroke College, Oxford. He married Elizabeth Jervis Porter in 1735 and moved to London in 1737. There, he became a frequent contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine but faced financial struggles as a writer. His anonymously published work, London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal (1738), gained some recognition. From 1750 to 1752, he produced the Rambler, a periodical largely written by himself, and further solidified his reputation as a significant moral essayist through approximately twenty-five essays in the Adventurer. The publication of his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 established Johnson as a dominant literary figure in London. To fund a visit to his ailing mother, he wrote Rasselas (1759), reportedly in a single week, completing it shortly after his mother’s passing. In 1763, Boswell became his devoted companion, and it is largely thanks to Boswell that we possess an intimate understanding of Johnson’s life and character. Johnson’s final major work was Lives of the Poets. He died in December 1784.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His extensive publications cover English literature from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. For Penguin, he has edited Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Augustan Critical Writing, Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, and Samuel Johnson’s Selected Essays.

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