Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
Summary
James Boswell has been known as the author of one book, and that a very influential and, more recently, a very controversial one. After two hundred years Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) is still widely read, and generates more debate as to its truth, its self-revelatory nature, and what it tells us about Johnson than it has at any time in the past. But whatever Boswell's strengths and shortcomings as a biographer, the portrait of Johnson that concludes the Life represents a summation of the biographer's efforts at grasping, understanding and passing on to posterity the essence of the man he revered so highly, and in relation to whom he expended much effort and ingenuity in defining himself. It is therefore fitting that this collection of essays, taking the occasion of the bicentenary of the Life to explore the relationship between Boswell's complex talents and his commitment to “writing the self,” should be prefaced by the portrait of Johnson that concludes the Life. The following passage comes from Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–64), IV, 425–30.
His figure was large and well formed, and his countenance of the cast of an ancient statue; yet his appearance was rendered strange and somewhat uncouth, by convulsive cramps, by the scars of that distemper which it was once imagined the royal touch could cure, and by a slovenly mode of dress.
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- New Light on BoswellCritical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicententary of the 'Life' of Johnson, pp. xiii - xvPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991