Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Boswell's ambiguities
- Part I BOSWELL AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH CULTURE
- Part II CONTEXTS FOR THE LIFE OF JOHNSON
- Part III THE LIFE OF JOHNSON RECONSIDERED
- 10 The originality of Boswell's version of Johnson's quarrel with Lord Chesterfield
- 11 Self-restraint and self-display in the authorial comments in the Life of Johnson
- 12 Johnson's conversation in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 13 Remembering the hero in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 14 Truth and artifice in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- Index
12 - Johnson's conversation in Boswell's Life of Johnson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Boswell's ambiguities
- Part I BOSWELL AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH CULTURE
- Part II CONTEXTS FOR THE LIFE OF JOHNSON
- Part III THE LIFE OF JOHNSON RECONSIDERED
- 10 The originality of Boswell's version of Johnson's quarrel with Lord Chesterfield
- 11 Self-restraint and self-display in the authorial comments in the Life of Johnson
- 12 Johnson's conversation in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 13 Remembering the hero in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 14 Truth and artifice in Boswell's Life of Johnson
- Index
Summary
Samuel Johnson's conversation is the best known of any figure in literary history, so well known that we seldom ask any more what the term actually means with regard to his life and literary career. Conversation, obviously, in the sense of the interchange of speech between people, must refer first to Johnson's real talk with real people from the end of his infancy to the day of his death. These speeches are lost, irretrievably, for he lived at a time before the existence of mechanical means for reproducing the human voice. We may know that Johnson's voice was sonorous, that he spoke with a pronounced Staffordshire accent, that he had a “bow-wow” method of speaking, but we cannot know how he sounded. Johnson's conversation refers next to the verbal exchanges which Johnson himself created for the characters in his literary works to speak: of this body of speeches we know a great deal although, to be sure, it is fictional rather than real and, because these exchanges never took place, their status is not in doubt. The third meaning of Johnson's conversation, which refers to what other people who talked with or listened to him record him as saying, is open to great uncertainty, for a large number of his contemporaries made some effort to recall, in writing, what he said on various occasions. This category of Johnson's conversation is complicated: it includes what some of his contemporaries called “wit and wisdom,” what others described as his “sayings,” and what still others called his “talk.”
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- Information
- New Light on BoswellCritical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicententary of the 'Life' of Johnson, pp. 174 - 193Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991