Synopses & Reviews
Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary tics, opinionated, powered in his conversation by a prodigious memory and intellect, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was in his life a literary and social icon as no other age has produced. "Johnsonianissimus," as Boswell called him, became in the hands of his first biographers the rationalist epitome and sage of Enlightenment. These clichés--though they contain elements of truth--distort the complexity of the public and private Johnson. Peter Martin portrays a Johnson wracked by recriminations, self-doubt, and depression--a man whose religious faith seems only to have deepened his fears. His essays, scholarship, biography, journalism, travel writing, sermons, fables, as well as other forms of prose and poetry in which he probed himself and the world around him, Martin shows, constituted rational triumphs against despair and depression. It is precisely the combination of enormous intelligence and frank personal weakness that makes Johnson's writing so compelling.
Benefiting from recent critical scholarship that has explored new attitudes toward Johnson, Martin's biography gives us a human and sympathetic portrait of Dr. Johnson. Johnson's criticism of colonial expansion, his advocacy for the abolition of slavery, his encouragement of women writers, his treatment of his female friends as equals, and his concern for the underprivileged and poor make him a very "modern" figure. The Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography, published for the tercentenary of Johnson's birth, is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable, flawed, and sympathetic figure than has been previously known.
Review
A lively new biography, a book well seasoned with good stories, most of which do not seek always to show the Doctor in a better light...Martin is sympathetic to Johnson and equally sympathetic to the truth about him. He has hitherto written excellent biographies of both Boswell and Edmond Malone--two of the Doctor's brightest satellites--and he turns to Johnson with a strong and nuanced sense of how he was, as much as anything, the figment of a great many busy pens, not least his own. G. Shivel - Choice
Review
[Samuel Johnson] will give readers a good sense of this extraordinary individual. For those who already know a fair bit about the subject, Martin will fill out the picture more amply. Leah Price - New York Times Review of Books
Review
Martin brings alive with novelistic detail such famous scenes as Johnson's youthful ride to London to be touched by Queen Anne for "the king's evil"--scrofula, which was believed to be curable by a touch from royalty; his public rejection of the Earl of Chesterfield's 11th-hour patronage of his dictionary; and the actor David Garrick's keyhole spying on (and later parody of) Johnson's amorous pursuit of Mrs. Johnson. For a man who bragged and twitched and stank, Johnson had a lot of friends, and Martin superintends them like a film director: poet Charlotte Lennox, painter Joshua Reynolds, novelist Fanny Burney and, of course, future laird and biographer James Boswell. Julia Keller - Chicago Tribune
Review
Martin has spent a lifetime steeped in Johnson's world, having written definitive biographies of Boswell and of Edmond Malone, the Irish Shakespearean scholar without whose help the unstable Boswell might never have finished his massive biography...As a character, Johnson turns out to be not only funny and wildly eccentric--as we always knew he was--but deeply poignant. I was moved to tears by Martin's biography. James Srodes - Washington Times
Review
As author also of A Life of James Boswell, Martin knows the territory and obviously enjoys it...The tercentenary of the birth of so large a figure is more than enough reason for new perspectives, and Martin's work is worthwhile. Pat Rogers - New Criterion
Review
[Martin] writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity. Martin is strikingly good...on Johnson's literary achievement. He shows why the man is still so influential and--important this--still read. Michael Coren - National Post
Review
Building on his previous work on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson's most celebrated biographer, Peter Martin has written a humane, coherent and accessible life of the great eighteenth-century polymath, deftly and sympathetically exploring his personal relationships and psyche while also locating him in the literary culture of his age. Henry Hitchings, author of < i=""> Dr Johnson ' s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World <>
Review
As Johnson's three hundredth birthday approaches, the time is ripe for a new biography that takes into account all we have learned about Johnson in this century and the later years of the last. Martin knows and tells. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed book that should find a broad and appreciative audience. Robert Folkenflik, University of California, Irvine
Review
Peter Martin's biography of Samuel Johnson is a profoundly poignant and eloquent account of the Western world's greatest literary critic. It is superior even to Martin's valuable biography of Boswell. Harold Bloom
Review
Few writers can approach Johnson (1709-84) more surely than Martin, biographer of the Great Man's own famous biographer (A Life of James Boswell)... From the ordinary clay of words, Martin sculpts an impressive image of an extraordinary man. Kirkus Reviews
Review
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) remains one of the most-quoted and carefully observed authors who ever lived. On the occasion of Johnson's tercentenary, Martin searches out the psychological elements covered up by Boswell and others: the immense insecurities, bouts of deep depression, corrosive self-doubt and, in his last days, despair for his very soul...Martin admirably succeeds in giving a new generation Dr. Johnson, warts and all, from the inside. Publishers Weekly
Review
Martin's book emphasizes aspects of Johnson not covered by any previously published biographies--including excellent ones by W. Jackson Bate, James L. Clifford, John Wain, and, of course, James Boswell--notably Johnson's deep depressions; his liberal views on women writers, slavery, and poverty (he was not the complete Tory that others have painted him); and Johnson as a writer whose works deserve to be better known by the general public...Written in an engaging manner and featuring many quotations from Johnson and his friends and acquaintances, this new portrait of a complex, multifaceted writer and thinker is highly recommended. Morris Hounion
Review
Modern biographers are aware of the competition. They have to write a first-rate book about Johnson or hear from critics that they've foolishly entered the wrong league. And a number of scholars, notably Paul Fussell and W. Jackson Bate, have given us remarkable portraits. They're now joined by Peter Martin, whose Samuel Johnson: A Biography is a model of its kind: a deeply felt, beautifully written account of a personality about whom we cannot know enough. Library Journal
Review
A fetching new version of the life of Samuel Johnson. George Sim Johnston - Wall Street Journal
Review
Meticulously researched and well written. Michael Sims - Washington Post Book World
Review
[An] outstanding new biography. Brooke Allen - Wilson Quarterly
Review
The story is well told, quotations from Boswell and Johnson are frequent and judicious, the anecdotes (familiar to some) are enlivening, and a picture of the fierce, complicated, manically eccentric genius emerges that will provoke admiration and wonder. Christopher Hitchens - The Atlantic
Review
Martin offers a convincing psychological study. Rex Murphy - Globe and Mail
Review
[Martin] is a literary conduit, bringing Johnson from the 18th-century English Tory world of letters down to the modern reader...[He is] an author who writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity...He shows why the man is still so influential and--important this--still read. Andrew O ' Hagan - New York Review of Books
Synopsis
Benefiting from recent critical scholarship that has explored new attitudes toward Johnson, Martin's biography gives us a human and sympathetic portrait of Dr. Johnson. The Johnson that emerges from this biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable, flawed, and sympathetic figure than has been previously known.
Synopsis
Kansas City Star Top 10 Notable Book of 2008
Synopsis
Runner-up, Atlantic Books of the Year, 2009
About the Author
Peter Martin has taught English literature on both sides of the Atlantic and is the author of A Life of James Boswell.
Robinson College, Cambridge University
Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
Part One, Staffordshire Youth
- Anecdotes of Beggary
- Stepping on the Duckling
- Leaping over the Rail
- Two Benefactors
Part Two, Despondency and Hope
- Oxford: Wielding a Scholar’s Weapon
- Horrible Imaginings
- Stirrings in Birmingham
- Taking a Wife
Part Three, Slow Rises Worth
- Stranger in London
- Sons of Misery: Finding Richard Savage
- ‘Slow Rises Worth by Poverty Depress’d’
- Wandering in the Midlands
Part Four, Triumph: The Dictionary Years
- London Revived: A Lion in Harness
- A Lifeline: The Dictionary
- Poetic Interludes
- Tetty and ‘Amorous Propensities’
- The Triumph of the Moralist
- Darkness Falls
- Once More unto the Breach: Back to the Dictionary
Part Five, Depression, Shakespeare, Travel and Anger
- Stalled
- ‘Suffering Chimeras’
- ‘Vain and Corrupt Imaginations’
- Boswell and Mrs Thrale
- Shakespeare and the Living World
- Coliseum of Beasts
- Back to Shakespeare and the Dictionary
- The Road to the Hebrides
- Politics and Travel
Part Six, Biography and ‘The Race with Death’
- ‘A Very Poor Creeper upon the Earth’
- Biographical Straitjacket
- Losing Ground
- The Last Days
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index