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A review by jonbrammer
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
4.0
At the end of his Life of Johnson, James Boswell admits to many of his subject's faults: Johnson's irascibility, his prejudices, his narrow-mindedness in religion and politics. Johnson was a conservative with a capital C, and he is outright dismissive of many of the important philosophical ideas of his time (there is little consideration of Locke, Hume or Smith, much less Kant).
Instead, Johnson is known has the foremost literary figure of 18th Century London. He was not a man of ideas; rather, he was a man of language, and his greatest achievement was to codify that language in his Dictionary. Again, this project was an essentially conservative endeavor, an attempt to protect and elevate the language so that the uneducated masses could be kept in their linguistic place.
The Romantics that followed represented a rebellion against this staid, elitist, infighting group of literati that includes Addison, Steele, Pope and Johnson. Instead of engaging in a game of wits against their intellectual rivals, the Romantics sought to expand the possibilities of language by infusing it with a more natural, vernacular, personal and passionate approach. The writers of the Age of Johnson were essentially backwards looking, translating and retranslating the Greeks and Romans, writing criticism on Shakespeare. The Romantics were visionary and progressive. johnson would have probably scoffed at the likes of a Keats or a Blake as being too radical and impolite in their poetic visions.
Boswell's life of Johnson is confusing in that, while it is a warts and all depiction of the good doctor, the reader is a left with a sense that Boswell looks at his subject through the rose-colored lenses of a literary acolyte. What are we meant to think of this complicated man?
Instead, Johnson is known has the foremost literary figure of 18th Century London. He was not a man of ideas; rather, he was a man of language, and his greatest achievement was to codify that language in his Dictionary. Again, this project was an essentially conservative endeavor, an attempt to protect and elevate the language so that the uneducated masses could be kept in their linguistic place.
The Romantics that followed represented a rebellion against this staid, elitist, infighting group of literati that includes Addison, Steele, Pope and Johnson. Instead of engaging in a game of wits against their intellectual rivals, the Romantics sought to expand the possibilities of language by infusing it with a more natural, vernacular, personal and passionate approach. The writers of the Age of Johnson were essentially backwards looking, translating and retranslating the Greeks and Romans, writing criticism on Shakespeare. The Romantics were visionary and progressive. johnson would have probably scoffed at the likes of a Keats or a Blake as being too radical and impolite in their poetic visions.
Boswell's life of Johnson is confusing in that, while it is a warts and all depiction of the good doctor, the reader is a left with a sense that Boswell looks at his subject through the rose-colored lenses of a literary acolyte. What are we meant to think of this complicated man?