Samuel Johnson: A Biography | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Martin
Publisher: Belknap Press
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 28288
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 640
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.3 x 1.6
ISBN: 0674031601
Dewey Decimal Number: 828.609
EAN: 9780674031609
ASIN: 0674031601
Publication Date: September 18, 2008
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Product Description
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 cliches?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. (20080901)
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| Customer Reviews:
 To Delight and Instruct November 29, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I first came across Samuel Johnson as a 15-year old sitting on the porch of an old farmhouse where I spent the lazy summer days reading an abridged but still lengthy version of Boswell's "Life of Johnson." The encounter with Samuel Johnson was for me a formative event in maturing from adolescence into adulthood.
C S Lewis, professor of mediaeval and Renaissance English literature and Christian apologist, towards the end of his life was asked in 1962 "what books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?" James Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson" was among the ten titles listed by C S Lewis.
It's been a generation since the last major biographies of the 18th century London literary arbiter Samuel Johnson. Author Peter Martin writes in the preface to his life of Johnson that "I came to write a biography of Samuel Johnson for the tercentenary of his birth in 2009 through writing biographies of Edmund Malone and James Boswell, two good friends devoted to the great man...."
Peter Martin takes into account the scholarship since the last biographies of 30 years ago and gives us a new appraisal.
The style and content of this new biography can be gleaned from the author's description of why he prefers a certain portrait of Samuel Johnson, of the many painted over his lifetime: "There is a portrait by his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds painted in the 1760s, when Johnson was in his late fifties, which speaks volumes about the private Johnson. In it Johnson does not hide under the wig in which men were conventionally painted in the eighteenth century and which could blur the persona with an appearance of social respectability. He looks less cloaked and protected, vulnerable yet courageous, even defiantly introspective. The energy of the profile seems almost agonised, focused on troubled thoughts, wrestling with difficult ideas that lie deep within-- a mind seemingly preying on itself....This is my favourite portrait of the several Reynolds painted of him because it cuts through the cliches about Johnson which prevailed during his lifetime and have persisted ever since. It helps make him accessible to us not as a relic of the eighteenteth century but as a man beset by problems common to us all, with important things to say about the human condition."
What that Reynold's portrait did for Johnson, so Peter Martin provides for us. Peter Martin writes in a pleasant style without literary sparkle, but the ordinariness of his style allows Johnson to shine forth. He evenly covers Johnson's whole life, without giving preference to one period over another. Peter Martin provides just the right touch: he satisfies our desire to know and understand Johnson, but leaves us wanting to know more.
Author Peter Martin dedicated his biography of Johnson to the memory of his late wife Cindy, "who was at the heart of this project in its early days."
Samuel Johnson: A Biography November 12, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Although the term "man of letters" didn't come into its own until the Victorian age, it applies as much to the eighteenth-century literary lion Samuel Johnson as it does to his nineteenth-century successors. He wrote poetry, a play, a novel, law lectures, sermons, prayers, literary biographies, and essays. He edited periodicals and compiled the first modern English dictionary. That dictionary has served as a model for English-language lexicographers ever since and is the direct ancestor of the desk dictionaries we consult regularly. Of course, the most famous biography of Johnson was written by his Scottish friend James Boswell. Since then, many fine biographies have been written. Most notable among modern studies are those by John Wain, James Clifford, and W. Jackson Bate. Now Peter Martin has essayed Johnson's life anew.
Martin's Johnson was, as all modern biographers agree he was, physically large and strong, intellectually brilliant, deeply religious, sociable, compassionate, and obstinate.Probably suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, Johnson's twitches, tics, and outbursts might have put people off, and yet the Great Cham had a circle of friends that encompassed many of the leading actors, artists, and political thinkers of his time. For Americans, one of Peter Martin's emphases is particularly interesting: Johnson's opposition to the American Revolution. Opposed to slavery and to the slave trade, Johnson took a young black man into his house as a servant, educated him, and left him a sizable sum in his will. Martin points out, correctly, that Johnson saw clearly and denounced the hypocrisy of Americans arguing for "freedom" whilst simultaneously holding and trading slaves.
Samuel Johnson was a complex and endlessly fascinating man, not because he kicked every third lamppost as he walked down the street, but because of the power of his mind and the generosity of his character. Peter Martin does him justice in this new evaluation of Johnson's life and career.
 Samuel Johnson, A Biography October 24, 2008
1 out of 14 found this review helpful
I believe this book is beyond intellectual achievement. Do believe it was written for the educational community. It is a most difficult read but I will finish and perhaps the last half of the book will "turn me on". C.J. Layden
The Great Cham September 30, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
All those who desire to learn about Dr. Johnson will want to own and read this one-volume biography by Peter Martin. It is a solid retelling, with modest new insights, of the life--and the focus here is on the life, not the times--of the strongest contributor to the elevation of the English language.
As an aside, Professor Martin mentions John Wilkes several times in his book on Samuel Johnson. Those wishing to learn more about this quite interesting figure in English politics should read the excellent "John Wilkes" by Arthur H. Cash and published in 2006.
Readers who have yet to read James Boswell's "Life of Johnson" must do so at once.
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