Chapter 8 - Legend

Summary

The Johnson legend owes most to James Boswell, yet despite writing the classic biography Boswell only knew Johnson in the last twenty-one years of his life, and less well than other biographers. There were also several short biographies, part of a vast literature on Johnson which was already sizeable in his lifetime. Much of it was hostile: he was caricatured as inhuman, dictatorial, and aggressive. Boswell, notwithstanding the brilliance of his account, was partly to blame for cementing this idea: he privileged Johnson as a debater over the other sides of a very complicated personality, and sometimes turned Johnson’s conversations into monologues. The Romantics, who despised Johnson’s literary principles, amplified this caricature, and the nineteenth century was in general a low point of Johnson’s critical reputation. Yet his books were widely read in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth he won many admirers among both scholars and authors.