Meeting Dr. Johnson

by James Boswell, Christopher Hibbert (Editor)

One of 60 low-priced classic texts published to celebrate Penguin's 60th anniversary. All the titles are extracts from "Penguin Classics" titles.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Classics, Autobiography

51 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1996

About the author

James Boswell, 10th Laird of Auchinleck and 1st Baronet was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the eldest son of a judge, Alexander Boswell, 8th Laird of Auchinleck and his wife Euphemia Erskine, Lady Auchinleck. Boswell's mother was a strict Calvinist, and he felt that his father was cold to him. Boswell, who is best known as Samuel Johnson’s biographer, inherited his father’s estate Auchinleck in Ayrshire. His name has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer.

Boswell is also known for the detailed and frank journals that he wrote for long periods of his life, which remained undiscovered until the 1920s. These included voluminous notes on the grand tour of Europe that he took as a young nobleman and, subsequently, of his tour of Scotland with Johnson. His journals also record meetings and conversations with eminent individuals belonging to The Club, including Lord Monboddo, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith. His written works focus chiefly on others, but he was admitted as a good companion and accomplished conversationalist in his own right.

Reviews

[Gordon Clark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I learned what animadversion and gulosity mean! This little book is Boswell’s account of his first few meetings with Dr Samuel Johnson in 1763. I’m not sure it has stood the test of time that well, but it’s a good window onto the foreign land of the past.

[James Dempsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

the excrescence of life hitherto; a poisoned flower, with prospective tower, wilted to the ground by a melancholic shower. If this is what Candide meant by cultivating garden I must ask now God to turn down the taps. Kempis next