Samuel Johnson

Walter Jackson Bate's biography follows Samuel Johnson from a childhood in Lichfield marked by scrofula and near blindness in one eye, through Oxford, which poverty forced him to leave without a degree, and into the London years when he supported himself as a jobbing writer before his Dictionary of the English Language, nine years of solitary labor that produced more than forty thousand entries and made him famous at forty five. Bate follows Johnson through the essays he wrote twice weekly for the Rambler, the long poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, his edition of Shakespeare, and the Lives of the Poets that closed his career, work Bate treats as inseparable from the man who produced it under constant money pressure and constant illness.

The book gives real weight to what Johnson himself called his black dog, the depressions that recurred throughout his life alongside involuntary tics and mutterings that friends noticed and that physicians have since read, from descriptions left by those who knew him, as a probable case of Tourette syndrome centuries before the condition had a name. Bate follows Johnson's difficult marriage to Elizabeth Porter, a widow twenty years his senior whose death in 1752 devastated him, and the friendship with James Boswell that began in 1763 and would eventually produce the biography against which every later life of Johnson, including this one, has to measure itself.

Bate writes as a literary scholar rather than a narrative popularizer, drawing on Johnson's own letters and on Boswell's testimony to build a portrait that treats Johnson's suffering as the source of his moral seriousness rather than a footnote to it. Reading the book means following a dense, sympathetic account of a writer who talked his way into literary immortality while privately convinced he was failing at everything that mattered, and it suits a reader who wants Johnson's melancholy and his genius explained as one thing rather than two.