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A collector’s rare early Folio edition of this great work

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) by James Boswell is a biography of English writer Dr. Samuel Johnson. The work was from the beginning a critical and popular success and represents a landmark in the development of the modern genre of biography. It is notable for its extensive reports of Johnson’s conversation. Many have claimed it as the greatest biography written in English, but some modern critics object that the work cannot be considered a proper biography. Boswell’s personal acquaintance with his subject began in 1763, when Johnson was 54 years old, and Boswell covered the entirety of Johnson’s life by means of additional research. The biography takes many critical liberties with Johnson’s life, as Boswell makes various changes to Johnson’s quotations and even censors many comments. Nonetheless, the book is valued as both an important source of information on Johnson and his times, as well as an important work of literature.

Background – On 16 May 1763, as a 22-year-old Scot visiting London, Boswell first met Johnson in the book shop of Johnson’s friend Tom Davies. They quickly became friends, although Boswell would for many years only see Johnson when he visited London in the intervals of his law practice in Scotland. From the age of 20, Boswell kept a series of journals thoroughly detailing his day-to-day experience. This journal, when published in the 20th century, filled eighteen volumes, and it was from this large collection of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on Johnson’s life. Johnson, in commenting on Boswell’s excessive note taking playfully wrote to Hester Thrale, “One would think the man had been hired to spy upon me”.

On 6 August 1773, eleven years after first meeting Boswell, Johnson set out to visit his friend in Scotland, to begin “a journey to the western islands of Scotland”, as Johnson’s 1775 account of their travels would put it. Boswell’s account, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786), which was not published until after Johnson’s death, was a trial of his biographical method before commencing his Life of Johnson.  With the success of that work, Boswell started working on the “vast treasure of his conversations at different times” that he recorded in his journals.  His goal was to recreate Johnson’s “life in scenes”. Because Johnson was 53 when Boswell first met him, the last 20 years of his life occupy four fifths of the book.  Furthermore, as literary critic Donald Greene has pointed out, Boswell’s works only describe 250 days that Boswell could have actually been present with Johnson, the rest of the information having to come from either Johnson himself or from secondary sources recounting various incidents.

Before Boswell could publish his biography of Johnson, there were many other friends of Johnson’s who published or were in the middle of publishing their own biographies or collections or anecdotes on Johnson: John Hawkins, Thrale, Frances Burney, Anna Seward, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, and Horace Walpole among many. The last edition Boswell worked on was the third, published after his death, in 1799.