This is one of the best books ever written. Its English is water and its stories are food. It is more than a window into the 18th century—when you read it you are actually there, and you can come back to it forever because the intellectual and human space it opens is timeless. It is also a deep source of wisdom—not the wisdom of the meditation cushion, but of the public house and the coffee house and the art of conversation. It is embodied and social. You can open it at almost any page and, as long as you're willing to give attention to a different way of thinking and speaking, with its seemingly endless sentences, you will be pulled into its flow.
I've changed the article title to the book title because it deserves more than 2020-level clickbait and moralizing.
Agreed. I love this quote about it from Thomas Carlyle singled out in the post (which I think is good despite the title!):
"The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all has vanished; in every deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there: of London, of England, of the World, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were they of adamant), only slower. The mysterious River of Existence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the former Billow with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it? Where! Now this Book of Boswell's, this is precisely a revocation of the edict of Destiny; so that Time shall not utterly, not so soon by several centuries, have dominion over us. A little row of Naphtha-lamps, with its line of Naphtha-light, burns clear and holy through the dead Night of the Past: they who are gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed, though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that little miraculously lamplit Pathway; shedding its feebler and feebler twilight into the boundless dark Oblivion, for all that our Johnson touched has become illuminated for us: on which miraculous little Pathway we can still travel, and see wonders."
I would have never dared to open this link or read the blog or know ANYTHING about this book without the provocative title. I had seen this article elsewhere so knew what this HN link was because of it.
Why would most normal people be interested in a biography of an 18th century literary figure? I was an English lit major for god's sake and don't care that much about Samuel Johnson.
Without Boswell Johnson would have been a footnote to the history of English literature of no interest to English lit. undergrads, despite having compiled the first useful dictionary of the English language.
> Why would most normal people be interested in a biography of an 18th century literary figure?
Because, as other have noted, it opens the door on London's public house intellectual scene in the mid-18th century. And the character Johnson ends up being a fascinating raconteur, even if his literary works have not withstood the test of time.
And it's not really that much of a biography, as we would think of a biography today. There's very little on Johnson's literary work which had propelled him to fame in his lifetime. A royal pension (happily for him) relieved Johnsonof having to produce any more works, I think sometime around the time Boswell met him. Johnson spent the last decades of his life as a popular man about town, with the sycophantic Boswell recording his conversations verbatim, which Johnson and others frequently teased Boswell about.
What person who isn't already a literature/history nerd cares about London's public house scene in the mid-18th century?
Not saying it isn't interesting. But journalism needs to be provocative to have a "hook" to bring people in who normally wouldn't bother to read about an 18th century literary figure.
If the subject is Steve Jobs or Donald Trump you don't need to be provocative to get the eyeballs.
The article really is about the question in its title, though: it's not a book review.
I dislike as much as anybody the fashion of judging historical figures by today's mores, but that's not what's happening in Boswell's case. He's being retconned as an idiot and a terrible person not by people in pursuit of 21st century social justice, but by the likes of Borges and Thomas Carlyle. Though the author has gone overboard by calling him "the worst man in the world".
Personally, I like the Borges interpretation, that it needs to be thus for the narrative - the noble and brilliant Johnson contrasted with the base and feeble Boswell. Though I don't get the Don Quixote comparison - isn't Sancho Panza in some ways the smarter one in that relationship?
The article is still up there, and the thread is still able to support excellent comments like yours here, while remaining within the orbit of the book itself. That seems to me the right balance.
The "I refute it thus" is one of the funniest episodes in the history of philosophy (next to Diogenes plucked chicken)
For the unaware:
> “After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.'”(Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quoted from Wikipedia.)
Reminds me of Alan Watts trying to point his audience to what's meant by immediate experience by saying (essentially) that any verbal description, for instance of a bell ringing, is missing the point as far as immediate experience is concerned; "it's just": then he actually rings a bell (catching the audience off guard).
Tom Holland, the historian, was tweeting about Boswell and his biography of Johnson recently. I was unfamiliar with Boswell or his biography. Between Holland's description and now this review – I will read this book.
I’ve seen references to, and quotes from, this book my whole life, but somehow have never opened it. Maybe this, and the comments here, will be the push that gets me to finally read it.
The dialogue with Rousseau had me in a mild fit of laughter.
For established Johnson fans, Walter Jackson Bate's 1975 biography is a must-read. Those unfamiliar should still begin with Boswell's "Life", followed by "Rasselas" and the Rambler essays.
I've changed the article title to the book title because it deserves more than 2020-level clickbait and moralizing.