I don’t often go in for biogra­phies or auto­bi­ogra­phies and am usu­al­ly found read­ing mate­r­i­al by peo­ple rather than about peo­ple (though I sup­pose biogra­phies are also by peo­ple, but you know what I mean). How­ev­er, it’s a genre as old as writ­ing itself. In the 1^st cen­tu­ry CE, Plutarch wrote his Par­al­lel Lives in which he pairs up and writes about famous Greeks and Romans that seem to have an equiv­a­lence e.g. the ora­tors Demos­thenes (Greek) and Cicero (Roman). In the 3^rd cen­tu­ry, Dio­genes Laër­tius was writ­ing his Lives and Opin­ions of Emi­nent Philoso­phers about all the known Greek philoso­phers from Thales to Epi­cu­rus. In the 16^th cen­tu­ry, Geor­gio Vasari wrote The Lives of the Most Excel­lent Painters, Sculp­tors, and Archi­tects cov­er­ing Renais­sance artists from Cimabue to Bronzi­no. Inci­den­tal­ly, read­ing these three books is a good way to acquire a pret­ty com­pre­hen­sive clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion!

What these biogra­phies have in com­mon is that they are essen­tial­ly sketch­es; they write pot­ted his­to­ries of mul­ti­ple peo­ple. When it comes to full-blown biog­ra­phy about one indi­vid­ual, how­ev­er, one book stands out as an ear­ly land­mark of the genre and that is James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel John­son (1791), about Eng­lish writer and lit­er­ary crit­ic Samuel John­son. It enjoys a rep­u­ta­tion as being one of the great­est biogra­phies ever writ­ten, and it is val­ued as an impor­tant source of infor­ma­tion not just about John­son but his times.

Samuel John­son was a cel­e­brat­ed char­ac­ter in 18th cen­tu­ry Lon­don, admired for his intel­lect and pithy one-lin­ers (a bit like Oscar Wilde or Stephen Fry in dif­fer­ent ages) and famed for his rep­u­ta­tion in lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and lex­i­cog­ra­phy in the form of his Dic­tio­nary of the Eng­lish Lan­guage (1755). It was John­son who famous­ly said “when a man is tired of Lon­don, he is tired of life”. And it was John­son also who pro­vid­ed a mem­o­rable response to the new, monist, ide­al­ist phi­los­o­phy of George Berke­ley, which con­jec­tured that all that exists – includ­ing “mat­ter” — could be reduced to one onto­log­i­cal fun­da­men­tal, name­ly “mind”. When asked, whilst out for a walk, what he thought about this idea, John­son is said to have kicked a stone with a con­temp­tu­ous “I refute it thus!”.

In 1763, trav­el­ling Scot­tish lawyer James Boswell first met John­son in the book shop of a friend of Johnson’s and they quick­ly became friends. In the ensu­ing years they spent a lot of time togeth­er in long con­ver­sa­tions whilst on walk­ing hol­i­days in places like the Hebrides. Boswell was a dili­gent keep­er of jour­nals and thor­ough­ly record­ed his day-to-day expe­ri­ences, and it was on this large col­lec­tion of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on John­son’s life. John­son com­ment­ed on Boswell’s exces­sive note-tak­ing: “One would think the man had been hired to spy upon me!”.

Boswell first pub­lished his account of their walk­ing hol­i­day The Jour­nal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1786, pub­lished after John­son’s death, and this proved to be a decent tri­al run of his bio­graph­i­cal method for when he took on his Life of John­son. With the suc­cess of the Jour­nal, 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”, and this he did spec­tac­u­lar­ly well, with the first edi­tion pub­lished in 1791.