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 1st 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 3rd century, Diogenes Laërtius was writing his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers about all the known Greek philosophers from Thales to Epicurus. In the 16th 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.
