2nd Hand - Samuel Johnson: A Biography By Peter Martin

2nd hand hardback in great condition. It has a sticker over the previous owner's detail but otherwise in barely read condition.

Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary ties, opinionated, powered in his conversation by a prodigious memory and intellect, Samuel Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare.

This new biography, the first substantial one for 30 years, illuminates the Johnson that James Boswell, Johnson's famous biographer, never knew: the awkward and suffering youth, the unsuccessful schoolmaster, the eccentric marriage, his early years in London in the 1740s scratching a living, the epic struggle to produce the Dictionary. He was in many ways very much the outsider. These aspects of Johnson radically modify the conventional picture of him as the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense.

Peter Martin portrays a Johnson wracked by recriminations, self-doubt and depression - a man whose religious faith seems only to have deepened his fears. His essays, scholarship, biography, journalism, travel writing, sermons and fables, in which he probed himself and the world around him, constituted rational triumphs against despair. It is the combination of enormous intelligence and frank personal weakness that make Johnson's writing so compelling.

Making use of new research and scholarship on various aspects of Johnson's life, Peter Martin gives us a human and sympathetic portrait of Dr Johnson. Johnson's criticism of colonial expansion and slavery, his encouragement of women writers, his treatment of his female friends as equals, and his concern for the underprivileged and poor make him a very modern figure. The Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable, flawed and sympathetic figure than has been previously known.

hardback with a sleeve15.5x24x4.5cm 522 pages