Boswell's life of Johnson is incontestably one of the great biographies in the English language. And yet not even it can give a completely rounded portrait. It is for that reason Hugh Kingsmill hit upon the idea of assembling this alternative anthology: Samuel Johnson as recalled diversely by those including Johnson himself, Mrs Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins, Anna Seward (not flattering) and Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua's sister. Here is an example from the latter: 'One Sunday morning, as I was walking with him in Twickenham ...
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Boswell's life of Johnson is incontestably one of the great biographies in the English language. And yet not even it can give a completely rounded portrait. It is for that reason Hugh Kingsmill hit upon the idea of assembling this alternative anthology: Samuel Johnson as recalled diversely by those including Johnson himself, Mrs Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins, Anna Seward (not flattering) and Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua's sister. Here is an example from the latter: 'One Sunday morning, as I was walking with him in Twickenham meadows, he began his antics both with his feet and his hands, with the latter as if he was holding the reins of a horse like a jockey on full speed. But to describe the positions of his feet is a strange task; sometimes he would make the back part of his heels to touch, sometimes his toes, as he was aiming at making the form of a triangle, at least the two sides of one. Though indeed, whether these were his gestures on this particular occasion in Twickenham meadows I do not recollect, it is so long since, but I well remember that they were so extraordinary that men, women and children gathered round him laughing. At last we sat down on some logs of wood by the river side, and they nearly dispersed; when he pulled out of his pocket Grotius De Veritate Religionis, over which he seesawed at such a violent rate as to excite the curiosity of some people at distance to come and see what was the matter with him.' This is richly readable and informative volume offering an endlessly fascinating conspectus of the Great Man. It is being reissued at the same time as Hugh Kingsmill biography of Samuel Johnson.
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New York. 1941. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Very Good. No Dustjacket. 318 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature England Biography Samuel Johnson. FROM THE PUBLISHER-Probably no celebrity of modern times has had to depend on another for his fame as much as Samuel Johnson, the crusty dictator of eighteenth-century English letters. It has become almost axiomatic never to mention that mammoth of wit and wisdom without linking him at least in thought with his great biographer, James Boswell. But there were others who knew him well, and who set down what they knew-among them Johnson himself in his letters and autobiographical fragments, his great friend Mrs. Thrale in her Anecdotes, and Sir John Hawkins in his Life. From these and others, excerpted and skillfully pieced together in this volume by Hugh Kingsmill, there emerges a portrait of Johnson more domestic and less alarming than Boswell's-of a little boy who cried when he was moved to the upper school; an undergraduate joining in chasing the servant the servant about Pembroke College, with noise and candlesticks and hunting songs; a susceptible young man addressing Miss Lucy Porter as ‘dear sweet'; a husband who always called his elderly wife ‘my charming love'; a host who never suffered a lady to walk from his house through Bolt Court to her carriage unattended by himself; a preacher of industry who became very idle himself when his pension relieved him from providing food and shelter for himself and the objects of his charity; and above all, a man who needed and took a great deal of feminine sympathy. But something of a curmudgeon still, who could terrorize his table-companions by brandishing a knife and bellowing that by God he could not eat a bit more, and could hate a man who had seen a larger bull than his friend's. Thus there emerges from these pages a figure far more moving than that made familiar by Boswell; and, though the unique humor of Boswell's own relations to the Doctor is lacking, the wit and humor of Johnson himself are abundantly present. The result is a volume richly readable and informative, which can be read with pleasure either wholly or in part-in short, a pretty perfect bedside book. ‘Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON is in some respects a first draft of Boswell's autobiography. Some say that Boswell resurrected Johnson; others that Johnson lies imprisoned in Boswell's book. How Boswell posthumously possessed Johnson and, like a great theatrical director, produced him for an audience of readers as a tremendous John Bull character, was brilliantly indicated by an anthology called JOHNSON WITHOUT BOSWELL, put together in 1940 by Hugh Kingsmill. '-an extract from Michael Holroyd's Biography Lecture on the Orange Word Stage at the Hay festival, June 9, 2002. inventory #5051.