Product Description

Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary tics, opinionated, powered in his conversation by a prodigious memory and intellect, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was in his life a literary and social icon as no other age has produced. “Johnsonianissimus,” as Boswell called him, became in the hands of his first biographers the rationalist epitome and sage of Enlightenment. These clichés—though they contain elements of truth—distort the complexity of the public and private Johnson. 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, fables, as well as other forms of prose and poetry in which he probed himself and the world around him, Martin shows, constituted rational triumphs against despair and depression. It is precisely the combination of enormous intelligence and frank personal weakness that makes Johnson’s writing so compelling.

Benefiting from recent critical scholarship that has explored new attitudes toward Johnson, Martin’s biography gives us a human and sympathetic portrait of Dr. Johnson. Johnson’s criticism of colonial expansion, his advocacy for the abolition of 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, published for the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth, is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable, flawed, and sympathetic figure than has been previously known.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111068 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 640 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780674031609
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Famed for his dictionary, Rambler essays and The Lives of the English Poets, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) remains one of the most-quoted and carefully observed authors who ever lived. On the occasion of Johnson's tercentenary, Martin (A Life of James Boswell) searches out the psychological elements covered up by Boswell and others: the immense insecurities, bouts of deep depression, corrosive self-doubt and, in his last days, despair for his very soul. He grew up the illness-wracked, nearly blind son of a backwater bookseller. Martin shows how Johnson's distant relationships with his family came to haunt him on the death of each member. Likewise, Johnson's strange mannerisms and disfigurement, marriage to a woman twice his age and poverty early in his career further shaped his psyche. Through all this, Martin says, Johnson was also a bit of a ladies' man, and notes in Johnson's journal references to the practice or condition of M., which, Martin speculates, stands for masturbation or defecation. Martin admirably succeeds in giving a new generation Dr. Johnson, warts and all, from the inside, though in prose that remains only serviceable. 30 b&w illus., map. (Sept.)
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Review
Building on his previous work on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson's most celebrated biographer, Peter Martin has written a humane, coherent and accessible life of the great eighteenth-century polymath, deftly and sympathetically exploring his personal relationships and psyche while also locating him in the literary culture of his age.
--Henry Hitchings, author of Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World (20080701)

As Johnson's three hundredth birthday approaches, the time is ripe for a new biography that takes into account all we have learned about Johnson in this century and the later years of the last. Martin knows and tells. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed book that should find a broad and appreciative audience.
--Robert Folkenflik, University of California, Irvine (20080721)

Peter Martin's biography of Samuel Johnson is a profoundly poignant and eloquent account of the Western world's greatest literary critic. It is superior even to Martin's valuable biography of Boswell.
--Harold Bloom (20080918)

Few writers can approach Johnson (1709–84) more surely than Martin, biographer of the Great Man’s own famous biographer (A Life of James Boswell)... From the ordinary clay of words, Martin sculpts an impressive image of an extraordinary man. (Kirkus Reviews 20081019)

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) remains one of the most-quoted and carefully observed authors who ever lived. On the occasion of Johnson's tercentenary, Martin searches out the psychological elements covered up by Boswell and others: the immense insecurities, bouts of deep depression, corrosive self-doubt and, in his last days, despair for his very soul...Martin admirably succeeds in giving a new generation Dr. Johnson, warts and all, from the inside. (Publishers Weekly 20090125)

Martin's book emphasizes aspects of Johnson not covered by any previously published biographies--including excellent ones by W. Jackson Bate, James L. Clifford, John Wain, and, of course, James Boswell--notably Johnson's deep depressions; his liberal views on women writers, slavery, and poverty (he was not the complete Tory that others have painted him); and Johnson as a writer whose works deserve to be better known by the general public...Written in an engaging manner and featuring many quotations from Johnson and his friends and acquaintances, this new portrait of a complex, multifaceted writer and thinker is highly recommended.
--Morris Hounion (Library Journal 20081201)

Modern biographers are aware of the competition. They have to write a first-rate book about Johnson or hear from critics that they've foolishly entered the wrong league. And a number of scholars, notably Paul Fussell and W. Jackson Bate, have given us remarkable portraits. They're now joined by Peter Martin, whose Samuel Johnson: A Biography is a model of its kind: a deeply felt, beautifully written account of a personality about whom we cannot know enough.
--George Sim Johnston (Wall Street Journal 20090301)

A fetching new version of the life of Samuel Johnson.
--Julia Keller (Chicago Tribune 20090221)

Martin brings alive with novelistic detail such famous scenes as Johnson's youthful ride to London to be touched by Queen Anne for "the king's evil"--scrofula, which was believed to be curable by a touch from royalty; his public rejection of the Earl of Chesterfield's 11th-hour patronage of his dictionary; and the actor David Garrick's keyhole spying on (and later parody of) Johnson's amorous pursuit of Mrs. Johnson. For a man who bragged and twitched and stank, Johnson had a lot of friends, and Martin superintends them like a film director: poet Charlotte Lennox, painter Joshua Reynolds, novelist Fanny Burney and, of course, future laird and biographer James Boswell.
--Michael Sims (Washington Post Book World 20090201)

Meticulously researched and well written.
--James Srodes (Washington Times 20090601)

Martin has spent a lifetime steeped in Johnson's world, having written definitive biographies of Boswell and of Edmond Malone, the Irish Shakespearean scholar without whose help the unstable Boswell might never have finished his massive biography...As a character, Johnson turns out to be not only funny and wildly eccentric--as we always knew he was--but deeply poignant. I was moved to tears by Martin's biography.
--Brooke Allen (Wilson Quarterly 20090701)

[An] outstanding new biography.
--Christopher Hitchens (The Atlantic 20091008)

The story is well told, quotations from Boswell and Johnson are frequent and judicious, the anecdotes (familiar to some) are enlivening, and a picture of the fierce, complicated, manically eccentric genius emerges that will provoke admiration and wonder.
--Rex Murphy (Globe and Mail 20090919)

Martin offers a convincing psychological study.
--Leah Price (New York Times Review of Books 20091011)

[Samuel Johnson] will give readers a good sense of this extraordinary individual. For those who already know a fair bit about the subject, Martin will fill out the picture more amply.
--Pat Rogers (New Criterion )

As author also of A Life of James Boswell, Martin knows the territory and obviously enjoys it...The tercentenary of the birth of so large a figure is more than enough reason for new perspectives, and Martin's work is worthwhile.
--G. Shivel (Choice )

A lively new biography, a book well seasoned with good stories, most of which do not seek always to show the Doctor in a better light...Martin is sympathetic to Johnson and equally sympathetic to the truth about him. He has hitherto written excellent biographies of both Boswell and Edmond Malone--two of the Doctor's brightest satellites--and he turns to Johnson with a strong and nuanced sense of how he was, as much as anything, the figment of a great many busy pens, not least his own.
--Andrew O'Hagan (New York Review of Books )

[Martin] is a literary conduit, bringing Johnson from the 18th-century English Tory world of letters down to the modern reader...[He is] an author who writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity...He shows why the man is still so influential and--important this--still read.
--Michael Coren (National Post )

[Martin] writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity. Martin is strikingly good...on Johnson's literary achievement. He shows why the man is still so influential and--important this--still read.
--Michael Coren (Ottawa Citizen )

About the Author
Peter Martin has taught English literature on both sides of the Atlantic and is the author of A Life of James Boswell.

Customer Reviews

To Delight and Instruct
I first came across Samuel Johnson as a 15-year old sitting on the porch of an old farmhouse where I spent the lazy summer days reading an abridged but still lengthy version of Boswell's "Life of Johnson." The encounter with Samuel Johnson was for me a formative event in maturing from adolescence into adulthood.

C S Lewis, professor of mediaeval and Renaissance English literature and Christian apologist, towards the end of his life was asked in 1962 "what books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?" James Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson" was among the ten titles listed by C S Lewis.

It's been a generation since the last major biographies of the 18th century London literary arbiter Samuel Johnson. Author Peter Martin writes in the preface to his life of Johnson that "I came to write a biography of Samuel Johnson for the tercentenary of his birth in 2009 through writing biographies of Edmund Malone and James Boswell, two good friends devoted to the great man...."

Peter Martin takes into account the scholarship since the last biographies of 30 years ago and gives us a new appraisal.

The style and content of this new biography can be gleaned from the author's description of why he prefers a certain portrait of Samuel Johnson, of the many painted over his lifetime: "There is a portrait by his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds painted in the 1760s, when Johnson was in his late fifties, which speaks volumes about the private Johnson. In it Johnson does not hide under the wig in which men were conventionally painted in the eighteenth century and which could blur the persona with an appearance of social respectability. He looks less cloaked and protected, vulnerable yet courageous, even defiantly introspective. The energy of the profile seems almost agonised, focused on troubled thoughts, wrestling with difficult ideas that lie deep within-- a mind seemingly preying on itself....This is my favourite portrait of the several Reynolds painted of him because it cuts through the cliches about Johnson which prevailed during his lifetime and have persisted ever since. It helps make him accessible to us not as a relic of the eighteenteth century but as a man beset by problems common to us all, with important things to say about the human condition."

What that Reynold's portrait did for Johnson, so Peter Martin provides for us. Peter Martin writes in a pleasant style without literary sparkle, but the ordinariness of his style allows Johnson to shine forth. He evenly covers Johnson's whole life, without giving preference to one period over another. Peter Martin provides just the right touch: he satisfies our desire to know and understand Johnson, but leaves us wanting to know more.

Author Peter Martin dedicated his biography of Johnson to the memory of his late wife Cindy, "who was at the heart of this project in its early days."

Samuel Johnson: A Biography
Although the term "man of letters" didn't come into its own until the Victorian age, it applies as much to the eighteenth-century literary lion Samuel Johnson as it does to his nineteenth-century successors. He wrote poetry, a play, a novel, law lectures, sermons, prayers, literary biographies, and essays. He edited periodicals and compiled the first modern English dictionary. That dictionary has served as a model for English-language lexicographers ever since and is the direct ancestor of the desk dictionaries we consult regularly. Of course, the most famous biography of Johnson was written by his Scottish friend James Boswell. Since then, many fine biographies have been written. Most notable among modern studies are those by John Wain, James Clifford, and W. Jackson Bate. Now Peter Martin has essayed Johnson's life anew.
Martin's Johnson was, as all modern biographers agree he was, physically large and strong, intellectually brilliant, deeply religious, sociable, compassionate, and obstinate.Probably suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, Johnson's twitches, tics, and outbursts might have put people off, and yet the Great Cham had a circle of friends that encompassed many of the leading actors, artists, and political thinkers of his time. For Americans, one of Peter Martin's emphases is particularly interesting: Johnson's opposition to the American Revolution. Opposed to slavery and to the slave trade, Johnson took a young black man into his house as a servant, educated him, and left him a sizable sum in his will. Martin points out, correctly, that Johnson saw clearly and denounced the hypocrisy of Americans arguing for "freedom" whilst simultaneously holding and trading slaves.
Samuel Johnson was a complex and endlessly fascinating man, not because he kicked every third lamppost as he walked down the street, but because of the power of his mind and the generosity of his character. Peter Martin does him justice in this new evaluation of Johnson's life and career.

A Transparent View of an Intellectual Giant
This was a terrific book to read about one of the intellectual giants from Western civilization. The average reader is probably more familiar with the occasional Johnson quote but unfamiliar with his life or massive body of work. Author Peter Martin gives us a wide retrospective on Johnson's life, showing us how the man was as deeply complicated as he was intelligent. We get to see not only his deep penetrating mind at work but also the internal battles that he fought regarding his own fears and deficiencies. That he did not receive a degree or finish his formal education was probably a blessing for the rest of us because his moral acuity and insight is steeped in the reality of everyday existence. He was no ivory tower academic but a man who lived through pervasive poverty and profound bouts of depression, yet always reaching for higher lights and searching for moral strongholds in every situation. His deep religious faith was central to Johnson, whose mental struggles were made the more harsh by his own admittedly difficult personality as well as by his physical appearance and odd gesticulations.

His writing output was unbelievable, penning a new edition of the English dictionary, a critical edition of all of Shakespeare's plays, biographies of major english poets, and innumerous essays, pamphlets and book prefaces. He even ghost wrote a good number of sermons on behalf of a pastor friend. He was so intelligent that his contemporaries sometimes avoided his company out of fear of being humiliated in argument. Today he might be called a polymath or a Renaissance man, and it is a shame that our educational institutions for the most part are no longer designed to produce such men or women with any consistency. Who are or were today's counterparts: George Will, Hubert Humphrey, William F. Buckley?

Martin's presentation also draws much sympathy from the reader as he describes Johnson's struggles with procrastination, depression, temptations to infidelity, confused feelings towards his loved ones, sibling rivalry, and just about every other situation that all humans confront regularly. Martin also shows us a compassionate side to Johnson, who helped friends not only by writing for them but also by putting them up in his home as well as giving them financial aid.

Johnson was also one of the last truly authentic people, who lived by his convictions and did not shirk from speaking the truth. This often made him a sort of social pariah, but in the end one wishes that more people were like that and that facades were less common.