The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Edited by O M Brack Jr.
This is the first and only scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins’s "Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.", a work that has not been widely available in complete form for more than 200 years. Published in 1787, some four years before James Boswell's biography of Johnson, Hawkins's "Life" complements, clarifies, and often corrects numerous aspects of Boswell's "Life."
Samuel Johnson (1709-84) is the most significant English writer of the second half of the 18th century; indeed, this period is widely known as the Age of Johnson. Hawkins was Johnson's friend and legal adviser and the chief executor of his will. He knew Johnson longer and in many respects better than other biographers, including Boswell, who made unacknowledged use of Hawkins's "Life" and helped orchestrate the critical attacks that consigned the book to obscurity.
Sir John Hawkins had special insight into Johnson's mental states at various points in his life, his early days in London, his association with the "Gentleman's Magazine", and his political views and writings. Hawkins's use of historical and cultural details, an uncommon literary device at the time, produced one of the earliest "life and times" biographies in our language. The introduction by O M Brack Jr. covers the history of the composition, publication, and reception of the "Life" and provides a context in which it should be read. Annotations address historical, literary, and linguistic uncertainties, and a full textual apparatus documents how Brack arrived at this definitive text of Hawkins's "Life".
Bio
Editor O M Brack Jr. was a professor emeritus of English at Arizona State University.
Praise for this book
Brack's edition makes available the full text of Hawkins's pre-Boswellian biography, providing a detailed scholarly context for a work that has traditionally been viewed with suspicion, if not hostility, by Johnsonians. Yet Hawkins had known Johnson much longer than Boswell, and his elaborate and firsthand, if at times idiosyncratic, narrative valuably supplements more familiar accounts.
Roger Lonsdale Editor of the Oxford edition of "Johnson's Lives of the Poets"
