The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography

by Robert DeMaria Jr.

In this major revision of The Life of Samuel Johnson, Robert DeMaria makes a compelling claim for the attention of a new generation of Johnson's readers and admirers.

Genres: Biography

391 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1993

About the author

Robert DeMaria, Jr. is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. His main area of study is eighteenth-century British Literature and, in particular, Samuel Johnson.

Reviews

[Nelson]

Part of the Blackwell lives series, whose remit seems to be re-situating authors in context—old historicism, if you will. Such a task, with Johnson, cries for a somewhat nuanced approach, since Johnson has been occluded under layers of 'quintessential Englishness'; the danger isn't a lack of context but rather too much, too bad, too rote. DeMaria approaches the task by arguing that understanding Johnson's true context is not through John Bullish Anglophilia, but rather through recognizing an aspiration on Johnson's part to see himself in a European intellectual tradition embodied by scholars and thinkers like Erasmus, Grotius and Scaliger. In the circle jerk world of contemporary Johnsonian criticism this argument might expect a less than warm welcome. If anything, DeMaria seems not to go far enough in insisting on his thesis. He returns to it lightly, in what amounts to a greatest hits compilation of anecdotes and the usual suspects. Perhaps his most arresting argument has to do with the empirical, almost skeptical side of Johnson and his perceptive view that Bacon bears a larger place in Johnson's intellectual universe than has sometimes been recognized. Such moves suggest that the struggle between faith and reason loomed large in Johnson; his life in DeMaria's view was an attempt to harmonize his own faith with a more deeply felt skepticism based on empirical evidence that he worked hard to hide from less stout readers in the interest of preserving their faith undisturbed. There's something heroic about this view of Johnson and DeMaria's biography presents it well if a trifle too modestly.