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1 results

  • Chapter 7 - Biographer

  • Robert DeMaria, Vassar College, New York, Daniel Hitchens, independent
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Johnson
    Published online:
    07 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025, pp 114-131

  • Summary

    As the most ‘delightful’ and ‘useful’ of genres, biography occupied a high place in Johnson’s ranking of literary genres, and he wrote many kinds of biography. All were aimed at raising the audience’s moral aspirations, showing them what was humanly possible. By the same token, sentimental panegyrics were no use, because they were too unrealistic to help the reader; they might also be based on falsehood, and Johnson is consistently sceptical towards stories that sound too good to be true. In his early biographies, Johnson explicitly draws conclusions about virtue and vice – even condemning his late friend Richard Savage, who despite his many admirable qualities set a dangerous example of contravening ordinary ethical standards. Yet by the time Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets more than three decades later, he approached these questions more subtly, speculating on the connection between bad morals and bad writing, and delivering his lessons with restrained irony.