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Samuel Johnson: A Life

Samuel Johnson: A Life

by David Nokes (Author), David Nokes (Author)

  • New

    Hardcover 2009

    $21.44
Synopsis

Johnson, born weak and half-blind, shambolic and poverty-stricken, became the most admired and quoted man in the eighteenth century. Thrown out of Oxford for a lack of funds, he rose to celebrity: author of the Dictionary, a friend to the king, companion of Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick. David Nokes looks beyond Johnson's remarkable public persona and beyond the Johnson that Boswell to some extent created. Nokes looks at his troubled relationship with his first wife, whom he married for money but felt guilty about for the rest of his life; at his family, who haunted his dreams for years; and at his difficult, intimate relationship with Mrs Thrale. He shows a man who gave a quarter of the government pension he received to the poor, filled his home with the blind and destitute, and bequeathed his wealth to Frank Barber, an emancipated black slave brought from Jamaica. Insightful and engaging, "Samuel Johnson" draws an illuminating portrait of Johnson, his life and world.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 448
 Edition: Main
 Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 17 Sep 2009
ISBN 10: 0571226353
ISBN 13: 9780571226351
Book Overview: From leading biographer David Nokes comes Samuel Johnson: A Life, an original and hugely rewarding portrait of Samuel Johnson, one of the great figures of English Literature.

Media Reviews
As a critic of Shakespeare, Johnson stressed the empirical persuasiveness of the dramatist's portrayal of human nature. In that spirit, the reader learns to judge fresh biographers of Johnson himself for their skill in limning the great critic's personality and character. By that standard Samuel Johnson, a workmanlike book by the British scholar David Nokes, joins itself to an admirable sequence that includes studies by Robert DeMaria, Walter Jackson Bate, Lawrence Lipking and Peter Martin. Each of these brought a particular warmth and individual insight to the reception of Johnson, and Nokes complements them by his sense of the critic as a Londoner, almost the archetypal citizen of that endless city. . . . Nokes is particularly moving and informative on Johnson's relation to his Jamaican manservant, Frank Barber, a freedman who essentially became Johnson's son, though without formal adoption. . . . I myself qualify as a common reader of Johnson, not a Johnsonian scholar, and Nok
Author Bio
David Nokes is Professor at King's College London, working on 18th century literature. His book Jonathan Swift, A Hypocrite Reversed won the James Tait Black prize in 1985 and he has also published biographies of John Gay (1995) and Jane Austen (1997). His adaptation of Clarissa for BBC TV was nominated for a BAFTA in 1991.