Synopsis "The Story of Doctor Johnson"
On the title-page of The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by James Boswell, Esq., the work to which this little book is a stepping-stone, Boswell claims that the story of Dr Johnson's life exhibits "a view of literature and literary men in Great-Britain, for near half a century, during which he flourished." It is no idle claim. Indeed, Boswell might have gone a great deal further, for his story is not merely concerned with books and bookish men, but with men and women in every rank of society. Kings and cottagers, statesmen and shopkeepers, bishops and play-actors, rich brewers and penniless poets, dukes and innkeepers, country parsons and gay young men of the town, street beggars and fashionable ladies-all play their part in the story and shew us a picture of the English world in the eighteenth century such as no history-book can give.
