"Hawkins’s book gives us a remarkably clear, authentic, and durable picture of Johnson, ‘warts and all,’ as viewed from the perspective of his lifelong friend, legal adviser, and, eventually, executor of his estate. I have found Professor Brack’s work exemplary. After a long interval of years, we now have the advantage of the total text with an apparatus criticus designed by a seasoned and distinguished textual editor."
—James Gray, author of Johnson’s Sermons: A Study

Description

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 two hundred 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 eighteenth 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…

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