User:DeRossitt/Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship

Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship is a 2012 book by literary scholar John B. Radner.

Overview
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Reception
Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship received positive reviews in the press.

Willy Maley, reviewing the book in Times Higher Education, found the book effective if overly detailed: "In this big bustling book on one of history’s most famous literary couplings ... 'an insecure young man with a cold, judgemental father finds ... a childless widower who zestfully "adopts him'.... The story of this mentor-mentee relationship, 'an evolving, multifaceted collaboration,' is complex and Radner relishes its richness. Sometimes the detail is deafening. Radner sets the reader little exercises, proposing days in the archives comparing letters and journals, or suggesting 15 minutes pondering how we might sketch the lives of contemporaries."

Philip Carter, in The Journal of Modern History, called Radner's work "meticulous" but perhaps too narrowly focused. Carter complained that "Radner’s precise focus on his main protagonists means that there is little space for comparisons between Johnson’s and Boswell’s conduct of, and attitudes toward, other friendships as a means to better contextualize their own. Moreover, in view of the book’s subtitle there is little to locate this 'special' friendship in the context of newer historiographies of sociability or letter writing."

Cartner concluded, "[t]his lack of historical context, coupled with the book’s exhaustive plotting of the friendship’s twists and turns, makes for a specialist’s monograph, although one with a wealth of detail of interest to social and cultural historians of the later eighteenth century.

Publisher's Weekly greeted the book with a highly laudatory review: Radner's thorough examination of the profound, occasionally volatile 20 year friendship between authors Samuel Johnson and James Boswell begins with a young Boswell's search for a religious mentor and ends in his struggle to write his dear friend's posthumous biography. Johnson guided his protégée away from promiscuity and drinking and through many bouts of depression, often with tough love. Meanwhile Boswell gently prodded Johnson to explore the fear of death and damnation that haunted him. They shared many collaborative efforts, notably their 12 week journey through the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides, the respective journals of which both men turned into best-selling books. There were intellectual clashes: Boswell sided with American colonists while Johnson defended the British government; Johnson took issue with Boswell's friendship with David Hume though it was Johnson that helped Boswell through spiritual confusion after Hume's death. Finally, we see Boswell's anxiety over losing an aging, ailing Johnson that caused him to neglect correspondence in Johnson's final days, as well as the guilt and grief he worked through while writing the biography. Radner, professor emeritus of English at George Mason University, should be praised for his research and critical reflection, providing a window into a complex relationship between two brilliant men.

Thomas F. Bonnell, reviewing the book in The Historian, wrote that "[t]his engrossing new study should erase the stubborn notion of a static relationship between the most famous of biographers and the most iconic of biographical subjects. Although James Boswell's Life of Johnson 'makes it easy to imagine continuity and coherence in their friendship,' John B. Radner sees rather 'an evolving, multifaceted collaboration,' which was subject to stresses, even threatened disruptions, only to be reconfigured time and again into something deeper (though even more complex) than before."