Designing the Life of Johnson

The Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, 2001-2

Bruce Redford

Lyell Lectures in Bibliography

A scintillating study of Boswell the biographer and Johnson the subject, from one of the foremost scholars of both.
Bruce Redford is the editor of both Johnson's Letters and the manuscript of Boswell's Life of Johnson, making him uniquely placed to study Boswell's extraordinary achievement.
Shows how Boswell revised and refined his notes and drafts, to fashion and dramatize the presentation of his famous friend.

Designing the Life of Johnson

The Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, 2001-2

Bruce Redford

Lyell Lectures in Bibliography

Description

For over two centuries Boswell's massive biography of Samuel Johnson has been both reverenced and reviled. Yet neither its admirers nor its critics have fully understood how the book was designed to work upon them. Boswell himself is partly to blame: throughout the Life he directs attention away from artistry to industry, from creative choices to dedicated researches. Yet his working manuscript, one of the twentieth century's greatest literary discoveries, tells a much different tale. Designing the Life of Johnson, the first study of its kind, reconstructs Boswell's models and methods by charting this textual labyrinth. It begins by analysing the stages that led to the first edition, goes on to reveal the impact of portrait and theatre-piece upon the structure of the Life, and ends by uncovering the transformation of Johnson from savage into sage. The result is a more subtle, more vital assessment of Boswell the designer - and an enhanced awareness of biography's power to make life into art.

Designing the Life of Johnson

The Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, 2001-2

Bruce Redford

Lyell Lectures in Bibliography

Designing the Life of Johnson

The Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, 2001-2

Bruce Redford

Lyell Lectures in Bibliography

Author Information

Bruce Redford, University Professor, Boston University

Designing the Life of Johnson

The Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, 2001-2

Bruce Redford

Lyell Lectures in Bibliography

Reviews and Awards

Review from previous edition Bruce Redford's Lyell Lectures are a splendid work, now setting Boswell's Life of Johnson on the very highest grounds of artistic biography. - Royal Stuart Review

Designing the Life of Johnson is an impressive achievement. The availability of the entire working manuscript, and the author's skill in using this manuscript to describe Boswell's complex procedures, make the book the most useful overall study of the Life yet available. - Biography

A winning combination of scholarly strength and subtlety of insight which will make these gracefully written lectures a fitting companion to Redford's edition of the manuscript, and also the inescapable point of departure for anyone who wishes to understand how it was that Boswell designed The Life of Johnson. - Review of English Studies

Redford is always in absolute control of his material: his readings and interpretations are perceptive and incisive, never strained or forced. The result is a wholly persuasive account of the "textual labyrinth" out of which Boswell created his masterpiece. . . . Nobody interested in the supposed contests between ... Boswell's Johnson and Johnson's Johnson, or more generally between biography as history and as poetry, will wish to ignore Bruce Redford's elegant and powerful book. - H. R. Woudhuysen, Times Literary Supplement