In the Library
The Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell, 1791
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 16 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 35
- Length
- Length 215k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys does the same thing, but keeps the camera on himself instead of a friend, recording gossip, ambition and vanity with the same helpless honesty.
£1.99
Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy does the same thing, but turns the interruption and the digression into the whole method, laughing at its own impossible task of capturing a life.
£1.99
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin does the same thing, but from the inside, a self-made man cataloguing his own virtues and failures with the same unblinking candour.
£1.99
About the book
Late one night, straight from a tavern where Samuel Johnson had talked until the small hours, James Boswell sat down and wrote out every word of it before he let himself sleep, terrified of losing a single sentence. He kept doing that for two decades. The result is not really a life; it is a voice, caught closer to full volume than any other mind in English has ever been recorded. You hear Johnson roar and contradict himself and touch every lamppost on the way home and weep over the dread that he would die unforgiven. Boswell loved him enough to leave in the ugliness: the rages, the sloth, the terror of his own mind giving way, the tics no one else thought worth writing down. That refusal to tidy him is the book's whole genius, and its scandal. Two centuries on, open the book anywhere and Johnson is still in the room, arguing too loudly to ignore.