Samuel Johnson: A Life

Published on the tercentenary of Dr. Johnson's birth comes yet another biography (after two in 2008) of the greatest personality in English literature. Nokes stakes his ground by putting to rest the notion of Johnson's overwhelming fear of his own insanity—“a fact” insisted on by Boswell as well as Hester Thrale, a much younger woman in whose husband's household Johnson spent the last 20 years of his life and the woman to whom he entrusted his most intimate confidences. If the massively awkward Johnson had one overarching obsession, it was, in his own withering observation, that too much of his life consisted in time wasted. Nokes, a biographer of Jane Austen and professor at King's College, London, is aware, almost to the point of constraint, that Johnson both invented the modern biography and was himself the subject of the greatest ever written. On the flip side, there is something almost Johnsonian in Nokes's unfashionable but commonsensical approach. For example, in dealing with the infamous padlock belonging to Mrs. Thrale and her teasing journal footnote on it, or in his examination of Johnson's largely unhappy marriage to a woman almost twice his age, Nokes refrains from prurient speculation. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.)