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Johnson hawkins biography dowload

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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 in London, his association with the Gentleman's Magazine, and his political views and writings. Hawkins's use of historical and cultu

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Further Reading

Samuel Johnson reading (‘Blinking Sam’) by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1775). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

There are many ways of approaching Johnson through reading. While not intended to be rigidly prescriptive, the list below suggests some introductory works, followed by others more suited to advanced studies.

 

Introductory

A good short introduction to Johnson’s life and achievement is Samuel Johnson by Pat Rogers, in the Past Masters series from Oxford University Press (1993). A longer, but lively, work is The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life by Henry Hitchings (Macmillan, 2018), which interweaves an account of Johnson’s life with discussions of his views.

Three readable biographies were published around the time of Johnson’s tercentenary: Samuel Johnson: A Biography by Peter Martin (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008); Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers (Basic Books, 2008); and Samuel Johnson: A Life by David Nokes (Faber and Faber, 2009).

After such introductory reading,

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Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

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 Lifecomplements, 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 in London, his association with the Gentleman's Magazine, and his political views and writings. H

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