III
JOHNSON WITHOUT BOSWELL
When Boswell was preparing to give to the public his Life of Samuel Johnson, he knew what he was doing. ‘I am absolutely certain,’ he wrote to his friend Temple, in February, 1788, ‘that my mode of biography, which gives not only a History of Johnson’s visible progress through the world, and of his publications, but a view of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared.’
His confidence was well warranted; he has fairly vanquished all his competitors, and has established his claim to be both the author of the best biography that has ever yet appeared and the single sufficient expositor of his great theme. Yet he was not the first in the field. Johnson died in 1784, and before Boswell’s book was published in 1791 there had been six other attempts to tell the story. The earliest of these, A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1784), was by Thomas Tyers, the son of the founder of Vauxhall Gardens. He was a man of a handsome fortune and a lively temper, impatient of the drudgery of the legal profession, to which he had been bred. ‘He therefore,’ says Boswell, ‘ran about the world with a pleasant carelessness, amusing everybody by his desultory conversation.’ The sketch of Tom Restless in Number 48 of The Idler was intended by Johnson for a portrait of Tyers. Tom ‘does not care to spend much time among authors; for he is of opinion that few books deserve the labour of perusal, that they give the mind
