That’s the answer that Johnson gave to Boswell when he was asked how he could make any of his Rambler essays any better. It’s a good answer from a practical person and editor. Nothing is perfect. If you look back at anything you were quite pleased with when you first wrote or published it, you […]
I don’t find the blogging about my writing about Johnson is slogging. But I set up a convenient form on my website where people can contact me, or send comments, or whatever they might want to do. It is here for my Johnson site and here for my general website. I’m going to have to […]
I have a lot of bits and pieces, and some of them some big bits or pieces, done for the biography about Samuel Johnson that I am writing. Some sections or scenes or passages have been fully written in advanced first draft, where when I go back to look at them, there likely won’t be […]
Johnson was 75 years old when in died in 1784. Even apart from his failing health, it was a troubled and turbulent year for him, one of dramatic changes and actions. It’s as if everything was starting to fall apart anyway, so death near the end of the year was the logical conclusion. He seemed […]
Johnson was notoriously hard on himself. Not in the sense that he doubted his intelligence or his ability to write or debate, for example, but more in the sense of himself as a person, his morality, his character, his traits. Often near the end of the year (but sometimes also throughout the year or on […]
I took the afternoon off on Wednesday and went to a spa. First time in my life for any such thing (and I just turned 60 a couple of weeks ago). I wandered around in a bathrobe and partook of the various luxurious offerings: large outdoor hot tubs, saunas that drained me, a (ahem) “foot […]
As I post this blog entry, I myself am about 20 hours from turning 60, and so in thinking about my own life I also thought about Johnson’s at the same age. He was 60 in 1769. By that time, he had published most of the major works of his life — his influential edition […]
Well, enough about sex (here, here!), for now. One of Johnson’s closest friends in his latter years, and frankly one that accommodated him (literally and figuratively) and put up with a lot of his idiosyncrasies, was Hester Thrale. He met her for the first time in 1765, when he was 55 and she was 23, […]
In Part 1 of this topic, I concentrated on sex work in general in both centuries, but in this post I will focus on the specific detail of how sex workers made money. This may seem obvious, but in a telephone interview I did with William Savage on September 6, for example, he talked about […]