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This chapter details Boswell's writing of Johnson's biography. By examining the journal entries and letters Boswell wrote as he drafted and then revised the Life, by studying how he modified entries describing his time with Johnson, by noticing what he cut from Johnson's letters and how he used his own, and by carefully attending to the many deletions and additions, changes and further changes throughout the long process of constructing this enormous biography, the chapter explores what this extended activity meant for Boswell.

This chapter discusses how Boswell's need for Johnson's understanding and forgiveness is reflected in Life. Having failed to receive a blessing in Johnson's final letter, and having not been mentioned in Johnson's will, Boswell could not formally receive a posthumous blessing. But when the Life pleased those best equipped to judge—longtime friends like Hector and Reynolds, Langton and Burke, and newer members of the Club who had known Johnson well, like Malone and Barnard—then it clearly was a worthy homage, a culminating gesture of friendship by someone who deserved to be embraced once Boswell and Johnson were reunited.

This chapter shows how Samuel Johnson’s authorial persona focalized a larger crisis of political and literary authority during the period spanning the American War and the French Revolution. Where Johnson’s commitment to absolute sovereignty set him at odds with changing conceptions of power, the ‘warm Toryism’ of James Boswell allowed him to navigate the onset of Britain’s counter-revolutionary turn and its imperial correlatives with far greater success. These changing conceptions of authority converged in Boswell’s monumental biography, which thereby illuminates crucial changes to the relationship between literature and politics. Through Johnson’s reputation in America and posthumous satires about his views on popular revolution, the chapter shows how Johnson’s dogmatic views on authority, together with his volatile personality, infused both his writings and his politics with uncertainty. Boswell’s depiction of Johnson in his 1791 Life of Johnson in turn acquired heightened and transformed significance amidst fears of anti-royalist unrest and the explosion of plebeian political activity associated with the aftermath of the French Revolution, and, to an important and neglected degree, was the product of both this changing political atmosphere and changing conceptions of the literary domain.

This chapter, written by Michael Bundock, describes competing portrayals of Francis Barber, the Jamaican manservant and friend of writer Samuel Johnson who worked in his household for the better part of three decades and became his heir. The incompatible depictions are found in separate biographies of Johnson written by lawyers John Hawkins and James Boswell as well as in other writings and letters. Hawkins’ biography, published first, is openly hostile to Barber. His disdain for Barber’s interracial marriage and criticism of Johnson’s indulgent financial and emotional support of Barber is tinged with racism. Bundock supposes that Boswell’s own biography of Johnson was, in part, a response and rebuke to Hawkins’—especially so in his favourable characterization of Barber, his wife and their closeness with Johnson. Comparing these rival biographies, Bundock attempts to evaluate the authors’ motivations as well as their attitudes to race.

This introductory chapter discusses the friendship between Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. It also sets out the book's purpose, which is to chart the friendship from the moment Johnson and Boswell met on 16 May 1763 to the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson exactly twenty-eight years later. It analyzes the key interactions, seeking to understand what each friend experienced at every stage of their long-term attachment. It examines how Johnson and Boswell challenged and confirmed each other, and provided perspectives that became internalized. It explores how their friendship deepened and evolved, how and why it endured, and how each perceived his “rivals”.

This chapter focuses on Francis Barber’s move to Lichfield following Samuel Johnson’s death. Johnson’s legacy left Barber independent and well-off, allowing him to make his own choices and to put them into effect. By October 1785 Barber had decided to leave London altogether and started a new life in Lichfield, where he became a minor celebrity, sought out by both locals and visitors who were eager to hear his tales of Johnson. In March 1787 John Hawkins published his Life of Samuel Johnson, with its attack on Barber and his wife. For some readers Hawkins’s account confirmed their suspicions about the black population as a whole. When Barber heard about Hawkins’s account, he was deeply offended. James Boswell quickly wrote to Barber to express his sympathy. In December 1800 Barber was taken to the Staffordshire General Infirmary, where he underwent an operation for an undisclosed illness. He died on January 13, 1801 at the age of about fifty-seven or fifty-eight.

This chapter speculates on the life of Francis Barber based on the biography written by James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson. According to Boswell, Barber was born in Jamaica and came to England with Colonel Richard Bathurst in 1750 when he was seven or eight years old. Barber must have became Bathurst’s property through either one of two ways: either he was purchased by Bathurst or he was the child of a woman slave whom Bathurst owned. It seems that Barber was at first called “Quashey” and that his origins were in slavery. Barber’s first known home was Bathurst’s estate, a sugar plantation. Following the collapse of his business, Bathurst decided to leave Jamaica for good and make his home in England, bringing the young Quashey with him.

This chapter looks at the historiography surrounding Igor Stravinsky's life and career and attempts to answer queries as to how much of it is true, and how much of it is myth and legend. It relates the musicological commotion surrounding Robert Craft's association with Stravinsky as a reflection of the spark that James Boswell, “The Great Biographer,” would ignite regarding the constitution of historiography. James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, for example, was questioned if it should be considered a biography at all, or if it should be categorized more as a personal diary that reveals more about Boswell's life than Johnson's. The chapter thus asks how closely this resembles Craft's journalizing of Stravinsky—especially since it is a journalizing that has shaped the perception and understanding of the composer for half a century.