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James Boswell's Life of Johnson is generally acclaimed as the best biography in the English language. Samuel Johnson is presented with a vividness and vitality unrivaled in accounts of historical figures. The 20-century discovery of the revealing Boswell journals, correspondence, and original manuscript for the biography provides material for an understanding of the personality of the biographer. Boswell's relations to his parents, depression, and his uncontrolled sexuality led him to an attachment and a need for a parental surrogate whose function was to provide cohesion and integration. The vividness of the biography is enhanced by the biographer's participation as an active and manipulative presence in search of idealization and an avidity for reverence.
Psychoanalysts have had an abiding interest in the linkage between biographer and choice of subject. Freud as early as 1910 remarked that a biographer has personal motives in devoting attention to a particular figure; often the interest is the result of a wish to find an object of idealization, a tendency observed not only in biographers of Leonardo da Vinci but quite generally. Freud wrote before the appearance of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians in 1918, an example of irreverent iconoclasm. The brother of Freud's translator brought further into question the stance of the biographer and the inevitable impact on the object of study. The present study of James Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson presents an in-depth approach to the personality of Boswell and the psychological factors in his own life that contributed to the success of his outstanding achievement.
At about 7 o'clock on the 16th of May 1763, the 23-year-old James Boswell, newly arrived in London from Scotland, was sitting