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A biographical & critical study.
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First published in 1940, Johnson without Boswell is about Samuel Johnson, the dictator of eighteenth-century English letters. It has become almost axiomatic never to mention that mammoth of wit and wisdom without linking him at least in thought with his great biographer, James Boswell. But there were others who knew him well, and who set down what they knew – among them Johnson himself in his letters and autobiographical fragments, his great friend Mrs. Thale in her Anecdotes, and Sir John Hawkins in his Life. From these and others, excerpted and skilfully pieced together in this volume by Hugh Kingsmill, there emerges a portrait of Johnson more domestic and less alarming than Boswell’s. But something of curmudgeon still, who could terrorise his table-companions by brandishing a knife and bellowing that by God he could eat a bit more. The result is a volume richly readable and informative, which can be read with pleasure either wholly or in part, especially by students of English literature.
The author's experiences as head of the National Recovery Administration, with an autobiographical introduction of fifteen chapters.
Language and tradition have long been relegated to the sidelines as scholars have considered the role of politics, science, technology and economics in the making of the modern world. This novel reading of over two centuries of philosophy, political theory, anthropology, folklore and history argues that new ways of imagining language and representing supposedly premodern people - the poor, labourers, country folk, non-europeans and women - made political and scientific revolutions possible. The connections between language ideologies, privileged linguistic codes, and political concepts and practices shape the diverse ways we perceive ourselves and others. Bauman and Briggs demonstrate that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply-rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, they suggest new strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.
Boswell's life of Johnson is incontestably one of the great biographies in the English language. And yet not even it can give a completely rounded portrait. It is for that reason Hugh Kingsmill hit upon the idea of assembling this alternative anthology: Samuel Johnson as recalled diversely by those including Johnson himself, Mrs Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins, Anna Seward (not flattering) and Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua's sister. Here is an example from the latter: 'One Sunday morning, as I was walking with him in Twickenham meadows, he began his antics both with his feet and his hands, with the latter as if he was holding the reins of a horse like a jockey on full speed. But to describe the positio...