The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Comprehending an Account of His Studies and Numerous Works, in Chronological Order; A Series of His Epistolary Correspondence and Conversations with Many Eminent Persons; and Various Original Exhibiting a View of Literature and Literary Men in Great-Britain, for Near Half a Century, During Which He Flourished. In Three Volumes. The Second Edition, Revised and Augmented. By James Boswell, Esq. London: Printed by Henry Baldwin, for Charles Dilly, MDCCXCIII (1793).
SECOND EDITION OF JAMES BOSWELL'S MAGNUM OPUS; THE GREATEST BIOGRAPHY EVER WRITTEN, IN BEAUTIFUL CONDITION.
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"The Life of Johnson was no single book miraculously produced by an inexperienced author. It was the crowning achievement of an artist who for more than twenty-five years had been deliberately disciplining himself for such a task" (Pottle, p.xxi).
The first edition was issued in 1,750 copies on the 16th of May 1791 and was fast to sell out and was an immediate commercial success, with new editions following quickly. It paved the way for the modern biography and is undoubtedly the most significant biography ever published in the genre.
Even the work's most famous critic, Thomas Macaulay, said of it that "The Life of Samuel Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them."
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Size: 139 x 217 mm (approx., each)
Condition:
[frontis, t.p., i-xxxix, 1pp., 603pp.]; [t.p., 634pp.]
Full brown tree-calf with red and black morocco labels to spines with surrounding decorative gilt tooling. Bindings with very minor scuffing and rubbing, no shelf lean. Small losses to tooled labels, more so to volume two. Both boards securely attached with very minor wear. Shelf and edge wear. Small part of the leather peeling from the edge of the front board of volume one. Corners very lightly turned-in. Page edges toned, top page edges darkened as often. Ink stamps to front pastedown in both volumes depicting some kind of wildcat and overlapping initials. Very small damp stain to the outer corner of the frontispiece. Text blocks very clean with light edge toning and some foxing. Very small hole to pp.1/2 not affecting the text.
