Johnson without Boswell

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 Hawk