“I Also am a Man”: Johnson’s Lives and the Gender of the Poet

In a conversation with Samuel Johnson shortly after the initial volumes of his Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) appeared, James Boswell raised the touchy issue of Johnson’s subordination to the London booksellers who initiated the project: “I asked him if he would [provide a preface] to any dunce’s works, if they should ask him. Johnson. ‘Yes, Sir; and say he was a dunce?’” 1 Johnson’s reply asserts the complete autonomy of his critical judgments, declaring that even the economic concerns of those who financed the Lives would have no effect on the content of his prefaces. Most readers of the Lives agreed that Johnson maintained his intellectual independence, surpassing the work of his predecessors and transforming the “not very extensive or difficult” 2 undertaking into something much more complicated: as Robert Halsband observes, the Lives represented “the culmination of his career as well as the art and craft of literary biography up to that time.”3