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have eluded him had he been obliged to rely on his other biographers – that troop of the now all but unread, comprising Sir John Hawkins, Mrs Piozzi, Isaac Reed, George Steevens, Thomas Tyers, William Cooke, William Shaw, Joseph Towers, James Harrison, et al.11 That meeting, then, was not only the beginning of Johnson and Boswell’s friendship. It was also the seed of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and it is therefore appropriate that Boswell should have folded into his account of that primal scene a reference to the book which would result from it, when he mentioned the Reynolds portrait of Johnson ‘from which an engraving has been made for this work’.12

Boswell offers further implicit comment on the self-reflexive complexity of his book at the end of his account of his first visit to Johnson’s lodgings, when he congratulates himself on ‘having now so happily established an acquaintance of which I had been so long ambitious’:

My readers will, I trust, excuse me for being thus minutely circumstantial, when it is considered that the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson was to me a most valuable acquisition, and laid the foundation of whatever instruction and entertainment they may receive from my collections concerning the great subject of the work which they are now perusing.13

In this awkwardly articulated sentence, Boswell tries to express the relationship between a number of distinct entities: his appetite for literary detail; his friendship with Johnson; the production of literary instruction and entertainment; his ‘collections’ preparatory to the writing of the book; the Life of Johnson itself, which its readers are ‘now perusing’; and its ‘great subject’. It is tempting to take that last phrase as referring simply to Johnson himself: what could be more self-evident than that the great subject of the Life of Johnson is Samuel Johnson? But so to construe the final limb of Boswell’s ungainly sentence would be to short-change the Life of Johnson. It is about Boswell; it is about Johnson; it is about the friendship between Boswell and Johnson; and finally it is also about the process whereby those individuals and that friendship gave rise to the material ‘collections’ which made possible its own creation. Nothing less than all of this is the ‘great subject’ of Boswell’s book, and it is this complex amplitude which makes the Life of Johnson the richest example of life-writing in English. As Boswell himself put it in a letter of 21 April 1786 to Hugh Blair, ‘I will venture to promise that my Life of my revered Friend will be the richest piece of Biography that has ever appeared. The Bullion will be immense, whatever defects there may be in the workmanship.’14 That final note of diffidence is rather uncharacteristic for Boswell, inclined as he was to bounce and preen.15 It was also misplaced, as the workmanship – that is to say, Boswell’s deliberate and creative manipulation of the materials he had collected over many years – was, and remains, essential to the book’s triumph, as Bruce Redford has recently demonstrated.16 It was because of the workmanship that Vicesimus Knox would in 1791 recognize in Boswell’s Life of Johnson ‘a new Species of Biography’.17

‘Hyperion to a satyr’: so Hamlet expressed the profound discrepancy between Old Hamlet and Claudius.18 The difference between Boswell and Johnson was perhaps less absolute, but it was still pronounced. In 1763 Johnson was a literary figure of substance: a poet, the author of The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler, a novelist, and the heroic compiler of A Dictionary of the English Language. In 1755 he had received an honorary MA from Oxford, and in 1762 he had been given a pension of £300 per annum by George III. Boswell, by contrast, was unknown, and virtually unpublished.19 Johnson was both admired and censured as the spokesman for a severe and Christian morality in a mid-century society which was given, perhaps with a certain disabling self-consciousness, to seeing itself as gripped in moral crisis.20 Boswell was fond of drink and women. Nevertheless, the friendship between