TO FACE PAGE JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH OUTSIDE FILBY'S SHOP (from a drawing by W. M. Thackeray in the North (from an engraving after the portrait by himself) MRS THRALE. (from an engraving after the portrait by Reynolds) 100 116 MRS THRALE'S BREAKFAST-TABLE • 120 (from an engraving after I. Cruikshanks, 1791) FANNY BURNEY (from an engraving after the portrait by E. F. Burney) JOHNSON AND BOSWELL ARM-IN-ARM UP THE) HIGH STREET 128 JOHNSON UNDER BOSWELL'S ROOF (from the caricatures by Thomas Rowlandson, 1786) The design on the cover is from one of the "copper pieces struck at Birmingham with his (Johnson's] head impressed on them." They passed current, as Boswell tells us, " as halfpence there, and in the neighbouring parts of the country." Acknowledgment is made to Messrs Sidgwick and Jackson Ltd for supplying the block of the Boswell portrait; to Messrs George Routledge & Sons Ltd for permission to reproduce the pictures facing p. 88 from Doran's Annals of the English Stage (ed. Lowe, 1888); and to Messrs Emery Walker Ltd for permission to reproduce the portrait of Garrick facing p. 92. The Story of DOCTOR JOHNSON Johnson's World N the title-page of The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by JAMES BOSWELL, Esq., the work to which this little book is a stepping-stone, Boswell claims that the story of Dr Johnson's life exhibits "a view of literature and literary men in Great-Britain, for near half a century, during which he flourished." It is no idle claim. Indeed, Boswell might have gone a great deal further, for his story is not merely concerned with books and bookish men, but with men and women in every rank of society. Kings and cottagers, statesmen and shopkeepers, bishops and play-actors, rich brewers and penniless poets, dukes and innkeepers, country parsons and gay young men of the town, street beggars and fashionable ladies-all play their part in the story and shew us a picture of the English world in the eighteenth century such as no history-book can give. R. B. J. I |