JOHNSON AND BOSWELL ARM-IN-ARM UP THE HIGH STREET } } 128 JOHNSON UNDER BOSWELL'S ROOF } } (from the caricatures by } Thomas Rowlandson, 1786) } BOSWELL STANDING FIRM TO HIS POST } } 138 WHIGGISM TERRIBLY BUFFETED } } (from the caricatures by Rowlandson) } FLEET STREET IN JOHNSON'S DAY 150 (from a contemporary engraving) 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 half-pence 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_ On 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. Dr Johnson lived in four reigns--from 1709 to 1784. He could remember seeing Queen Anne and had an audience of George III; a Jacobite as a boy and a Tory always, he saw the '15 and the '45; he groaned under the Whig domination of Walpole and rejoiced in the Tory triumph of the king who gloried in the name of Briton; he saw the victories of our armies in India and Canada and their failure in America; he saw the damage done in the Gordon Riots and chatted to a South Sea islander brought home by Captain Cook; he dined with John Wilkes and was a guest in the house of Flora Macdonald.