1831 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Description

Publishers' Original Binding

5 Volumes, complete. With a Hedges & Smith bookseller's label on the front board of volume 1. On Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, it is commented that, “In 1831 Croker published a new edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson including the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which was vindictively attacked by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review, but which remained the best edition until...the work of George Birkbeck Hill" and that his research has been invaluable to later historians. (DNB) Dr Samuel Johnson, 1709 – 1784, was an English author. Beginning as a Grub Street journalist, he made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and political conservative. Samuel Johnson is probably most famous for his dictionary. James Boswell, 1740 – 1795, was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for his biography of Samuel Johnson. His name has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer. John Wilson Croker, 1780 – 1857, was a British statesman and author. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1800. Immediately afterwards he entered Lincoln's Inn, and in 1802 he was called to the Irish bar. His interest in the French Revolution led him to collect a large number of valuable documents on the subject, now in the British Museum. In 1809 Croker was appointed as secretary to the Admiralty. Many of his political speeches were published in pamphlet form. He was for many years one of the leading contributors on literary and historical subjects to the Quarterly Review, with which he had been associated from its foundation. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography comments that, “He had a wide appreciation of all varieties of literature and art, which made him a valuable intermediary between the politicians and the public, and he was an able writer, lucid, fluent, and always well informed.”