Volume 1

Studies of a biographer / by Leslie Stephen.

  • Stephen, Leslie, 1832-1904.
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of a biographer / by Leslie Stephen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    murder. Johnson would have visited her too, he said, if they had not already got into the habit of putting things into the papers ; and both would have justified themselves on the pretext that they were studying ‘ human nature.’ When people go to Wapping now it is generally to carry out Mr. Charles Booth’s admirable method of investigating great social problems. They deal with criminals by statistical tables, not by seek¬ ing the society of eminent murderers, or looking on at executions. We talk about sociology, not the study of human nature, and investigate the manners and customs of primitive savages in¬ stead of generalising our private personal ex¬ perience. The speciality of Johnson’s period is precisely this desire to consider the concrete human being, from Wapping to St. James’s, as the subject-matter of a separate and intensely in¬ teresting science. This, not to go further, characterises Boswell’s view of Johnson. Boswell, already inclined to study life after a quaint and desultory fashion enough, to put himself in contact with all manner of famous people and to play their parts in imagination, imagined, not without excuse, that he had found in Johnson an embodiment of