Self-Hugging

Andrew O’Hagan

  • Boswell's Presumptuous Task by Adam Sisman
    Hamish Hamilton, 352 pp, £17.99, November 2000, ISBN 0 241 13637 7
  • James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’: Research Edition: Vol. II edited by Bruce Redford and Elizabeth Goldring
    Edinburgh, 303 pp, £50.00, February 2000, ISBN 0 7486 0606 8
  • Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author by Lawrence Lipking
    Harvard, 372 pp, £11.50, March 2000, ISBN 0 674 00198 2
  • Dr Johnson's London by Liza Picard
    Weidenfeld, 362 pp, £20.00, July 2000, ISBN 0 297 84218 8

One of the general effects of hero-worship is its tendency to marshal resentment in those who claim themselves no party to the admiration. A good example of this offers itself at the opening of Vanity Fair – ‘A Novel without a Hero’ – when the single-minded Becky Sharp, high in a coach bound for Russell Square, flings a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window to land on the grass at the feet of her former teacher, a sworn disciple of the Great Lexicographer. ‘So much for the Dictionary,’ says Becky Sharp as the carriage pulls away, ‘and, thank God, I’m out of Chiswick.’

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