Harold Bloom
…Samuel Johnson, a workmanlike book by the British scholar David Nokes, joins itself to an admirable sequence that includes studies by Robert DeMaria, Walter Jackson Bate, Lawrence Lipking and Peter Martin. Each of these brought a particular warmth and individual insight to the reception of Johnson, and Nokes complements them by his sense of the critic as a Londoner, almost the archetypal citizen of that endless city…Like all biographers of Johnson, Nokes is appreciatively wary of Boswell, who after all was a genius at self-advertisement. Lovers of Johnson can be forgiven for wanting him without Boswell, wherever possible, while knowing most readers will hear of Johnson only through Boswell. I myself qualify as a common reader of Johnson, not a Johnsonian scholar, and Nokes is now part of a select company to whom I am indebted.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Published on the tercentenary of Dr. Johnson's birth comes yet another biography (after two in 2008) of the greatest personality in English literature. Nokes stakes his ground by putting to rest the notion of Johnson's overwhelming fear of his own insanity—“a fact” insisted on by Boswell as well as Hester Thrale, a much younger woman in whose husband's household Johnson spent the last 20 years of his life and the woman to whom he entrusted his most intimate confidences. If the massively awkward Johnson had one overarching obsession, it was, in his own withering observation, that too much of his life consisted in time wasted. Nokes, a biographer of Jane Austen and professor at King's College, London, is aware, almost to the point of constraint, that Johnson both invented the modern biography and was himself the subject of the greatest ever written. On the flip side, there is something almost Johnsonian in Nokes's unfashionable but commonsensical approach. For example, in dealing with the infamous padlock belonging to Mrs. Thrale and her teasing journal footnote on it, or in his examination of Johnson's largely unhappy marriage to a woman almost twice his age, Nokes refrains from prurient speculation. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.)
Library Journal
On the tercentenary of novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist, editor, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson's birth, Nokes (English literature & creative writing, King's Coll., London; Jane Austen: A Life) presents an informative and engaging biography, viewing Johnson not through the lens of his accomplishments but through the eyes of those closest to him: Johnson's wife, Tetty, 20 years his senior and a reliable source of income; Hester Thrale, Johnson's landlady and love interest during the nearly 20 years he took to compile his annotated Shakespeare; and Frances Barber, the black manservant who was the recipient of Johnson's fortune. Through these characters we see Johnson as he interacts with those near him and learn how these relationships affected both the man and his work. Other books about Johnson, most notably James Boswell's famous book and Jeffrey Meyers's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, focus on his work and behavior. VERDICT Nokes's Johnson is a remarkable and accessible man. Scholars and the general reader alike will enjoy getting to know him as a man of letters and a man of the people.—Carol Gladstein, McMinnville P.L., OR
Kirkus Reviews
A swift life of the author of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), whose corporal and hygienic eccentricities matched in uniqueness the brilliance of his mind. Nokes (English Literature and Creative Writing/King's College, London; Jane Austen, 1997, etc.) does not add much to the biographical detail of Johnson's remarkable life (1709-1784), but he emphasizes that Johnson's most celebrated biographer, James Boswell, was often more interested in portraying his own proximity to his subject than the subject himself. Nokes notes that Boswell spent fewer than 500 days in Johnson's presence in a two-decade period, and manifestly did not, as some think, cling like a remora to the flank of the shark. The author also depicts a sometimes dilatory Johnson, who often found myriad reasons not to begin or continue with a commission. A notable example was The Lives of the Poets, which was supposed to be a series of brief prefaces to a multivolume anthology of English poets. Johnson, however, devoted some scattered years to the project, whose modest dimensions soon ballooned. Nokes spends little time summarizing or assessing the quality or enduring significance of Johnson's work, but he does attend well to chronology, quoting liberally and effectively from Johnson's correspondence and personal records. The author examines Johnson's boyhood, his complex medical and psychological profile, his marriage to an older woman, his struggles to become a writer, his long loving relationship with Hester Thrale and his affection for young novelist Fanny Burney, whose 1778 novel Evelina he praised. Curiously, Nokes often neglects to provide a year for certain events, requiring inquisitive readers to pagebackward to do uncertain calculations. Rigorous and scholarly, but an introduction rather than an advancement in knowledge. Agent: Gordon Wise/Curtis Brown
