YOUNG SAMUEL JOHNSON: A Biography. By . James L. Clifford.
(Heinemann, 30s.) IT would be a pity if the recent spate of books on Samuel Johnson should ward off potential readers from this fine biography by the Pro- fessor of English at Columbia University. Mr. Clifford is as aware as the rest of us that the name Dr. Johnson usually conjures up a men- tal picture of an old man, and has therefore written this account of the first forty years of his subject's life. There is no sign of the pro- lixity or pedantry that we sometimes associate with contemporary American scholarship; in- deed, the book is eminently readable, and both the figure of Johnson as a young man and the world in which he moved emerge with a re- markable clarity. The reader is left with two over-all impressions : what an essentially de- cent person Johnson was, and how 'modern' he appears to us. I can think of no character in English history, including the nineteenth century, who would have adjusted more easily to our world of 1956 than the ungainly son of the Lichfield bookseller. And James Clifford lucidly demonstrates this as 'well rounding off a picture of one of the most lovable of Eng- land's list of literati—a picture that for too long has been incomplete in our minds.
DAVID WATMOUGH
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