Samuel Johnson, born at Lichfield in the year 1709, on the 7th of September Old Style,
18th New Style, was sixty-eight years old when he agreed with the booksellers to write
his "Lives of the English Poets." "I am engaged," he said, "to write little Lives, and little
Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets." His conscience was also a little hurt by
the fact that the bargain was made on Easter Eve. In 1777 his memorandum, set down
among prayers and meditations, was "29 March, Easter Eve, I treated with booksellers on
a bargain, but the time was not long."
The history of the book as told to Boswell by Edward Dilly, one of the contracting
booksellers, was this. An edition of Poets printed by the Martins in Edinburgh, and sold
by Bell in London, was regarded by the London publishers as an interference with the
honorary copyright which booksellers then respected among themselves. They said also
that it was inaccurately printed and its type was small. A few booksellers agreed,
therefore, among themselves to call a meeting of proprietors of honorary or actual
copyright in the various Poets. In Poets who had died before 1660 they had no trade
interest at all. About forty of the most respectable booksellers in London accepted the
invitation to this meeting. They determined to proceed immediately with an elegant and
uniform edition of Poets in whose works they were interested, and they deputed three of
their number, William Strahan, Thomas Davies, and Cadell, to wait on Johnson, asking
him to write the series of prefatory Lives, and name his own terms. Johnson agreed at
once, and suggested as his price two hundred guineas, when, as Malone says, the
booksellers would readily have given him a thousand. He then contemplated only "little
Lives." His energetic pleasure in the work expanded his Preface beyond the limits of the
first design; but when it was observed to Johnson that he was underpaid by the
booksellers, his reply was, "No, sir; it was not that they gave me too little, but that I gave
them too much." He gave them, in fact, his masterpiece. His keen interest in Literature as
the soul of life, his sympathetic insight into human nature, enabled him to put all that was
best in himself into these studies of the lives of men for whom he cared, and of the books
that he was glad to speak his mind about in his own shrewd independent way. Boswell
was somewhat disappointed at finding that the selection of the Poets in this series would
not be Johnson's, but that he was to furnish a Preface and Life to any Poet the booksellers
pleased. "I asked him," writes Boswell, "if he would do this to any dunce's works, if they
should ask him. JOHNSON. "Yes, sir; and SAY he was a dunce."
The meeting of booksellers, happy in the support of Johnson's intellectual power,
appointed also a committee to engage the best engravers, and another committee to give
directions about paper and printing. They made out at once a list of the Poets they meant
to give, "many of which," said Dilly, "are within the time of the Act of Queen Anne,
which Martin and Bell cannot give, as they have no property in them. The proprietors are
almost all the booksellers in London, of consequence."
