The Life of Samuel Johnson

Back home in Edinburgh, Boswell writes to Johnson with the results of Joseph Knight’s case which has been decided in Joseph Knight’s favor. Surprisingly, Boswell now says that he belongs to “those who hold even the mildest and best regulated slavery in abomination” (885), which seems a complete turnaround from his opinion on slavery stated in the previous section. This suggests that Boswell’s view had indeed changed since he wrote the previous section and that he did not care about adjusting each part of the Life for absolute consistency.

On April 15, there is a conversation between Johnson and a company of men and women in which we see the violent contrasts in Johnson’s temperament. The subject turns to women’s rights. Mrs. Knowles, a Quaker woman, argues that “men had much more liberty allowed them than women” (944). Johnson responds that women in fact have “all the advantage” in society; he further argues that of the two sexes, “one or other must have the superiority” (944) and that both men and women achieve happiness in the way appropriate to them. The company goes on to discuss Christian ethics and to contrast friendship with the call to “universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren” (946).