Caring deeply for the works of a great writer sometimes prompts a reflective modern author to suggest that he can teach us how to live. Thus Alain de Botton on Proust and now Henry Hitchings in his recent book: The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life (Macmillan).
Writing about the life of Dr Johnson will always be rewarding for its author and for readers, given Johnson’s largeness of stature, both physically and intellectually and the indispensable anecdotes provided by James Boswell; nonetheless, to try to treat him as a mentor for how to change or improve one’s life, is a fanciful and useless enterprise. I don’t know anyone who has seriously reformed his habits in this way – except – occasionally – by reading the life of a saint.
