A talk by Dr Jane Darcy in the atmospheric Georgian townhouse that was once home to Dr Johnson.
Wednesday March 19th, 7pm (doors open 6.15pm).  

Dr Johnson famously loved biographical works: ‘the part of literature’, he told Boswell, ‘I love most.’ 

He championed biographies that focused not on ‘incidents which produce vulgar greatness’ but those that ‘lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life.’

This talk will examine the profound appeal to Johnson of accounts of other people’s lives, and in particular, to lives of suffering.

‘They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.’  
(Boswell, ‘Life.’)

Tickets: £5 (tickets include the lecture and a glass of wine served in the Withdrawing Room)
Please click here to book. 
Tickets in advance only.  

Dr Jane Darcy is a teaching fellow in the English Department at University College London, with a particular interest in the literature and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has written on melancholy throughout this period with a focus on life-writing, resulting in her recent publication Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816 (Palgrave, 2013).