This volume of The Life of Johnson is both biography and intellectual atlas, gathering the sources that illuminate Samuel Johnson's world and Boswell's celebrated account of it. Alongside the scholarly apparatus, it includes Johnson's own proposal for a Geographical Dictionary, a practical and ambitious letter to Mr. Strahan that lays out the terms of the project and argues for a comprehensive reference to the world's countries, cities, rivers, ports, and trade routes. The result is a portrait of Johnson as lexicographer, moralist, and man of letters, shaped by books, correspondence, memoirs, and history. The volume also offers a sharp alphabetical treasury of Johnson's wit and judgment on poverty, praise, prejudice, public fame, reform, religion, ridicule, rights, and the contradictions of human conduct. Skeptical, ironic, and morally alert, these remarks expose vanity, pretension, and self-deception while revealing the comic and serious sides of eighteenth-century life. Together, the entries create a vivid map of the literary, political, and social world around Johnson. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.