The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

By Leo Damrosch

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, History

Harvard literary scholar Leo Damrosch's 2019 group portrait centers on the Club, the London dining society founded in 1764 by Samuel Johnson and the painter Joshua Reynolds. Its members came to include James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith. Damrosch follows Johnson's friendship with Boswell and with Hester Thrale, and credits the Club's conversations, preserved in Boswell's journals, with shaping literature, politics and ideas in eighteenth-century Britain.

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