Sickly look at Doctor Johnson - Samuel Johnson: A biography by Peter Martin

A biography to mark the tercentenary of his birth adds nothing to our knowledge and suffers by comparison with earlier masterpieces

NEXT YEAR IS THE TERCENTENARY of Johnson's birth in September 1709; thus Peter Martin's new biography is an early strike on the commemorative market. Martin tells us he fears Johnson is too little known these days, in spite of his "iconic status and occasional programmes about him on television and on the radio". He conducted spot interviews in the high streets of English towns and found only a quarter of those he met could identify him.

"Some wondered whether he was a boxer, or a contemporary of Shakespeare's, or a Canadian sprinter convicted of drug-taking, or a leading Conservative MP". Even "a hilarious episode of the British television sitcom Blackadder" has failed to lodge Johnson in the general public's memory, he reckons.

So here comes Martin to remind us. He has previously written biographies of the Shakespearean scholar Edmund Malone and of James Boswell and would thus seem well-placed to take on this daunting commission. He has produced here, his publishers assert, the first substantial new life of Johnson for 30 years, tacitly referring back to Walter Jackson Bate's, titled simply Samuel Johnson, of 1978.

But it's a dangerous comparison to invite, for Bate's biography is a Johnsonian masterpiece, no less, possessed of the strengths of its subject. Reviewing it at the time, Christopher Ricks commented: "Like Johnson, the book is warmly humane and utterly unsentimental; personal and egotistical; rangingly learned and altogether without pedantry; wise and unpriggish; stringent and open-minded; capacious and compact."

Martin has been able to draw on 30 years more of scholarship and research than Bate, but it can't be said there's been much discovered in the interim that has radically altered our knowledge of Johnson. So the biographer is himself exposed: what can he bring to the study that we have not had before?

The answer, alas, is nothing special. He tells us Boswell's Johnson, the personality and truculent conversationalist, is but part of the picture. But every biographer since has asserted this. He laboriously emphasises Johnson's liberalism, detestation of slavery and repeated denunciation of colonialism and imperialism, at the expense of his conservatism – all in the interests of representing him as fully modern.

"When one reads Johnson, one is struck by how modern he is," he says. Martin claims his "directness and impatience would have made him a popular guest for television interviews and talk shows". This is poor stuff, there's a lot of it, and mere proximity to the incisiveness of Johnson himself condemns it. Discussing Johnson's difficulties in correlating the Dictionary, he fatuously observes: "If he had had a word processor, his sleepless nights would have been less troubled."

Any halfway decent book about Johnson's life should be a pleasure to read simply because it provides a way of being in his company, of being reminded of the facts and re-acquainted with his sayings and writings, as with a commentated anthology. But here, too, Martin fails to deliver. Quoting from letters, he omits the best lines. Citing Johnson's last to Hester Thrale, there's no "irremeable stream", no "The tears stand in my eyes" – a line which brings tears to the eyes itself.

In his discussion of Johnson's greatest poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes", he actually misquotes abominably. Johnson unforgettably wrote: "Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,/ Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?" Martin somehow transcribes this as "Must man in ignorant solace ..." How could any Johnsonian have passed this at the proof stage?

Even the footnoting is haphazard and imprecise, sometimes irrelevant. Of course, had this been the first biography of Johnson, or even the first since Boswell, it would have been the most exciting and compelling book for years. But that is not the case. It tags on amateurishly to a great tradition.

Where Martin could have taken advantage of new freedoms is in discussing Johnson's sexuality. But he makes no advances. He deals with Johnson's love for his wife Tetty – 20 years his elder and perhaps the only woman he ever had sex with – unsympathetically, certainly compared to Walter Jackson Bate.

What we do know about Johnson is that the very idea of sexual happiness shaped and informed him greatly. There is much yet to be said about this aspect of his life. "There never was a man who had stronger amorous inclinations than Dr Johnson," said Mrs Desmoulins, whom he fondled. Discussing sexual desire with Johnson, Boswell said: "I don't know but there is upon the whole more misery than happiness produced by that passion." Johnson replied shortly: "I don't think so, Sir." He wrote warningly to a friend who had fallen in love: "If all would happen that a lover fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve pursuit. But love and marriage are different states."

He told Mr Thrale that the happiest period of his life had been when he spent a whole evening talking with Molly Aston, the woman nearer his own age he fell for shortly after he had married. "That indeed (said he) was not happiness, it was rapture." Martin chews this over and then produces this lame remark: "That he never, so far as we know, satisfied his passion for Molly has to be regarded as one of his greatest personal sadnesses."

So this, I am sorry to say, is not the book to distinguish Samuel from Ben or Boris Johnson in the public consciousness. The modern biography to read – after reading Boswell and Piozzi – remains Walter Jackson Bate's and it would have been a greater service to the tercentenary to have brought that back into print, along with those volumes of Boswell's private papers, such as The Applause of the Jury, that are no longer available. There's time yet.

SAMUEL JOHNSON: A BIOGRAPHY BY PETER MARTIN Weidenfeld, 568pp, £25