A Biographical Sketch of Dr Samuel Johnson

A Biographical Sketch of Dr Samuel Johnson was written by Thomas Tyers for The Gentleman's Magazine's December 1784 issue. The work was written immediately after the death of Samuel Johnson and is the first postmortem biographical work on the author. The first full length biography was written by John Hawkins and titled Life of Samuel Johnson.

There is little known about the relationship that Johnson and Tyers shared, except that Johnson claimed that "Tyers always tells him something he did not know before" and was familiarly mentioned by Johnson to Johnson's friends. However, Johnson, in The Idler, described Tyers, called Tom Restless, as "a circumstance" and says:

"When Tom Restless rises he goes into a coffee-house, where he creeps so near to men whom he takes to be reasoners, as to hear their discourses and endeavours to remember something which, when it has been strained through Tom's head, is so near to nothing, that what it once was cannot be discovered. This he carries round from friend to friend through a circle of visits, till, hearing what each says upon the question, he becomes able at dinner to say a little himself; and as every great genius relaxes himself among his inferiors, meets with some who wonder how so young a man can talk so wisely."

On 13 December 1784, Samuel Johnson died. In response to his death, the Gentleman's Magazine ran A Biographical Sketch of Dr Samuel Johnson for their December issue. The work was written in the short time between the death and the printing. Although it was the first biographical work on Johnson, the first full-length biography would be published by Murphy in 1787.

Tyers used his Biographical Sketch to discuss Johnson's mental state, but not everyone agreed with the way Tyers revealed Johnson's private life; Hester Thrale wrote, in her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, "Poor Johnson! I see they will leave nothing untold that I laboured so long to keep secret; & I was so very delicate in trying to conceal his fancied Insanity." Regardless of what Thrale may have wanted, critics focused on Johnson's mental state from then after. In particular, John Wain emphasizes Tyers's description of Johnson as "like a ghost. He never speaks unless he is spoken to", which Wain considered a "bon mot". Likwise, Walter Jackson Bate relies on how Tyers was able to partly capture Johnson's "bisociative" ability to bring "together two different frames of experience". Tyers, when saying Johnson "said the most common things in the newest manner", describes Johnson's "unpreditability" and a

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