Mentioned throughout James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) as a dinner and tavern companion, publishing adviser, actor, and friend to both Johnson and Boswell, Thomas Davies earned public esteem as both a biographer and publisher. The popular success of his biography about a well-known actor and manager, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick (1780), ran through four printings and inspired other anecdotal collections and memoirs about actors; then it became the model for a second, more fully developed biography of Garrick by Arthur Murphy (1801). Davies's literary merit, however, was often underestimated or taken for granted. Throughout the 1770s his small publishing house and bookshop at 8 Russell Street, Covent Garden, produced important editions of works by English poets and playwrights, together with biographies of British stage figures. Conscientious in his plan to help publish a comprehensive body of English literature, Davies referred to himself in one advertisement as "the...