Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson was born on September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, above the bookshop kept by his father, Michael Johnson ^[1]. The family had books but little money, and the child's start was harder still: he contracted scrofula, a tubercular infection then called the king's evil, which left him scarred, partly deaf, and nearly blind in one eye. In 1712 his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, the traditional royal remedy, an episode Johnson recalled all his life ^[2].

Weak eyesight did nothing to slow his reading. He absorbed the stock of his father's shop and excelled at Lichfield Grammar School, where he acquired the Latin that anchored everything he later wrote ^[1]. In 1728 a small legacy allowed him to enter Pembroke College, Oxford. The money ran out after about thirteen months. He left without a degree, humiliated by his poverty, and returned to the Midlands with no clear prospects ^[3].

The years that followed were bleak. Johnson suffered a period of deep depression, and episodes of melancholy, along with involuntary tics and gestures that startled strangers, recurred throughout his life ^[3]. He tried teaching, translated a travel account of Abyssinia, and drifted between Lichfield and Birmingham while searching for steady work.

In 1735 Johnson married Elizabeth Porter, a widow from Birmingham roughly twenty years his senior, whom he called Tetty. Her modest fortune funded a private school at Edial, near Lichfield, but the venture attracted only a handful of pupils ^[1]. One of them was David Garrick, later the most famous actor of the age. In 1737 master and pupil set out for London together, both nearly penniless, in one of the best known departures in English literary history ^[2].

London meant hack work. Johnson wrote for Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine, producing essays, biographies, and reconstructed parliamentary debates composed largely from scraps of information, since verbatim reporting of Parliament was then forbidden ^[4]. The drudgery taught him speed and range. In 1738 his poem London, an imitation of Juvenal's third satire, appeared anonymously and won praise from Alexander Pope, who tried to discover the unknown author ^[3].

His Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), a compassionate portrait of a talented, self-destructive friend from those hungry years, showed what he could do with biography ^[1]. By the mid 1740s London booksellers knew Johnson as a writer of unusual learning and force, and in 1746 a group of them signed him to the project that would define his career.

The contract of 1746 committed Johnson to compile a comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language. He predicted three years; it took nine. Working in a garret in Gough Square with a team of six assistants, he defined over 42,000 words and illustrated their senses with more than 100,000 quotations drawn from English writers, a method that set the pattern for later lexicography ^[5]. When A Dictionary of the English Language appeared in two folio volumes in 1755, it was immediately recognized as the greatest achievement of its kind in English, and it remained the standard authority until the Oxford English Dictionary began appearing well over a century later ^[2].

The project also produced a famous quarrel. Lord Chesterfield, who had ignored Johnson's request for patronage at the outset, praised the Dictionary just before publication. Johnson answered with a letter of icy politeness, often read as marking the shift from aristocratic patronage to a literary marketplace sustained by publishers and readers ^[3]. Oxford granted him a master of arts degree in time for the title page.

The Dictionary years were productive beyond the Dictionary itself. The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), his second Juvenalian imitation, was the first work published under his own name, and Garrick staged his tragedy Irene the same year ^[1]. From 1750 to 1752 he wrote The Rambler, a twice weekly series of moral essays, composing more than 200 numbers almost single-handed, and he followed it with contributions to The Adventurer and the lighter Idler papers of 1758 to 1760 ^[4]. In 1759 he wrote the philosophical tale Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, reportedly in the evenings of a single week, to cover the costs of his mother's final illness and funeral ^[2]. Any account of Samuel Johnson achievements must also include his edition of Shakespeare (1765), whose preface remains a landmark of criticism for its defense of Shakespeare's fidelity to nature and its dismissal of rigid dramatic rules ^[5].

Tetty Johnson died in 1752, before the Dictionary that her money had helped make possible was finished. Johnson grieved for her the rest of his life and never remarried ^[1]. His household in later years was an odd act of charity: he sheltered the blind poet Anna Williams, the impoverished physician Robert Levet, and others with nowhere else to go. His Jamaican-born servant Francis Barber joined him in 1752, was educated at Johnson's expense, and became his principal heir ^[6].

Johnson's sociability was as famous as his books. In 1764 he and the painter Joshua Reynolds founded The Club, a dining society whose members came to include Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Garrick, and eventually James Boswell, the young Scot who met Johnson in a bookshop in 1763 and recorded his talk for the next two decades ^[2]. From 1765 the brewer Henry Thrale and his wife Hester gave Johnson a second home at Streatham, where he found comfort, conversation, and relief from the fear of solitude ^[3].

He was a devout, anxious Anglican and a political Tory who nonetheless despised slavery, once startling an Oxford gathering by toasting the next insurrection of enslaved people in the West Indies, as Boswell reported ^[1]. His private diaries record constant self-reproach over idleness and unfulfilled resolutions, a severity he rarely applied to anyone but himself.

In 1762 the government of George III granted Johnson an annual pension of 300 pounds, ending decades of financial insecurity, though critics noted the awkwardness for a man whose own Dictionary had defined a pensioner sharply ^[3]. The award freed him to write at his own pace. Trinity College Dublin gave him an honorary doctorate in 1765, and Oxford followed in 1775, fixing the title Dr Johnson to his name permanently ^[2].

At the age of sixty-three he undertook a demanding journey with Boswell through the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides, published as A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), an observant account of a society he found both remote and rapidly changing ^[1]. He also produced political pamphlets in the 1770s, including Taxation No Tyranny (1775), which argued the government case against the American colonists ^[4].

His final major work was commissioned by London booksellers as a set of prefaces and grew into the Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779 to 1781), fifty-two critical biographies ranging from Cowley and Milton to Pope and Gray. The Lives combined biography, anecdote, and blunt critical judgment in a form Johnson had made his own ^[5]. His health failed through 1783 and 1784, with a stroke, dropsy, and worsening asthma. Samuel Johnson died in London on December 13, 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey ^[7].

Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, fixed his friend's image for posterity and is often called the greatest biography in English ^[2]. Its vivid record of Johnson's conversation made him one of the most quoted figures in the language, sometimes at the cost of obscuring the working writer behind the talker. Twentieth century scholars, notably Walter Jackson Bate in his 1977 biography, restored attention to Johnson's own writing and to the courage with which he managed illness and depression ^[6].

The Dictionary remains the anchor of any Samuel Johnson biography. Its blend of exhaustive quotation, careful discrimination of senses, and occasional flashes of wit (the definition of lexicographer as a harmless drudge is the most famous) influenced Noah Webster in America and the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary alike ^[5]. His criticism, especially the Preface to Shakespeare and the Lives of the Poets, still sets terms for debate about the English canon.

Among the basic Samuel Johnson facts that endure: his birthplace in Lichfield is now the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, his house at 17 Gough Square in London survives as a museum, and a statue faces Lichfield's market square ^[7]. More than two centuries after his death, Johnson remains the era's defining literary figure, so much so that the second half of the eighteenth century in English letters is still commonly called the Age of Johnson ^[3].