Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson was the dominant figure of English letters in the second half of the eighteenth century — poet, essayist, moralist, biographer, editor, critic, and, single-handed, the author of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the most influential dictionary in the history of English. Born poor in provincial Lichfield, scarred by illness, afflicted with tics and deep melancholy, he made his way in London by hack writing until the Dictionary made him famous and a royal pension made him independent. His philosophical tale Rasselas (1759), his periodical essays in The Rambler, his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, his Preface to Shakespeare (1765) and his Lives of the Poets (1779–81) are classics of English prose and moral thought. But he lives most vividly in the pages of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), the greatest biography in English, which preserves his conversation — witty, combative, wise, often outrageous — so that after Shakespeare he is the most quoted writer in the language.

Life

Lichfield and Oxford

Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, above his father’s bookshop. Michael Johnson was a bookseller, respected but always in difficulties; his mother, Sarah, was forty when he was born. The baby was sickly; he contracted scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph glands) from his wet-nurse, which left him with scars, poor eyesight and deafness in one ear, and at two and a half he was taken to London to be “touched” by Queen Anne. He grew into a large, powerful, ungainly man with violent nervous tics, gesticulations, mutterings and compulsions now thought to be Tourette’s syndrome, and he suffered from depression all his life, which he called “the black dog”.

He read voraciously in his father’s shop, and at nineteen went to Pembroke College, Oxford, but after thirteen months had to leave for lack of money; his shoes had holes, and he threw away a pair left at his door by a well-meaning student. He fell into a deep depression. His father died bankrupt. He worked as a schoolmaster and hack writer in Birmingham, and in 1735 married Elizabeth “Tetty” Porter, a widow twenty years older than he, whom he loved devotedly. With her money he opened a school at Edial near Lichfield; it failed, though one of its three pupils was David Garrick, later the greatest actor of the age.

Grub Street

In 1737 Johnson and Garrick walked and rode together to London, Johnson with the manuscript of a tragedy, Irene, and almost no money. For years he lived by hack work for the Gentleman’s Magazine — writing reports of parliamentary debates (which he largely invented, making sure “the Whig dogs” did not get the best of it), translations, prefaces and biographies. He became friends with the disreputable poet Richard Savage, with whom he walked the streets all night when neither could afford lodging; his Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744) is a pioneering biography. His poem London (1738), an imitation of Juvenal’s satire on Rome, was admired by Pope.

The Dictionary

In 1746 a group of booksellers commissioned Johnson to compile an English dictionary, for 1,500 guineas. He hired six assistants and worked in the garret of his house in Gough Square for nine years. A Dictionary of the English Language appeared in two folio volumes in April 1755. It was not the first English dictionary, but it was by far the best and most authoritative, with 42,773 entries and some 114,000 quotations from English writers since the Elizabethans illustrating the meanings of words — a revolutionary method that made it an anthology of English literature. It established the standard spelling and meaning of English words for over a century, until the Oxford English Dictionary. Some of its definitions are famously personal: “Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge”; “Oats: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”; “Patron: commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery”; “Network: any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.”

The word “patron” had a target. Johnson had addressed his Plan of the dictionary to the Earl of Chesterfield, who ignored him for seven years and then wrote two puffing articles as publication approached. Johnson’s letter to him is a classic of dignified contempt: “Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?” The preface to the Dictionary ends sadly: “I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds.” Tetty had died in 1752.

The Rambler, Rasselas and the pension

While working on the Dictionary he wrote The Rambler (1750–52), twice-weekly essays on morality, literature and human nature, written alone and often at the last minute; and later The Idler (1758–60). The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), another imitation of Juvenal, surveys the disappointment of all human ambitions — power, learning, military glory, beauty, long life — in grave, compressed heroic couplets: “Let observation with extensive view, / Survey mankind, from China to Peru”. On the scholar: “There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, / Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.”

In 1759, when his mother died, he wrote Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia in the evenings of one week to pay for her funeral. Prince Rasselas, bored in the Happy Valley where every need is supplied, escapes with his sister Nekayah, her maid and the poet-philosopher Imlac to seek the “choice of life” that brings happiness. They examine every way of living — pleasure, philosophy, pastoral simplicity, solitude, power, marriage, celibacy — and find none satisfying. “Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” An astronomer has gone mad believing he controls the weather — a warning of “the dangerous prevalence of imagination”. The final chapter is titled “The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded.” It appeared in the same year as Voltaire’s Candide, which it resembles.

In 1762 the government of George III granted him a pension of £300 a year — ironic, since his Dictionary defined pension as “pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country”. He accepted, and was free from want for the rest of his life.

Boswell and the Club

On 16 May 1763, in the back parlour of Tom Davies’s bookshop in Covent Garden, Johnson met James Boswell, a twenty-two-year-old Scottish lawyer who idolised him. “Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” “That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.” Boswell became his friend, travelling companion and recorder, noting his conversation in journals for twenty years.

In 1764 Johnson and the painter Joshua Reynolds founded The Club (later the Literary Club), whose members included Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Garrick, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith and Boswell. He became intimate with Henry and Hester Thrale, a wealthy brewer and his brilliant wife, at whose house in Streatham he lived for long periods; Hester Thrale’s later remarriage to an Italian music teacher, Gabriel Piozzi, after Henry’s death, broke Johnson’s heart.

His edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), with its great Preface, defended Shakespeare against neoclassical critics: “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature… Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life.” He rejected the “unities” of time and place, since the audience always knows “that the stage is only a stage”. He also noted Shakespeare’s faults: “a quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.”

In 1773, at sixty-four, he toured the Hebrides with Boswell — riding, sailing in storms, staying in crofters’ huts — and wrote A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) recounts the same trip. His Lives of the Poets (1779–81), fifty-two biographical and critical prefaces to an edition of English poets from Cowley to Gray, are his critical masterpiece — judicious, opinionated, often brilliant: of the metaphysicals, that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”; of Paradise Lost, that “none ever wished it longer than it is”; of Gray’s Elegy, that it “abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind.”

He died on 13 December 1784 in his house in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, after a long illness borne with fear of death and judgement, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The talk

Boswell’s Life preserves Johnson’s conversation — combative (“Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding”), comic, sometimes bigoted, often wise:

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

Clear your mind of cant.

When Boswell said that Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the non-existence of matter could not be refuted, Johnson kicked a large stone so hard that he rebounded from it: “I refute it thus.”

Thought

Johnson was a moralist above all. His view of human life was sombre: we are restless, never satisfied with the present, always seeking happiness in a “choice of life” and never finding it — driven by “the hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life.” His remedy was not philosophy but realism, industry, charity, religious faith and conversation. He was a devout, anxious High Church Anglican, terrified of death and damnation. In politics he was a Tory who despised the Whig cant of liberty — “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” he asked of the American rebels — and an opponent of slavery who toasted “the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies”. He took into his household a freed Jamaican slave, Francis Barber, who became his heir, and a collection of poor and quarrelsome dependants.

As a critic he valued truth to “general nature” — what is permanent in human experience — over local detail and novelty, and judged literature by its power to instruct by pleasing. His prose — balanced, Latinate, weighty, antithetical — was the model of “Johnsonese” for generations.

Legacy

Johnson’s Dictionary shaped the language; his criticism remained authoritative for a century; his Lives are still read. Above all, through Boswell, he became a character as vivid as any in fiction. Johnson’s house in Gough Square is a museum; his cat Hodge has a statue outside it. T. S. Eliot and later critics have restored his reputation as a poet and critic. Blackadder the Third made him the butt of comedy; scholars still debate the meaning of his life of struggle, illness and faith.

In conversation

• “A harmless drudge” — his definition of a lexicographer; any patient, plodding worker.
• “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” — the classic defence of city life.
• “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” — against those who hide behind national feeling.