Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784)

JOHNSON, SAMUEL (1709–1784)

JOHNSON, SAMUEL (1709–1784), English writer, lexicographer, and critic. Known as "Dr. Johnson," Samuel Johnson was one of the most complex and important figures of eighteenth-century culture. Renowned particularly for his personality, his contribution to eighteenth-century writing is important both for his scholarly knowledge and for his insight into humanity in its moral and social complexity.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

The son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller with intellectual ambitions in Lichfield, Staffordshire, Samuel Johnson was born in 1709. When he was three, he was taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne to cure his scrofula, which, along with smallpox, caused lasting disfiguration. Johnson was educated at Lichworth Grammar School and read prodigiously, enjoying Latin authors and Renaissance literature. While at school, he wrote several English and Latin poems and essays, and a distant cousin, the Reverend Cornelius Ford, whom he visited in Worcestershire, encouraged his interests in poetry and classical culture. As a student at Pembroke College, Oxford, Johnson translated Alexander Pope's "Messiah" into Latin verse, and the poem was published in 1731.

Due to the family's increasing poverty, Johnson completed only one year toward his degree at Oxford, a prevailing source of unhappiness throughout his life. Faced with unemployment, Johnson grudgingly helped in his father's bookshop for two years. The drudgery was compensated for by his friendship with the Reverend Gilbert Walmesley of Lichfield, who encouraged Johnson's literary ambitions. Johnson taught briefly at Market Bosworth Grammar School in Leicestershire but quarreled with his employer and moved to Birmingham in 1733. He lived with a former school friend, Edmund Hector, and earned money writing for the Birmingham Journal. He translated the Portuguese Jesuit Jeronymo Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia in 1735. In the same year he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow twenty-five years his senior, and opened a boarding school in Edial, near Lichfield; the school failed, perhaps as a result of the combination of Johnson's indifference to teaching and his physical deformity.

LONDON, JOURNALISM, AND BIOGRAPHY

In 1737 Johnson traveled with David Garrick (a former pupil who was to become the most famous actor of his time) to London, where Johnson was to spend the rest of his life. He found employment as a journalist with the printer Edward Cave, the founder of The Gentleman's Magazine, and later commented, "No one but a blockhead wrote except for money." Johnson almost certainly influenced the journal's development as an authoritative source of information. He contributed book reviews on several subjects and wrote reports of parliamentary debates (a forbidden practice) under the title of Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia, which was a blend of both fact and Johnson's own views presented in his own words. After writing satirical pamphlets that were critical of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Johnson went into hiding in Lambeth under a false name because his arrest had been ordered.

Johnson secured literary success with London, a satirically exuberant poem on the excesses and corruption of London life. Between 1738 and 1744 he also wrote short biographies of historical and naval figures. He helped to catalogue the Harleian library, a collection of books by the first earl of Oxford, writing an influential preface on cataloguing as essential in helping scholarly investigation. Johnson collated The Harleian Miscellany, a series of pamphlets on the political controversies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, and wrote a preface to his collation. In 1744 he wrote an extended biography, A Life of Richard Savage, a passionately written defense of his friend, a struggling poet who had died in poverty in 1743.

LEXICOGRAPHER, LITERARY CRITIC, AND POET

Johnson's ambition to be an authority on language and literature is realized in his most important work. In 1747, he produced a plan for A Dictionary of the English Language addressed to statesman Philip Dormer Stanhope (Lord Chesterfield), who ignored Johnson and sent him £10. Johnson wished to provide a work of reference "for the use of such as aspire to exactness of criticism, or elegance of style" (Preface, 1756). His intention was to stabilize the language, for example in usage and pronunciation, but not to impose rigid rules like the dictionaries of the continental academies. Johnson's dictionary elucidates the different meanings of words through close examination of the use of quotations from celebrated and authoritative authors. The dictionary's diversity reflects Johnson's wide reading to find illustrative quotations, which were transcribed with the help of six amanuenses. In a famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, Johnson refused his offer of patronage after the dictionary was published to high critical acclaim in 1755 and an abridgment published in 1756. The abridged version became the standard dictionary until the publication of Noah Webster's in 1828.

The Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of the Latin poet Juvenal's tenth satire, was published in 1749; the tone and vision of the poem has been debated by critics as reflecting either pessimism at human vanity or hope for humanity's redemption. Although Johnson was disillusioned with the judgment of theater producers about its value as a tragedy, his play Irene was produced by David Garrick in 1749. It earned Johnson £300. Johnson also established a twice-weekly periodical, The Rambler (1750–1752), writing critical essays on many topics such as the English novel. Between 1758 and 1760, he produced for the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette a series of essays called The Idler that were lighter in tone. He also edited and wrote reviews for The Literary Magazine. Opposed to the Seven Years' War, Johnson wrote sporadic pieces attacking the war. To pay the expenses of his mother's illness, Johnson rapidly wrote Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, (1759) a philosophical "Oriental" novella. Because of his scholarly successes, Johnson was awarded an honorary M.A. by Oxford University in 1755 and an LL.D. by Dublin University in 1765. The need to support himself by writing was relieved in 1762, when he (controversially) accepted an annual pension of £300 from Lord Bute's ministry.

JAMES BOSWELL AND LATER YEARS

In 1763, Johnson became acquainted with a young Scot named James Boswell, who became his friend and his biographer. Johnson's expanding social life saved him from the bouts of melancholia and depression he suffered. Acquainted with almost all the leading political and literary figures of the time, in 1764 he formed the Literary Club, whose members included Joseph Banks, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Adam Smith, and James Boswell, who recorded their conversations. Johnson befriended Robert Chambers, a lawyer, who asked his help in composing a course of lectures on common law to deliver to Oxford undergraduates. The degree to which Johnson helped write the fifty-six lectures remains undetermined. In the same year he met the Welsh writer Hester Lynch Thrale (later Piozzi), with whom he developed a close friendship, and traveled to Wales and to France with her family. Her Anecdotes of Johnson (1786) and Letters to and from Johnson (1788), as well as her diaries, have provided rich material for Johnson's biographers. In 1765, Johnson finally published an edition of Shakespeare's plays, which is the first variorum edition, providing the notes of previous editors to aid or sometimes correct interpretation. His preface to the edition demonstrates Johnson's excellence at close critical reading.

In 1773, Johnson traveled with Boswell to the Hebrides, recorded in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and in Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). At the urging of a number of London booksellers, Johnson agreed in 1777 to write Prefaces, Biographical and Critical to the Works of the English Poets (later known as The Lives of the Poets ), which was published 1779–1781. The monumental work discussed fifty-two of the most celebrated English writers and displayed Johnson's powers of literary criticism and insight.

Johnson died in December 1784 and was buried in poets' corner in Westminster Abbey. His fame followed him with the appearance of his letters and several biographies after his death, most notably James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).

See also Boswell, James ; Dictionaries and Encyclopedias ; English Literature and Language .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. London, 1755.

——. Early Biographical Writings of Dr. Johnson. Edited by J. D. Fleeman. Farnborough, U.K., 1973.

——. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssina. Edited by J. P. Hardy. Oxford, 1999.

——. Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Edited by J. D. Fleeman. Oxford, 1985.

——. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Edited by Bruce Redford. 5 vols. Princeton, 1992.

——. Samuel Johnson: Political Writings. Edited by Donald J. Greene. New Haven, 2000.

——. Samuel Johnson: The Major Works. Edited by Donald J. Greene. Oxford, 2000.

——. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. 16 vols. currently published. New Haven, 1958–.

Secondary Sources

Boswell, James. Boswell's Life of Johnson, together with Boswell's Journey of a Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into North Wales. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill and revised by L. F. Powell. Oxford, 1934–1964. Important posthumous biographies of Johnson, invaluable for its detail.

Clingham, Greg. The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson. Cambridge, U.K., 1997. Fifteen essays discussing politics, religion, travel, women, imperialism and many other topics.

Greene, Donald. Samuel Johnson. Boston, 1989. Useful introductory guide to the range of Johnson's work and influence. See also Greene's critical introduction to Samuel Johnson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Oxford, 1984.

Hart, Kevin. Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property. Cambridge, U.K., 1999. Explores the critical emergence of "The Age of Johnson" in relation to Johnson's literary reputation as a public commodity.

Korshin, Paul J., and Jack Lynch, eds. The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual. New York, 1987–. Periodical published once a year focusing on Johnson and his influence.

Venturo, David F. Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson. Newark, N.J., 1999. First monograph focusing on all of Johnson's poetry.

Max Fincher