Samuel Johnson

The writings of the English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) express a profound reverence for the past modified by an energetic independence of mind. The mid-18th century in England is often called the Age of Johnson.

Samuel Johnson was born in Litchfield, Staffordshire, on Sept. 18, 1709. His father was a bookseller—first successful, later a failure—and Johnson, whom Adam Smith described as the best-read man he had ever known, owed much of his education to the fact that he grew up in a bookstore. Though he lived to old age, from infancy Johnson was plagued by illness. He was afflicted with scrofula, smallpox, and partial deafness and blindness. One of his first memories was of being taken to London, where he was touched by Queen Anne, the touch of the sovereign then thought to be a cure for scrofula.

Johnson was educated at the Litchfield Grammar School, where he learned Latin and Greek under the threat of the rod. He later studied with a clergyman in a nearby village from whom he learned a lesson always central to his thinking—that, if one is to master any subject, one must first discover its general principles, or, as Johnson put it, "but grasp the Trunk hard only, and you will shake all the Branches." In 1728-1729 Johnson spent 14 months at Pembroke College, Oxford. He was poor, embarrassed by his poverty, and he could not complete the work for a degree. While at Oxford, Johnson became confirmed in his belief in Christianity and the Anglican Church, a belief to which he held throughout a life often troubled by religious doubts. His father died in 1731, and Johnson halfheartedly supported himself with academic odd jobs. In 1735 he married Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow some 20 years older than he. Though Johnson's references to his "Tetty" were affectionate, the 17 years of their childless marriage were probably not very happy. Still casting about for a way to make a living, Johnson opened a boarding school. He had only three pupils, one of them being David Garrick— eventually to become the greatest actor of his day. In 1737 Johnson went to London to make a career as a man of letters.

Making His Name

Once in London, Johnson began to work for Edward Cave, the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. Parliament did not then permit stenographic reports of its debates, and Cave published a column called "Debates in the Senate of Lilliput"—the name is taken, of course, from the first book of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels—for which Johnson, among others, wrote re-creations of actual parliamentary speeches. Years later, when someone quoted to him from a speech by William Pitt the Elder, Johnson remarked, "That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street."

Johnson worked at a variety of other literary tasks. He published two "imitations" of the Roman satirist Juvenal, London, a Poem (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), transposing the language and situations of the classical originals into those of his own day. In 1744 Johnson published a biography of his friend Richard Savage. A neurotic liar and sponger and a failed writer, Savage had been one of Johnson's friends when they were both down and out, and to such early friends Johnson was always loyal. The Life of Savage is a sympathetic study of a complex and initially unsympathetic man. In 1749 Johnson completed his rather lifeless tragedy in blank verse Irene; it was produced by Garrick and earned Johnson £300.

In the early 1750s Johnson, writing usually at the rate of two essays a week, published two series of periodical essays—The Rambler (1750-1752) and The Adventurer (1753-1754). The essays take various forms—allegories, sketches of representative human types, literary criticism, lay sermons. Johnson constantly lived in the presence of the literature of the past, and his essays refer to the classics as if they were the work of his contemporaries. He has a satirist's eye for discrepancies and contradictions in human life, yet he is always in search of the central and universal, for whatever is unchanging in man's experience. His prose is elaborate and richly orchestrated, and he seems to have tried to enlarge the language of moral philosophy by using scientific and technical terms.

Johnson's interest in specialized vocabularies can be easily explained. In 1746 he had, with the help of six assistants, begun work on a dictionary of the English language. The project was finally completed in 1755. Johnson had originally tried to interest Lord Chesterfield in becoming patron for this vast project, but he did little to help Johnson until help was no longer needed. Johnson wrote Chesterfield a public letter in which he declared the author's independence of noble patronage. Johnson's Dictionary is probably the most personal work of its kind that will ever be compiled; though Johnson received help from others, it was not the work of a committee. His own definition of lexicographer was a "writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge," yet the work bears his personal stamp: it is notable for the precision of its definitions, for its appreciation of the paramount importance of metaphor in use of language, and for its examples, which draw on Johnson's reading in 200 years of English literature.

Johnson's Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia appeared in 1759, the year of the publication of Voltaire's Candide, a work which it somewhat resembles. Both are moral fables concerned with an innocent young man's search for the secret of happiness. The young Prince Rasselas, accompanied by his sister and the philosopher Imlac, leaves his home in the Happy Valley and interviews men of different kinds in the hope of discovering how life may best be lived. Disillusioned at last, Rasselas returns to his old home. Though Johnson was given to fits of idleness, he could at other times work with great facility; he wrote Rasselasin the evenings of one week to pay for the expenses of his mother's funeral. The work was immediately successful; six editions appeared during Johnson's lifetime and also a number of translations.

Years of Success and Fame

In 1762 Johnson, though he had been anti-Hanoverian in his politics, accepted a pension of £300 a year from George III. A year later he met James Boswell, the 22-year-old son of a Scottish judge. Boswell became Johnson's devoted companion; he observed him closely, made notes on his conversation, and eventually wrote the great biography of his hero. Boswell's Johnson is a formidable and yet endearing figure: bulky, personally untidy, given to many eccentricities and compulsions, in conversation often contentious and even pugnacious, a man of great kindness who delighted in society but was also the victim of frequent black moods and periods of religious disquiet. In 1773 Boswell persuaded Johnson, who pretended a stronger dislike of the Scots than he actually felt, to join him in a tour of Scotland, and there are records of the trip made by both men— Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell's journal.

In 1764 Johnson and the painter Joshua Reynolds founded a club whose members eventually numbered some of the most eminent men of the time; they included the writer Oliver Goldsmith, Johnson's old pupil David Garrick, the economist Adam Smith, the historian Edward Gibbon, and the politicians Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox. In 1765 Johnson met Mr. and Mrs. Henry Thrale. He was a well-to-do brewer, and in the Thrales' home Johnson found a refuge from the solitude which had oppressed him since his wife's death in 1752. In 1765 Johnson published an eight-volume edition of the works of Shakespeare; in his "Preface" Johnson praises Shakespeare for his fidelity to nature and defends him against the charge that his failure to observe the three classical unities was a limitation on his achievement.

Last Years

Johnson's last great literary enterprise, a work in 10 volumes, was completed in his seventy-second year; it is the Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, better known as the Lives of the Poets. Itisa series of biographical and critical studies of 52 English poets, the earliest being Abraham Cowley; it is a magisterial revaluation of the course of English poetry from the early 17th century until his own time by a man whose taste had been formed by the poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope and who was thus in varying degrees out of sympathy with the metaphysicals and John Milton, as he was with the more "advanced" writers of his own time. Even when he deals with writers whom he does not much like, Johnson shows his genius for precise definition and for laying down fairly the terms of a critical argument.

Johnson's last years were saddened by the death of his old friend Dr. Robert Levett (to whom he addressed a beautiful short elegy), by the death of Thrale, and by a quarrel with Mrs. Thrale, who had remarried with what seemed to Johnson indecorous haste. In his last illness Johnson, always an amateur physician, made notes on the progress of his own disease. He died on Dec. 13, 1784, in his house in London, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Further Reading

The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, edited by Edward L. McAdam, Jr., and others (9 vols., 1958-1971, and still in progress), will eventually supersede all earlier editions. The Letters of Samuel Johnson was edited by R. W. Chapman (3 vols., 1952). The Poems of Samuel Johnson was edited by David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam, Jr. (1941). The best edition of Lives of the Poets is by George B. Hill (3 vols., 1905). A convenient one-volume edition of James Boswell's Life of Johnson was edited by Robert William Chapman (1953). Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Johnson (1944), is a reliable modern biography. James Lowry Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (1955), is an account of Johnson's life before he met Boswell.

Critical studies particularly recommended are Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (1955), and Matthew J. C. Hodgart, Samuel Johnson and His Times (1962). Aspects of Johnson's career and thought are examined in Donald Johnson Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson (1960); Maurice J. Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion (1964); Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence: Imagination and Reason in the Work of Samuel Johnson (1967); Paul Kent Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (1967); and Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (1971). A useful guide to the literature on Johnson is James Lowry Clifford and Donald J. Greene, Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (1951; rev. ed. 1970). □

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1696-1772), American clergyman and educator, was the first Anglican minister in Connecticut and first president of King's College, later Columbia University.

Samuel Johnson was born in Guilford, Conn., on Oct. 14, 1696. His father was a deacon. A precocious student, Samuel acquired a fondness for Hebrew at the age of 6. He was unable to enter grammar school until the age of 11, but at 14 he was admitted to the Collegiate School (now Yale) at Saybrook, Conn. Even before graduating in 1714, he began teaching school at Guilford. When Yale moved to New Haven in 1716, he was made a tutor. For the first 2 years he taught the three lower classes alone, introducing students to the works of two prominent Englishmen—philosopher John Locke and scientist and philosopher lsaac Newton.

However, Johnson's relations with his students were unhappy. A student contingent presented a petition complaining of the "Public Expositions & Disputations & Managements of the Tutors" Johnson was singled out as the worst. Although the Yale Corporation found him guiltless, he tendered his resignation in September 1719 and accepted a call to the pulpit of neighboring West Haven.

Johnson continued to use the growing resources of the Yale library, which had recently acquired the latest English works, including several volumes of liberal Anglican theology. He read and discussed these works with his classmate Daniel Browne and with Yale's new president, Timothy Cutler, and the three developed doubts concerning the validity of the "Congregational Way." In September 1722 the three men announced their misgivings at commencement, launching the "Great Apostasy." Soon after, they sailed to England, where they obtained Anglican ordination. A year later Johnson returned to Stratford, Conn., as the first Anglican minister to the colony and remained the only one for 3 years. On Sept. 23, 1725, he married Charity Nicoll, a widow, and became guardian of her two sons.

The work of propagating and defending the Anglican persuasion in New England consumed 30 years of Johnson's life. As the acknowledged intellectual and ecclesiastical leader of the movement, he was asked to become the head of the new King's College in New York City in 1753. In 1754 he moved his family to New York and began a decade as president of the college.

In a colonial culture of rampant denominationalism, King's College was chartered as a nonsectarian institution with a mixed board of trustees. The only Anglican requirements were that the president always be of the Church of England and that the daily prayers be conducted from the Book of Common Prayer. On Sundays the students attended the church of their choice.

The enrollment was small—only eight boys graduated in the first class of 1758—and the fees were the highest in the Colonies. The boys' median age at entrance was 15, and the attrition rate was high. But this was fertile ground for Johnson. As he advertised in the New York Gazette in 1754, "the chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children to know God in Jesus Christ, and to love and serve Him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness of life, with a perfect heart, and a willing mind."

Johnson taught the first-year class himself so that he might "carry them through the New Testament in its Greek original, and not only make them understand the words but the things, explaining all difficult passages, and giving them a clear understanding of the whole scheme of Christianity." And he ensured that his graduates would have a greater understanding of the "New Philosophy" than he had by devoting three-fourths of the sophomore and junior class curriculum to mathematics and science.

Unfortunately Johnson's personality and probably his well-known disparagement of colonial culture robbed him of success. "He did not figure greatly as a president," wrote President Ezra Stiles of Yale, "but it does not seem to have been for want of Learning. Dr. Johnson was an excellent Classical Scholar—he had few equals in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He was good at the Sciences, easy and communicative, was eminent in Moral Philosophy," as he demonstrated in his book Elementa philosophica (1752). Nevertheless, Stiles concluded, "Some Geniuses, with half the Observation and Reading of Dr. Johnson, would make ten times greater Men."

When Johnson's second wife died of smallpox in 1763—a previous outbreak had carried off his first wife, son, and stepdaughter—he lost the heart to continue and retired to his parish in Stratford. He died on Jan. 6, 1772.

Further Reading

Herbert and Carol Schneider edited Samuel Johnson, President of King's College: His Career and Writings (4 vols., 1929). Johnson's work as president of King's College is recounted in Horace Coon, Columbia: Colossus on the Hudson (1947). His importance as a philosopher is ably discussed in Robert Clifton Whittemore, Makers of the American Mind (1964).

Additional Sources

Carroll, Peter N., The other Samuel Johnson: a psychohistory of early New England, Rutherford N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978. □

Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), born at Lichfield, the son of a bookseller. He was educated at Lichfield Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he spent 14 months, 1728–9, but took no degree; his college days were marred by poverty. During the scantily documented period between leaving Oxford and his father's death in 1731 he appears to have suffered acute mental stress; bouts of melancholia were to recur in later life. He translated and abridged from the French an account of Father Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, published anonymously in 1735. In the same year he married Mrs Elizabeth Porter, a widow considerably older than himself, and started a private school at Edial, near Lichfield. This was not a success and in 1737 he set off with one of his few pupils, Garrick, to try his fortune in London. He entered the service of Edward Cave, the founder of the Gentleman's Magazine, to which he contributed essays, poems, Latin verses, biographies, and, most notably, his Parliamentary Debates. In 1738 he published his poem London. In 1744 appeared his Life of Mr Richard Savage, a vivid evocation of Grub Street. In 1747 he issued the ‘Plan’ of his Dictionary (see Johnson's Dictionary), which he dedicated to Chesterfield, with results recorded under the latter's name. In 1749 he published The Vanity of Human Wishes, the first work to bear his own name, and in the same year Garrick produced his tragedy Irene. In 1750 he started the Rambler, a periodical written almost entirely by himself. His wife died in 1752, a loss which caused him prolonged grief. From March 1753 to March 1754 Johnson contributed regularly to Hawkesworth's Adventurer. His Dictionary was published in 1755, after nine years of labour; it firmly established his reputation, and also brought him, just before publication and through the support of Francis Wise and T. Warton, the Oxford degree he had failed to achieve earlier. During 1758–60 he contributed the Idler series of papers to the Universal Chronicle. In 1759 appeared Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. In 1762 Johnson received a crown pension of £300 a year, and the following year he met his biographer, Boswell, in the bookshop of his friend Thomas Davies.

From this period onwards we have Boswell's account of Johnson's life as one of the most eminent literary figures of his day, and also vivid portraits of his contemporaries, notably of the members of the Club (later known as the ‘Literary Club’), founded in 1764. In January 1765 he met the Thrales, in whose town and country houses he found much comfort and companionship, Later that year appeared his edition of Shakespeare. Although superseded by later scholarship, it contained valuable notes and emendations, and its preface is regarded as one of his finest works of critical prose. In 1773 he travelled with Boswell to Scotland and the Hebrides, a journey recorded in his A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). In 1777 he undertook, at the request of a number of booksellers, to write The Lives of the English Poets, the crowning work of his old age (1779–81). In 1784, saddened by the deaths of his friend Robert Levet and Thrale and by his estrangement from Mrs Thrale, he died at his house in Bolt Court and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Johnson's reputation rests not only on his works but also on Boswell's evocation of his brilliant conversation, his eccentricities and opinionated outbursts (against Scots, Whigs, Americans, players, etc.), his interest in the supernatural (see Cock Lane Ghost), his generosity and humanity, and many other aspects of his large personality. His profound but melancholy religious faith is revealed also in his diaries and meditations, and in his attacks on the facile optimism of mid-18th-cent. thought (see Jenyns, S.). Two useful accounts appeared before Boswell's: Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) by Mrs Piozzi, formerly Mrs Thrale, and a Life by Sir John Hawkins (1787). For a 20th-cent. assessment of Johnson, see T. S. Eliot's essay, ‘Johnson as Critic and Poet’ (1944).

Samuel Johnson 1696–1772, American clergyman, educator, and philosopher, b. Guilford, Conn., grad. Collegiate School (now Yale), 1714; father of William Samuel Johnson . He became a Congregationalist minister, but in 1722 joined the Church of England. In 1724 he opened the first Anglican church in Connecticut at Stratford, remaining its minister until 1754, when he became the first president of an Anglican institution, King's College (now Columbia), in New York City. He resigned in 1763 to return to Stratford. A friend and correspondent of the English philosopher George Berkeley , Johnson became the principal exponent in America of Berkeleian idealism. His chief work was Ethica (1746), republished in an enlarged edition by Benjamin Franklin as Elementa Philosophica (1752).

Bibliography: See H. and C. Schneider, ed., Samuel Johnson … His Career and His Writings (4 vol., 1929, repr. 1972); B. Redford, ed., The Letters of Samuel Johnson (2 vol., 1994); biography by E. L. Pennington (1938); study by J. J. Ellis (1973).

Johnson, Dr Samuel (1709–84), the great English lexicographer, was the author of a five-act tragedy, Irene, which his friend and fellow townsman David Garrick produced at Drury Lane in 1749, with little success. After its failure Johnson never again essayed the stage, though he made more money from the proceeds of the third, sixth, and ninth nights of his play than by anything he had previously done. His edition of the plays of Shakespeare is valuable for the light it throws on the editor rather than on the author, since Johnson had little knowledge of Elizabethan drama or stage conditions, and was not temperamentally a research worker. He should not be confused with Samuel Johnson of Cheshire, author of Hurlothrumbo (1729) and other burlesques.

Johnson, Dr Samuel (1709–84) English lexicographer, poet, and critic. Most notable among his prolific array of works is the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which established his reputation. He also produced a collection of essays, The Idler (1758–61), and an edition (1765) of the plays of Shakespeare. A discerning critic and trenchant conversationalist, he was co-founder with Joshua Reynolds of ‘The Club’ (1764), later known as ‘The Literary Club’. James Boswell's life of Johnson contains invaluable biographical detail.

Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), English lexicographer and author, in 1775 was employed by the ministers in power to write a tract, Taxation No Tyranny, in answer to the resolutions and addresses of the Continental Congress. In it he ridicules the attempt of the Americans to resist the will of the mother country, asserts the supreme power of the home government to require contributions for the purposes of maintaining public safety or prosperity, and contends that in Parliament all British subjects possess a “virtual representation.”

Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), author, lexicographer, and controversialist. A devout High Churchman, he ascribed his conversion as a young man to reading W. Law's Serious Call. He wrote various works besides his Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

The American hymn-writer Samuel Johnson (1822–82) is not to be confused with the lexicographer.