Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson 1709-84, English author, b. Lichfield. The leading literary scholar and critic of his time, Johnson helped to shape and define the Augustan Age. He was equally celebrated for his brilliant and witty conversation. His rather gross appearance and manners were viewed tolerantly, if not with a certain admiration.

Early Life and Works

The son of a bookseller, Johnson excelled at school in spite of illness (he suffered the effects of scrofula throughout his life) and poverty. He entered Oxford in 1728 but was forced to leave after a year for lack of funds. He sustained himself as a bookseller and schoolmaster for the next six years, during which he continued his wide reading and published some translations. In 1735 he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow 20 years his senior, and remained devoted to her until her death in 1752.

Johnson settled in London in 1737 and began his literary career in earnest. At first he wrote primarily for Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine —poetry and prose on subjects literary and political. His poem "London," published anonymously in 1738, was praised by Pope and won Johnson recognition in literary circles. His Life of Savage (1744) is a bitter portrait of corruption in London and the miseries endured by writers. Also of note are The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and his essays in the periodical The Rambler (1750-52).

Later Life and Works

Johnson's first work of lasting importance, and the one that permanently established his reputation in his own time, was his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the first comprehensive lexicographical work on English ever undertaken. Rasselas, a moral romance, appeared in 1759, and The Idler, a collection of his essays, in 1761. Although Johnson enjoyed great literary acclaim, he remained close to poverty until a government pension was granted to him in 1762. The following year was marked by his meeting with James Boswell , whose famous biography presents Johnson in exhaustive and fascinating detail, often recreating his conversations verbatim.

In 1764 Johnson and Joshua Reynolds founded "The Club" (known later as The Literary Club). Its membership included Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Boswell. The brilliance of this intellectual elite was, reportedly, dazzling, and Dr. Johnson (he had received a degree in 1764) was its leading light. His witty remarks are remembered to this day. He was a master not only of the aphorism—e.g., his definition of angling as "a stick and a string, with a worm on one end and a fool on the other" —but also of the quick, unexpected retort, as when, while listening with displeasure to a violinist, he was told that the feat being performed was very difficult: "Difficult," replied Johnson, "I wish it had been impossible!"

In 1765 Johnson met Henry and Hester Thrale , whose friendship and hospitality he enjoyed until Thrale's death and Mrs. Thrale's remarriage. In that same year Johnson's long-heralded edition of Shakespeare appeared. Its editorial principles served as a model for future editions, and its preface and critical notes are still highly valued. In the 1770s Johnson wrote a series of Tory pamphlets. His political conservatism was based upon a profound skepticism as to the perfectibility of human nature. Although personally generous and compassionate, he held that a strict social order is necessary to save humanity from itself.

In 1773 he toured the Hebrides with Boswell and published his account of the tour in 1775. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-1781), his last major work, comprises ten small volumes of acute criticism, characterized, as is all of Johnson's work, by both classical values and sensitive perception. Dr. Johnson, as he is universally known, was England's first full-dress man of letters, and his mind and personality helped to create the traditions that have guided English taste and criticism.

Bibliography

Besides the classic biography by Boswell, see biographies by J. W. Krutch (1944), J. L. Clifford (1955), Sir John Hawkins (1787; ed. by B. Davis, 1961), D. Greene (1970), W. J. Bate (1977), and R. DeMaria, Jr. (1993); critical studies by W. J. Bate (1955), R. B. Schwartz (1971), P. Quennell (1973), J. T. Boulton, ed. (1978), P. Fussell (1986), N. Hudson (1988), and G. S. Gross (1992); H. Hitchings, Defining the World (2005); R. DeMaria, Jr., and G. J. Kolb, ed., Johnson on the English Language (2005); J. L. Clifford, Johnsonian Studies, 1887-1950 (1951; supplement, 1962); J. L. Clifford and D. J. Greene, A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (1970); D. Greene and J. A. Vance, Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, 1970-1985 (1987).

Johnson, Samuel (1709–84). Johnson was the son of a bookseller in Lichfield (Staffs.). He attended local schools before spending just one year at Pembroke College, Oxford, 1728–9. His early attempts at teaching failed, but he married the widow Elizabeth Porter at this time (1735). The hard life of Grub Street in London beckoned him next, but it was some years before he was regularly commissioned by Edward Cave, proprietor of the Gentleman's Magazine, to report parliamentary debates and undertake book translations. Johnson wrote his fine poem London at this time (1738), containing the line, ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.’ In 1746–55 Johnson worked on his Dictionary, the first full collation of the English language and a masterpiece of prose. He composed The Vanity of Human Wishes in 1749 and lost his wife three years later. To pay for his mother's funeral, Johnson wrote Rasselas (1759) in one week; it is possibly his finest work, a profound novel upon ‘the choice of life’. Between the larger works Johnson composed periodical moral essays under the title of the Rambler, the Idler, and the Adventurer. In 1762, Lord Bute bestowed upon Johnson a pension of £300 a year, ending his financial difficulties. He met Boswell in the following year, received a doctorate from Dublin in 1765, and met George III in 1767. After receiving his pension Johnson's literary output was smaller, but he produced his masterly edition of Shakespeare (1765), Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), undertaken with Boswell, and Lives of the Poets (1779–81). In addition, he wrote a number of political pamphlets in defence of the government, most notably its policy towards the American revolutionaries. Johnson's religious writings were published posthumously as Prayers and Meditations (1785), underlining his reputation as a devout Christian.

Much of Johnson's fame comes from his personality and conversation. To list his friends is to list many of the leading cultural figures of the 18th cent., painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, novelist Oliver Goldsmith, politician Edmund Burke, and actor David Garrick. All of these were members of the celebrated Literary Club, of which Johnson was a founder; many of the splendid discussions that took place there were recorded by Boswell in his incomparable Life of Johnson (1791). Johnson was a ferocious opponent in debate, but kind and understanding in daily life, loyal to friends, and sympathetic to their shortcomings. His house in London was filled with the needy and upon his death he bequeathed it to his black servant Frank Barber. Johnson was plagued by depression, loneliness, and ill-health, but fought valiantly against them, aided by Hester Thrale, perhaps his closest friend. Politically, he was a Tory, but despite declaring, ‘the first Whig was the Devil,’ he had many Whig friends. To many Samuel Johnson has become the personification of the 18th cent.

Andrew Iain Lewer

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).