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Samuel Johnson: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Samuel Johnson
On the 30th of March 1712, a young boy named Samuel Johnson stood before Queen Anne to receive the royal touch, a ritual believed to cure the scrofula, or King's Evil, that had plagued him since birth. The infant had not cried when born, and his aunt had declared him unworthy of life, yet here he stood, scarred and trembling, as the monarch laid her hand upon his forehead. The ritual failed to heal him, leaving permanent marks across his face and body, but it marked the beginning of a life that would redefine English literature. Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on the 18th of September 1709, Johnson entered the world to a bookseller father and a mother who was forty years old at his birth. His early years were shadowed by illness and poverty, with his family struggling to maintain their standard of living after his father's debts mounted. Despite these hardships, Johnson displayed signs of great intelligence, memorizing passages from the Book of Common Prayer at the age of three and excelling in Latin at Lichfield Grammar School. His childhood was marked by tics and gestures that would later disconcert those who met him, forming the basis for a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome. These physical quirks, combined with his profound intellect, set the stage for a man who would become arguably the most distinguished figure in English literary history.
The Grub Street Years
In the year 1737, Samuel Johnson and his former pupil David Garrick left Lichfield for London, penniless and pessimistic about their future. They stayed in taverns and night-cellars, roaming the streets until dawn because they had no money, embodying the life of Grub Street writers who supplied publishers with on-demand material. Johnson's first major work, the poem London, was published anonymously in May 1738, describing the character Thales fleeing the problems of London, which was portrayed as a place of crime, corruption, and poverty. Alexander Pope predicted the author would soon be unearthed, but it would take fifteen years for Johnson's identity to be revealed. During this period, Johnson befriended the poet Richard Savage, and they shared a life of poverty, often sleeping in night-cellars and roaming the streets until dawn. Savage's friends tried to help him by persuading him to move to Wales, but he ended up in Bristol and fell into debt, eventually dying in 1743. A year later, Johnson wrote Life of Mr Richard Savage, a moving work that remains one of the innovative works in the history of biography. Johnson's early career was marked by financial struggles and mental anguish, with his tics and gesticulations becoming more noticeable and often commented upon. Despite these challenges, he continued to write, producing works that would later be recognized as some of the greatest achievements in English literature.
When was Samuel Johnson born and where was he born?
Samuel Johnson was born on the 18th of September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire. He was the son of a bookseller father and a mother who was forty years old at his birth.
What major work did Samuel Johnson publish in 1755?
Samuel Johnson published his authoritative dictionary of the English language in April 1755. The dictionary contained 42,773 entries and used approximately 114,000 literary quotations to illustrate word meanings.
Who wrote the famous biography of Samuel Johnson?
James Boswell wrote the famous biography of Samuel Johnson titled The Life of Samuel Johnson. Boswell first met Johnson on the 16th of May 1763 and documented their friendship and Johnson's life extensively.
When did Samuel Johnson die and where was he buried?
Samuel Johnson died on the 13th of December 1784 at 7:00 pm in London. He was buried on the 20th of December 1784 at Westminster Abbey with an inscription stating his birth and death dates.
What was the title of Samuel Johnson's weekly essay series published in 1750?
Samuel Johnson published a series of essays titled The Rambler starting in 1750. He wrote 208 essays for the series which were published every Tuesday and Saturday and sold for twopence each.
On the 18th of June 1746, a group of publishers approached Johnson with the idea of creating an authoritative dictionary of the English language, signing a contract worth 1,500 guineas. Johnson claimed he could finish the project in three years, but it took him eight years to complete, a feat that some critics described as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship. The dictionary, published in April 1755, contained 42,773 entries and sold for the extravagant price of £4 10s, perhaps the rough equivalent of £350 today. An important innovation in English lexicography was to illustrate the meanings of his words by literary quotation, of which there were approximately 114,000. The authors most frequently cited include William Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Dryden. Johnson's process included underlining words in the numerous books he wanted to include in his Dictionary, and his assistants would copy out the underlined sentences on individual paper slips, which would later be alphabetized and accompanied with examples. The dictionary was not the first, nor was it unique, but it was the most commonly used and imitated for the 150 years between its first publication and the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928. Johnson's relationship with his patron, Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was strained, as Johnson felt that Chesterfield had not fulfilled his obligations as the work's patron. In a letter to Chesterfield, Johnson expressed his view that a patron who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help, is not a true patron. The dictionary as published was a large book, its pages nearly tall, and the book was wide when opened, containing 42,773 entries, to which only a few more were added in subsequent editions.
The Rambler And The Idler
In 1750, Johnson decided to produce a series of essays under the title The Rambler, which were to be published every Tuesday and Saturday and sell for twopence each. During this time, Johnson published no fewer than 208 essays, each around 1,200, 1,500 words long, often on moral and religious topics. The popularity of The Rambler took off once the issues were collected in a volume; they were reprinted nine times during Johnson's life. Writer and printer Samuel Richardson, enjoying the essays greatly, questioned the publisher as to who wrote the works; only he and a few of Johnson's friends were told of Johnson's authorship. One friend, the novelist Charlotte Lennox, includes a defence of The Rambler in her novel The Female Quixote, describing Johnson as the greatest Genius in the present Age. In 1758, Johnson began to write a weekly series, The Idler, which ran from the 15th of April 1758 to the 5th of April 1760, as a way to avoid finishing his Shakespeare. This series was shorter and lacked many features of The Rambler, and unlike his independent publication of The Rambler, The Idler was published in a weekly news journal The Universal Chronicle. Johnson's most highly regarded poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, was written with such extraordinary speed that Boswell claimed Johnson might have been perpetually a poet. The poem is an imitation of Juvenal's Satire X and claims that the antidote to vain human wishes is non-vain spiritual wishes. Johnson emphasized the helpless vulnerability of the individual before the social context and the inevitable self-deception by which human beings are led astray. The poem was critically celebrated but it failed to become popular, and sold fewer copies than London. Johnson's works during this period were dominated by his intent to use them for literary criticism, examining how words were used, especially in literary works.
The Club And The Thrales
On the 16th of May 1763, Johnson first met 22-year-old James Boswell, who would later become Johnson's first major biographer, in the bookshop of Johnson's friend, Tom Davies. They quickly became friends, although Boswell would return to his home in Scotland or travel abroad for months at a time. Around the spring of 1763, Johnson formed The Club, a social group that included his friends Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith, and others, with membership later expanding to include Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. They decided to meet every Monday at 7:00 pm at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, and these meetings continued until long after the deaths of the original members. On the 9th of January 1765, Murphy introduced Johnson to Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and MP, and his wife Hester. They struck up an instant friendship; Johnson was treated as a member of the family, and was once more motivated to continue working on his Shakespeare. Afterwards, Johnson stayed with the Thrales for 17 years until Henry's death in 1781, sometimes staying in rooms at Thrale's Anchor Brewery in Southwark. Hester Thrale's documentation of Johnson's life during this time, in her correspondence and her diary, became an important source of biographical information on Johnson after his death. Johnson's edition of Shakespeare was finally published on the 10th of October 1765 as The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, with notes by Sam. Johnson. The first edition quickly sold out, and a second was soon printed. The plays themselves were in a version that Johnson felt was closest to the original, based on his analysis of the manuscript editions. Johnson's revolutionary innovation was to create a set of corresponding notes that allowed readers to clarify the meaning behind many of Shakespeare's more complicated passages, and to examine those which had been transcribed incorrectly in previous editions.
The Journey To The Hebrides
On the 6th of August 1773, eleven years after first meeting Boswell, Johnson set out to visit his friend in Scotland, and to begin a journey to the western islands of Scotland. That account was intended to discuss the social problems and struggles that affected the Scottish people, but it also praised many of the unique facets of Scottish society, such as a school in Edinburgh for the deaf and mute. Johnson used the work to enter into the dispute over the authenticity of James Macpherson's Ossian poems, claiming they could not have been translations of ancient Scottish literature on the grounds that in those times nothing had been written in the Earse language. There were heated exchanges between the two, and according to one of Johnson's letters, MacPherson threatened physical violence. Boswell's account of their journey, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, was a preliminary step toward his later biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson. Included were various quotations and descriptions of events, including anecdotes such as Johnson swinging a broadsword while wearing Scottish garb, or dancing a Highland jig. In the 1770s, Johnson, who had tended to be an opponent of the government early in life, published a series of pamphlets in favour of various government policies. On the evening of the 7th of April 1775, he made the famous statement, Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. This line was not, as widely believed, about patriotism in general, but what Johnson considered to be the false use of the term patriotism by Wilkes and his supporters. Johnson opposed self-professed Patriots in general, but valued what he considered true patriotism. The last of these pamphlets, Taxation No Tyranny, was a defence of the Coercive Acts and a response to the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, which protested against taxation without representation.
The Final Years And Death
On the 17th of June 1783, Johnson's poor circulation resulted in a stroke and he wrote to his neighbour, Edmund Allen, that he had lost the ability to speak. Two doctors were brought in to aid Johnson; he regained his ability to speak two days later. Johnson feared that he was dying, and wrote that he was advancing towards death with acceleration. By this time he was sick and gout-ridden. He had surgery for gout, and his remaining friends, including novelist Fanny Burney, came to keep him company. He was confined to his room from the 14th of December 1783 to the 21st of April 1784. His health began to improve by May 1784, and he travelled to Oxford with Boswell on the 5th of May 1784. By July, many of Johnson's friends were either dead or gone; Boswell had left for Scotland and Hester Thrale had become engaged to Piozzi. With no one to visit, Johnson expressed a desire to die in London and arrived there on the 16th of November 1784. On the 25th of November 1784, he allowed Burney to visit him and expressed an interest to her that he should leave London; he soon left for Islington, to George Strahan's home. His final moments were filled with mental anguish and delusions; when his physician, Thomas Warren, visited and asked him if he were feeling better, Johnson burst out with: No, Sir; you cannot conceive with what acceleration I advance towards death. On the 13th of December 1784, Johnson met with two others: a young woman, Miss Morris, whom Johnson blessed, and Francesco Sastres, an Italian teacher, who heard some of Johnson's final words: iam moriturus, now I am about to die. Shortly afterwards he fell into a coma, and died at 7:00 pm. Langton waited until 11:00 pm to tell the others, which led to John Hawkins' becoming pale and overcome with an agony of mind, along with Seward and Hoole describing Johnson's death as the most awful sight. He was buried on the 20th of December 1784 at Westminster Abbey with an inscription that reads: Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Born the 18th of September 1709. Died the 13th of December 1784.
The Legacy Of The Great Critic
Johnson was, in the words of Steven Lynn, more than a well-known writer and scholar; he was a celebrity, for the activities and the state of his health in his later years were constantly reported in various journals and newspapers, and when there was nothing to report, something was invented. According to Bate, Johnson loved biography, and he changed the whole course of biography for the modern world. One by-product was the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and there were many other memoirs and biographies of a similar kind written on Johnson after his death. These accounts of his life include Thomas Tyers's A Biographical Sketch of Dr Samuel Johnson, Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Hester Thrale's Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, John Hawkins's Life of Samuel Johnson, and, in 1792, Arthur Murphy's An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson. Another important source was Fanny Burney, who described Johnson as the acknowledged Head of Literature in this kingdom and kept a diary containing details missing from other biographies. Above all, Boswell's portrayal of Johnson is the work best known to general readers. Although critics like Donald Greene argue about its status as a true biography, the work became successful as Boswell and his friends promoted it at the expense of the many other works on Johnson's life. In criticism, Johnson had a lasting influence, although not everyone viewed him favourably. Some, like Macaulay, regarded Johnson as an idiot savant who produced some respectable works, and others, like the Romantic poets, were completely opposed to Johnson's views on poetry and literature, especially with regard to Milton. However, some of their contemporaries disagreed: Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare is based in part on Johnson's views of Shakespeare, and Johnson influenced Jane Austen's writing style and philosophy. Later, Johnson's works came into favour, and Matthew Arnold, in his Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets, considered the Lives of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, and Gray as points which stand as so many natural centres, and by returning to which we can always find our way again. More than a century after his death, literary critics such as G. Birkbeck Hill and T. S. Eliot came to regard Johnson as a serious critic. They began to study Johnson's works with an increasing focus on the critical analysis found in his edition of Shakespeare and Lives of the Poets. Yvor Winters claimed that A great critic is the rarest of all literary geniuses; perhaps the only critic in English who deserves that epithet is Samuel Johnson. F. R. Leavis agreed and, on Johnson's criticism, said, When we read him we know, beyond question, that we have here a powerful and distinguished mind operating at first hand upon literature. This, we can say with emphatic conviction, really is criticism. Edmund Wilson claimed that The Lives of the Poets and the prefaces and commentary on Shakespeare are among the most brilliant and the most acute documents in the whole range of English criticism. The critic Harold Bloom placed Johnson's work firmly within the Western canon, describing him as unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him. Bate in the finest insight on Johnson I know, emphasised that no other writer is so obsessed by the realisation that the mind is an activity, one that will turn to destructiveness of the self or of others unless it is directed to labour. Johnson's philosophical insistence that the language within literature must be examined became a prevailing mode of literary theory during the mid-20th century. Half of Johnson's surviving correspondence, together with some of his manuscripts, editions of his books, paintings and other items associated with him are in the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson, housed at Houghton Library at Harvard University since 2003.