Samuel Johnson

• 1. Introduction

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  Samuel Johnson was touched by Queen Anne on the 30th of March 1712, when he was barely two years old, in a ritual meant to cure the scrofula scarring his face. The royal touch did nothing. He kept the amulet she gave him on a chain for the rest of his life. That detail captures something essential about the man: a stubborn persistence in the face of futility, a willingness to carry what cannot be fixed. Johnson would go on to compile 42,733 entries in A Dictionary of the English Language, draft literary criticism that shaped how the English-speaking world reads Shakespeare and Milton, and become, in the words of the writer Fanny Burney, "the acknowledged Head of Literature in this kingdom". He did all of this while deaf in one ear, blind in one eye, scarred across his face and body, struggling with what we now recognise as Tourette syndrome, and battered by decades of poverty and depression. What drove a man with every reason to quit to produce work that outlasted him by centuries? And how did someone so physically conspicuous and emotionally tormented become the centre of London's literary world? The answers start in a bookshop above a Staffordshire street.

• 2. Lichfield to London

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  Michael Johnson, a bookseller in Lichfield, Staffordshire, was deeply in debt by the time his son Samuel was old enough to understand money. The family's precarious finances shaped Johnson's early education in ways both practical and accidental. His mother, Sarah, began teaching him at the age of three from the Book of Common Prayer. At six he was sent to a retired shoemaker. A year later he was at Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin, the language he would use for his most personal poems throughout his life.

  At sixteen, Johnson spent six months with his cousins the Fords at Pedmore, Worcestershire, where Cornelius Ford, a well-connected academic and notorious alcoholic, tutored him in the classics. When Johnson eventually returned to Lichfield, the headmaster Hunter refused to readmit him for the "impertinence" of such a long absence. Johnson enrolled instead at the King Edward VI grammar school at Stourbridge, where he began writing poems and verse translations.

  The family's fortunes turned only when a distant relative, Elizabeth Harriotts, died in February 1728 and left enough money to send Johnson to university. On the 31st of October 1728, a few weeks after turning nineteen, Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford. He was a quick student; when his tutor asked him to translate Alexander Pope's Messiah into Latin as a Christmas exercise, Johnson completed half the translation in one afternoon and the rest the following morning. But money ran out after thirteen months, and he left Oxford without a degree, abandoning the books he had borrowed because he could not afford to transport them home.

  His father died in December 1731, and Johnson, then twenty-two, was so devastated that he stood bareheaded in the rain at the spot where his father's market stall had been, atoning for a day he had not gone along to sell books. He would spend the next years cycling through failed job applications and schoolteaching posts, each rejection underlining the same obstacle: no Oxford degree.

• 3. Marriage and Grub Street

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  Harry Porter, one of Johnson's friends in Lichfield, died on the 3rd of September 1734, leaving behind a widow named Elizabeth, known as Tetty, who was forty-five years old with three children and substantial savings. Within months Johnson began to court her. According to his friend and biographer William Shaw, the first moves probably came from her, and her family was firmly opposed. Johnson was twenty-five to her forty-six. Her son Jervis severed all relations with his mother over the match. Nonetheless, they married on the 9th of July 1735 at St Werburgh's Church in Derby.

  In the autumn of 1735 Johnson opened Edial Hall School as a private academy near Lichfield. He had just three pupils: Lawrence Offley, George Garrick, and the eighteen-year-old David Garrick, who later became one of the most celebrated actors of the eighteenth century. The school failed and cost Tetty a substantial portion of her savings. Rather than prolong the experiment, Johnson began writing his first major work, the historical tragedy Irene, and biographer Robert DeMaria later argued that Tourette syndrome may have made public occupations like schoolteaching almost impossible, pushing Johnson toward what DeMaria called "the invisible occupation of authorship".

  On the 2nd of March 1737, the day his brother Nathaniel died, Johnson left for London with Garrick. He was penniless. Between 1737 and 1739 he befriended the poet Richard Savage, and the two spent nights in taverns or sleeping in "night-cellars", sometimes roaming the streets until dawn because neither had money for lodging. They worked as Grub Street writers, anonymously supplying publishers with on-demand material. Johnson would later define "grub street" in his Dictionary as "the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet". Savage eventually died in 1743 in a Bristol debtors' prison, and Johnson spent the following year writing his Life of Mr Richard Savage, which the critic Walter Jackson Bate later called "one of the innovative works in the history of biography".

  In October 1737 Johnson had brought Tetty to London and taken work with Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine. His first major poem, London, appeared anonymously in May 1738, drawing on Juvenal's Satire III. Alexander Pope read it and remarked that its author "will soon be déterré", though it would be another fifteen years before Johnson's name was publicly attached to the poem.

• 4. The Dictionary Years

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  On the morning of the 18th of June 1746, Johnson signed a contract with the publisher William Strahan and associates, worth 1,500 guineas, to produce an authoritative dictionary of the English language. He told them he could finish in three years. He had noted that the Academie Francaise had employed forty scholars over forty years to complete their dictionary, and quipped that as three was to sixteen hundred, so was the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman. He finished in eight years.

  The process filled his home at 17 Gough Square, near his printer Strahan, with books and assistants. Johnson underlined words in hundreds of volumes; the assistants copied the underlined passages onto individual paper slips, which were then alphabetised. The books he used were, as his friend John Hawkins observed, "a copious but a miserably ragged" collection, and any volumes borrowed from others came back "so defaced as to be scarce worth owning".

  Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was the Dictionary's patron, to Johnson's displeasure. Seven years after the project began, Chesterfield wrote two anonymous essays in The World praising the Dictionary's value. Johnson was furious. In a letter to Chesterfield he wrote: "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?" Chesterfield, apparently impressed by the prose, kept the letter on a table for any visitor to read.

  The Dictionary appeared in April 1755, its pages nearly eighteen inches tall and twenty inches wide when opened, containing 42,773 entries. It sold for the extravagant price of four pounds ten shillings. An important feature was the use of approximately 114,000 literary quotations to illustrate word meanings; the most frequently cited authors were William Shakespeare, John Milton and John Dryden. Authors' royalties were unknown at the time, and once Johnson had delivered the manuscript, he received no further money from its sale. The Dictionary remained the most used and imitated English dictionary for the 150 years between its first publication and the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928.

  While working on the Dictionary, Johnson also produced 208 essays for The Rambler, published every Tuesday and Saturday at twopence each. He told his friend Joshua Reynolds that he had resolved one night not to go to sleep until he had chosen a title, and that "The Rambler seemed the best that occurred". The essays tended to be more grave than the title suggested, running around 1,200 to 1,500 words each. Samuel Richardson, who enjoyed the essays greatly, tried to find out from the publisher who had written them. The popularity exploded once they were collected in a volume and reprinted nine times during Johnson's lifetime.

  Tetty's health declined through these years. She died on the 17th of March 1752, while Johnson was still working on the Dictionary. Johnson wrote to his old friend John Taylor in terms that Taylor said "expressed grief in the strongest manner he had ever read". Johnson wrote a funeral sermon for her, but Taylor refused to read it. Johnson's diary was filled with prayers and laments over her death that continued until his own death more than thirty years later.

• 5. The Club and Later Works

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  On the 16th of May 1763, Johnson first met the twenty-two-year-old James Boswell in the bookshop of Tom Davies, a mutual friend. The meeting began awkwardly, but they became close companions within weeks. Around the spring of 1763, Johnson founded a social group known as "The Club", which met every Monday at seven in the evening at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, Soho. Its original members included Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick and Oliver Goldsmith; Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon joined later, as did Boswell himself.

  On the 9th of January 1765, Johnson met Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and Member of Parliament, and his wife Hester, through his friend Arthur Murphy. Johnson was treated as a member of the Thrale family, spending time at their home and at Thrale's Anchor Brewery in Southwark. He stayed with them for seventeen years. Hester Thrale's detailed diary, known as Thraliana, and her correspondence became important biographical sources after Johnson's death.

  Johnson's edition of Shakespeare's plays, The Plays of William Shakespeare, was published on the 10th of October 1765 in a print run of one thousand copies; the first edition sold out quickly. Johnson's central innovation was a set of notes that helped readers work through Shakespeare's more complicated passages and identified errors introduced by earlier editors. The Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone later credited Johnson with having thrown more light on the plays than all his predecessors combined.

  On the 6th of August 1773, Johnson and Boswell set out for Scotland, and Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, published in 1775. The account addressed the social struggles of the Scottish people and praised specific institutions, including a school in Edinburgh for the deaf and mute. It also entered the controversy over James Macpherson's Ossian poems, which Johnson flatly dismissed on the grounds that nothing had been written in the Gaelic language at the time they were claimed to have been composed. Macpherson threatened him with physical violence. Boswell's own account, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, included anecdotes such as Johnson swinging a broadsword while dressed in Scottish garb and dancing a Highland jig.

  In 1777, Tom Davies, William Strahan and Thomas Cadell asked Johnson to write prefaces for a collection of English poets. Johnson asked 200 guineas, which he acknowledged was significantly less than he could have demanded. The resulting Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, covering 52 poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, appeared between 1779 and 1781 in a final collected edition of six volumes. It became one of the most influential works of literary criticism in English.

• 6. The Body and the Mind

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  William Hogarth, upon first seeing Johnson standing near a window at Richardson's house, "shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner", concluded Johnson must be a relative's ward being looked after by the household. When Johnson walked over and joined the conversation, Hogarth stood astonished, and, in the account that has survived, "actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired".

  The tics and involuntary movements that so startled Hogarth had been present since Johnson's childhood at Lichfield Grammar School. Boswell described them in clinical detail: Johnson "commonly held his head to one side... moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand", making sounds like "a half whistle" or "as if clucking like a hen", and blowing out his breath "like a whale" after finishing a point in an argument. He was said to perform elaborate physical rituals at the thresholds of doorways. When a little girl asked why he made such noises and movements, he answered simply: "From bad habit." The posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome was first formally made in a 1967 report, and the researcher Arthur K. Shapiro described Johnson as "the most notable example of a successful adaptation to life despite the liability of Tourette syndrome".

  Beyond the tics, Johnson suffered from depression severe enough that his friend John Taylor said Johnson had once "strongly entertained thoughts of suicide". What separated him from contemporaries who were committed to asylums, in Hester Thrale's view, was his ability to keep his fears to himself. After his stroke on the 17th of June 1783 left him temporarily unable to speak, Johnson wrote to his neighbour Edmund Allen describing the loss. He later wrote of the depression that circled him in his final years using a phrase that has stayed in the language: "The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive."

  His autopsy revealed emphysema and cardiac failure likely caused by hypertension, a condition not yet understood in the eighteenth century. He had also had surgery for gout. He was deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, and the childhood scrofula had left permanent scarring across his face and body. Adam Smith, who was not given to easy praise, said that Johnson "knew more books than any man alive".

• 7. Death and What Remained

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  Johnson arrived back in London on the 16th of November 1784, expressing a desire to die in the city. On the 25th of November he allowed the novelist Fanny Burney to visit and told her he wanted to leave London; he soon moved to George Strahan's home in Islington. On the 13th of December 1784, he met two final visitors: a young woman named Miss Morris, whom he blessed, and Francesco Sastres, an Italian teacher, to whom Johnson spoke some of his last words in Latin: "iam moriturus", meaning "now I am about to die". He fell into a coma shortly after and died at seven in the evening. He was seventy-five.

  Bennet Langton, who was present, waited until eleven that night to tell the others gathered outside. William Gerard Hamilton, upon hearing the news, said: "He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best: There is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson." Johnson was buried on the 20th of December 1784 at Westminster Abbey.

  Boswell's biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, appeared in 1791. The Johnson scholar Walter Jackson Bate selected it as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature". It was so successful that Boswell and his circle promoted it at the expense of the many other biographical accounts that had appeared after Johnson's death, including works by Thomas Tyers, Hester Thrale, John Hawkins, Arthur Murphy, and Fanny Burney.

  Literary opinion on Johnson shifted across the following century. The Romantic poets were hostile to his views on poetry, particularly his scepticism of Milton's blank verse. But later critics including Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis arrived at a very different assessment. Leavis wrote: "When we read him we know, beyond question, that we have here a powerful and distinguished mind operating at first hand upon literature." Yvor Winters put it more bluntly, writing that perhaps "the only critic in English" who deserves the name of great is Samuel Johnson. The Dictionary's influence ran through Webster's and the New English Dictionary before the Oxford English Dictionary eventually supplanted it, some 150 years after Johnson first published it.