Titans of History

SAMUEL JOHNSON

1709–1784

Here lies Sam Johnson:—Reader, have a care,

Tread lightly, lest you wake a sleeping bear:

Religious, moral, generous, and humane

He was: but self-sufficient, proud, and vain,

Fond of, and overbearing in dispute,

A Christian and a scholar—but a brute.

Soame Jenyns, suggested epitaph for Dr. Johnson (1784)

Samuel Johnson was one of the most versatile, erudite and accomplished writers in the history of English literature. In addition to his remarkable and ground-breaking Dictionary, he also wrote copiously in a wide range of other genres: essays, literary criticism, travel writing, political sketches and satires, a tragedy, biography, poetry, translations, sermons, diaries, letters and pamphlets. He was a master conversationalist and a spiky, magnetic and brilliant figure in London society. Through the biography written by his disciple James Boswell, we can still appreciate one of the reigning personalities of literary history as though he were alive today.

Johnson’s early years did not show much promise. As a child he suffered from both scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph glands), which affected his sight, and smallpox, which disfigured his face, making him at best peculiar to look at. Throughout his life he was also prone to depression and had all manner of odd tics and twitches that now suggest Tourette’s syndrome. Despite these disadvantages, the young Samuel was a bright boy and grew up in a family of booksellers in Lichfield. But poverty obliged him to leave Pembroke College, Oxford, after only a year, without taking a degree.

In 1735 he married Elizabeth Porter, a local widow twenty years his senior. Failing to obtain a teaching post, Johnson decamped to London in 1737 and began working for the Gentleman’s Magazine, for which he wrote parliamentary sketches. He had already written a stage tragedy, Irene, and worked on satirical poems, biographies such as The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, and a catalog of the Harley collection of books and manuscripts.

It was in 1746 that Johnson began his magnum opus. He was commissioned to write a new English dictionary, and the project dominated the next nine years of his life. Nothing on such a scale had previously been undertaken, and the Dictionary proved to be a masterpiece of scholarship. It broke new ground in lexicography, encompassing a vast array of words from a gigantic pool of source material, and even made a good stab at discovering the etymology of many of the words that were included. The Dictionary was also a demonstration of Johnson’s pithy and precise style. In a characteristic flash of witty self-deprecation, Johnson defines a lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.”

The Dictionary, published in 1755, was immediately recognized as a work of brilliance, and Johnson was awarded with an honorary MA from Oxford before the book was even finished. In the meantime he had continued to write copiously in other genres. His essays in The Rambler dealt with matters as varied as capital punishment, good parenting and the emergence of the novel, and are replete with eminently quotable epigrams—such as “No man is much pleased with a companion, who does not increase, in some respect, his fondness for himself.” Johnson had the same gift as Oscar Wilde for pointing out, with razor-like wit, the contradictions inherent in human nature.

Johnson lost his wife in 1752. He never married again, but his house was a refuge to friends from a variety of odd backgrounds. Ex-prostitutes, indebted unlicensed surgeons, female writers—a particular favorite with Johnson—all stayed under his roof. But Johnson was just as popular in the higher strata of society, receiving patronage from the Treasury and conversing with men like the American founding father, philosopher and inventor Benjamin Franklin. In 1763 Johnson met the young Boswell in a bookshop and took him on as a protégé. Boswell was a devoted fan, and his biography tells us much about Johnson’s life and scintillating conversation which otherwise might have been lost.

As his fame grew Johnson turned out another pair of fine works: an admired edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1765 and The Lives of the Poets, which came out between 1779 and 1781. Johnson was often tart, if not harsh, on his contemporaries—when asked to pick the better of the two minor poets Smart and Derrick, he replied that there was “no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” But despite this gruffness, he had a warm heart and a fond regard for his friends. He died in 1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, a sign of the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries—an esteem that has not diminished over the succeeding centuries. “I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl,” he once said. “Let him come out as I do, and bark.”