Statue of Dr. Johnson erected in 1838 opposite the house where he was born at Lichfield's Market Square. There are also statues of him in London and Uttoxeter.
Statue of Dr. Johnson erected in 1838 opposite the house where he was born at Lichfield's Market Square. There are also statues of him in London and Uttoxeter.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer.
Background
Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709, to Sarah (née Ford) and Michael Johnson, a bookseller. The birth took place in the family home above his father's bookshop in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Sarah was 40 when she gave birth to Samuel. This was considered an unusually late pregnancy, so precautions were taken, and a "man-midwife" and surgeon of "great reputation" named George Hector was brought in to assist. The infant Samuel did not cry, and there were concerns for the baby's health. His aunt exclaimed that "she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street". The family feared that the baby would not survive, and in this extremity, summoned the vicar of St Mary's to perform a baptism. Two godfathers were chosen, Samuel Swynfen, a physician and graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Richard Wakefield, a lawyer, coroner, and Lichfield town clerk.
Johnson's health soon improved and he was put to wet-nurse with Joan Marklew. Some time later he contracted scrofula, known at the time as the "King's Evil" because it was thought royalty could cure it. Sir John Floyer, former physician to King Charles II, recommended that the young Johnson should receive the "royal touch", which he received from Queen Anne on 30 March 1712. However, the ritual proved ineffective, and an operation was performed that left him with permanent scars across his face and body. With the birth of Johnson's brother, Nathaniel, a few months later, Michael became unable to pay the debts he had accrued over the years, and his family was no longer able to maintain its standard of living.
Education
Samuel Johnson displayed signs of great intelligence as a child, and his parents, to his later disgust, would show off his "newly acquired accomplishments". His education began at the age of three, and was provided by his mother, who had him memorise and recite passages from the Book of Common Prayer. When Samuel turned four, he was sent to a nearby school, and, at the age of six he was sent to a retired shoemaker to continue his education. A year later Johnson went to Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin. During this time, Johnson started to exhibit the tics that would influence how people viewed him in his later years, and which formed the basis for a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome. He excelled at his studies and was promoted to the upper school at the age of nine. During this time, he befriended Edmund Hector, nephew of his "man-midwife" George Hector, and John Taylor, with whom he remained in contact for the rest of his life.
At the age of 16 Johnson was given the opportunity to stay with his cousins, the Fords, at Pedmore, Worcestershire. There he became a close friend of Cornelius Ford, who employed his knowledge of the classics to tutor Johnson while he was not attending school. Ford was a successful, well-connected academic, but he was also a notorious alcoholic whose excesses contributed to his death six years later. After spending six months with his cousins, Johnson returned to Lichfield, but Mr. Hunter, the headmaster, "angered by the impertinence of this long absence", refused to allow Samuel to continue at the grammar school. Unable to return to Lichfield Grammar School, Johnson enrolled at the King Edward VI grammar school at Stourbridge. Because the school was located near Pedmore, Johnson was able to spend more time with the Fords, and he began to write poems and verse translations. However, he spent only six months at Stourbridge before returning once again to his parents' home in Lichfield.
Johnson's future remained uncertain because his father was deeply in debt. To earn money, Johnson began to stitch books for his father, and it is likely that Johnson spent much time in his father's bookshop reading and building his literary knowledge. The family remained in poverty until Sarah Johnson's cousin, Elizabeth Harriotts, died in February 1728 and left enough money to send Johnson to university. On 31 October 1728, a few weeks after he turned 19, Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford. The inheritance did not cover all of his expenses at Pembroke, but Andrew Corbet, a friend and fellow student at Pembroke, offered to make up the deficit.
Johnson made friends at Pembroke and read much. In later life he told stories of his idleness. His tutor asked him to produce a Latin translation of Alexander Pope's Messiah as a Christmas exercise. Johnson completed half of the translation in one afternoon and the rest the following morning. Although the poem brought him praise, it did not bring the material benefit he had hoped for. The poem later appeared in Miscellany of Poems (1731), edited by John Husbands, a Pembroke tutor, and is the earliest surviving publication of any of Johnson's writings. Johnson spent the rest of his time studying, even during the Christmas holiday. He drafted a "plan of study" called "Adversaria", which he left unfinished, and used his time to learn French while working on his Greek.
After thirteen months, a shortage of funds forced Johnson to leave Oxford without a degree, and he returned to Lichfield. Towards the end of Johnson's stay at Oxford, his tutor, Jorden, left Pembroke and was replaced by William Adams. Johnson enjoyed Adams' tutoring, but by December, Johnson was already a quarter behind in his student fees, and he was forced to return home. He left behind many books that he had borrowed from his father because he could not afford to transport them, and also because he hoped to return to Oxford soon.
He eventually did receive a degree. Just before the publication of his Dictionary in 1755, Oxford University awarded Johnson the degree of Master of Arts. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1765 by Trinity College Dublin and in 1775 by Oxford University. In 1776 he returned to Pembroke with Boswell and toured the college with his former tutor Adams, who by then was the Master of the college. During that visit he recalled his time at the college and his early career, and expressed his later fondness for Jorden.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 December 13, 1784, in his house in London, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Johnson was a devout, conservative Anglican and a compassionate man who supported a number of poor friends under his own roof, even when unable to fully provide for himself. Johnson's Christian morality permeated his works, and he would write on moral topics with such authority and in such a trusting manner that, Walter Jackson Bate claims, "no other moralist in history excels or even begins to rival him". However, Johnson's moral writings do not contain, as Donald Greene points out, "a predetermined and authorized pattern of 'good behavior'", even though Johnson does emphasise certain kinds of conduct. He did not let his own faith prejudice him against others, and had respect for those of other denominations who demonstrated a commitment to Christ's teachings. Although Johnson respected John Milton's poetry, he could not tolerate Milton's Puritan and Republican beliefs, feeling that they were contrary to England and Christianity.
Johnson's sermons, according to David Greene, are "a neglected but important and rewarding section of his writings". They are dry and formally organized because Johnson did not approve of the emotionally charged rhetoric of 17th century preachers at the pulpit. Christian religion and ethics are the primary topic of the sermons with emphasis on marriage, repentance, hardening the heart, charity, pride, wisdom, and compassion. Sometimes Johnson discussed theological topics like the nature of God or political topics like morality's role in governmental action.
Politics
Johnson was known as either a staunch Tory or was thought not to be active within politics; his political writings were subsequently disregarded and neglected. Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is to blame for part of this. Boswell did not meet Johnson until later in life, and he was unable to discuss how politics affected Johnson during his early years. Two periods, Robert Walpole's control over British Parliament and the Seven Years' War, were Johnson's most active periods and are the source for much of his early writings. Although Boswell was present with Johnson during the 1770s and describes four major pamphlets written by Johnson, he neglects to discuss them because he is more interested in their travels to Scotland. This is compounded by the fact that Boswell held an opinion contradictory to two of these pamphlets, The False Alarm and Taxation No Tyranny, and so he attacks Johnson's views in his biography - including Johnson's attacks on slavery.
Boswell was not the only reason why Johnson was disregarded as a political thinker; Thomas Babington Macaulay tried to promote the belief that Johnson's political thoughts were nonsensical and were the writings of a bigot. However, Macaulay was also a Whig, and the one who established the philosophical view that Whigs and Tories were polar opposites, a view that Johnson did not hold. Johnson's views on politics constantly changed through his life, and early on he admitted to sympathies for the Jacobite cause but, by the reign of George III, he came to accept the Hanoverian Succession. It was Boswell who gave people the impression that Johnson was an "arch-conservative", and it was Boswell, more than anyone else, who determined how Johnson would be seen by people years later.
Colonialism. Johnson had rather eccentrically advocated that the English and the French were just "two robbers" who were stealing land from the indigenous people of North America, and that neither deserved to live there. After the signing of the 1783 Peace of Paris treaties, marking the American colonists' defeat of the English, Johnson was "deeply disturbed" with the "state of this kingdom".
He agreed with the Whigs in being an opponent of slavery, unlike most Tories. This was well before the heyday of abolitionism, and he once proposed a toast to the "next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies". He had a black manservant, Francis Barber (Frank), whom Johnson made his heir.
Views
Johnson was a rationalist and believed that rational thought was vital to morality.
On poverty. In his review of Soame Jenyns's A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil and its argument that those "born to poverty" should not be educated so they could enjoy the "opiate of ignorance", Johnson wrote, "To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation only because the ancestor happened to be poor, is, in itself, cruel, if not unjust".
On madness. When Jenyns claimed that madness was a way God ensured that the poor would be content with life, Johnson responded: "On the happiness of madmen, as the case is not very frequent, it is not necessary to raise a disquisition, but I cannot forbear to observe that I never yet knew disorders of mind increase felicity; every madman is either arrogant and irascible, or gloomy and suspicious, or possessed by some passion or notion destructive to his quiet. He has always discontent in his look, and malignity in his bosom. And, if we had the power of choice, he would soon repent who should resign his reason to secure his peace."
On education. Johnson responds to Jenyns's final argument, that the ends justify the means when it comes to keeping the poor uneducated, by saying: "I am always afraid of determining on the side of envy or cruelty. The privileges of education may sometimes be improperly bestowed, but I shall always fear to withhold them lest I should be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade myself that I am following the maxims of policy; and under the appearance of salutary restraints, should be indulging the lust of dominion, and that malevolence which delights in seeing others depressed."
On slavery. At Oxford Johnson gave a toast and said, "Here's to the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies".
Quotations:
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance."
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
"Second Marriage: the triumph of hope over experience."
"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome."
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."
"Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others."
Membership
Around the spring of 1763, Johnson formed "The Club", a social group that included his friends Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith and others (the membership later expanded 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.
The Club
,
London
1764
Personality
Johnson had several health problems, including childhood tuberculous scrofula resulting in deep facial scarring, deafness in one ear and blindness in one eye, gout, testicular cancer, and a stroke in his final year that left him unable to speak; his autopsy indicated that he had pulmonary fibrosis along with cardiac failure probably due to hypertension, a condition then unknown. Johnson displayed signs consistent with several diagnoses, including depression and Tourette syndrome.
Physical Characteristics:
Johnson was a tall and robust man. His odd gestures and tics were disconcerting to some on first meeting him.
Quotes from others about the person
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."
Interests
Johnson is known for his love of cats, especially his own two cats, Hodge and Lily. Boswell wrote, "I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat."
Connections
After the death of his close friend Harry Porter, he met Porter’s wife Elizabeth, named Tetty by her relatives. At that time, Tetty was 45 years old and had three children. On 9th July, 1735 Johnson married Tetty, but her family couldn’t accept the marriage owing to the wide age gap, as Johnson was only 25 years.
Though Johnson's references to his "Tetty" were affectionate, the 17 years of their childless marriage were probably not very happy. Elizabeth's marriage to Johnson so disgusted her son Jervis that he severed all relations with her. However, her daughter Lucy accepted Johnson from the start, and her other son, Joseph, later came to accept the marriage.
In 1752, after a long terminal illness, Tetty passed away. Samuel grieved her death and felt guilty for having used her savings for his literary work.