Samuel Johnson Biography and List of Works

English poet, essayist, critic, journalist, lexicographer, conversationalist, regarded as one of the outstanding figures of 18th-century life and letters. Johnson's literary reputation is part dependent on James Boswell's (1740-1795) biography The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791). - Johnson became Doctor Johnson when Dublin University gave him the honorary degree in 1765. He had a huge, strong athletic build, his appetite was legendary and it is said that he often drank over 25 cups of tea at one sitting.

"One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts."

Johnson was born in Lichfeld as the son of a bookseller. His childhood was marred by ill health: a tubercular infection affected both his sight and hearing and his face was scarred by scrofula. Johnson was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford. His father died in 1731 and left the family in poverty. Johnson's studies were cut short and he returned to Lichfield, affected by depression, which haunted him for most of his life. He worked as a teacher at the grammar school in Market Bosworth and published his first essays in the Birmingham Journal. In 1735 he married Mrs Elisabeth Porter, a widow 20 years his senior. They started a school at Edial, near Lichfeld, but the school did not prosper. Johnson's lack of degree and convulsive mannerisms hindered his success as a teacher. Two years later they moved to London where Johnson worked for Edward Cave, the founder of The Gentleman's Magazine. When he applied to a publisher for employment, he was found unfit for the job. "You had better get a porter's knot and carry trunks," he was advised.

The death of the poet Richard Savage, who was Johnson friend, gave rise in 1743 to his first biographical work. He addressed to Lord Chesterfield his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language in 1747 and worked for eight years on the project. Lord Chesterfield refused to support Johnson while he was at work on his dictionary and later Johnson wrote: "This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but I find, he is only a wit among Lords." A patron was in his Dictionary "one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery." Johnson's longest poem, THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES, appeared in 1749. On that same year his tragedy IRENE was staged and appeared at Drury Lane. Between the years 1750 and 1752 he edited Cave's magazine The Rambler, writing nearly all of its numbers. When Cave died in 1754 Johnson wrote a life of the bookseller for The Gentleman's Magazine.

A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE was published finally in 1755, and the abridged edition in 1756. Johnson's financial situation was weak, although the work as a whole remained without rival until the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928), initially compiled by James Murray (1837-1915). Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40000 words, illustrating them with about 114000 quotations drawn from every field of learning. On the lines laid down by earlier French and Italian dictionaries, Johnson selected a 'golden age' from which he would work. For him this was the century that ran from the later sixteenth century until the English Restoration of 1660. It was not that Johnson did not understand that language changed, but that he regarded most of the changes as degenerate.

In addition to his Dictionary and the philosophical romance of THE PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA (1759, later known as RASSELAS), Johnson published essays in The Adventurer (1752-54) and The Idler (1758-60). He wrote a number of political articles, biographies of Sir Thomas Browne and Roger Ascham, and contributed to the Universal Chronicle.

The new monarch George III awarded Johnson in 1762 an annual pension, which improved his circumstances. He met, the next year, the young Scot James Boswell, who became later his biographer and with whom he formed one of the most famous friendships in literary history. With Boswell he travelled in 1773 in Scotland and published his observations in A JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND (1775). Of his many remarks about Scotsmen perhaps the most famous was his reply when Boswell told him, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it..." Johnson replied: "That, sir, I find, is what a very good many of your countrymen cannot help." He continued his travels and went to Wales with Hester Lynch Thrale, a wealthy brewer, and accompanied him to Paris in 1775, Johnson's only visit to the Continent. Johnson's biographical essays of English poets were published in 1781 as THE LIVES OF THE POETS.

Johnson spent the summer of 1784 visiting Lichfield, Birmingham, and Oxford and returned to London depressed. He died during the night of 13th December and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Although Johnson's celebrity at that time was phenomenal, views about him as a pedantic and pompous writer came to dominate the 19th century. Walter Raleigh's Six Essays on Johnson in 1910 and T.S. Eliot's essay Johnson as Critic and Poet (1944) were early efforts to take him seriously as a writer. In 1944 Joseph Wood Krutch produced the first modern biography of the rigorous and eloquent author.

Johnson was not afraid of vulgar expressions in his dictionary:

to fart. To break wind behind.As when we gun discharge, Although the bore be ne're so large, Before the flame from muzzle burst, Just at the breech it flashes first; So from my lord his passion broke, He farted first, and then he spoke - Swift

See also: Edward Gibbon was also a member of the circle that was formed around Samuel Johnson. In 1764 Johnson founded with the painter Joshua Reynolds 'the Club', an artistic group, whose meetings were held at the Turk's Head in Gerald Street. It was attended my Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrik, Boswell, and Charles James Fox - Place to visit in London: Dr. Johnson House, 17 Gough Square, where Johnson lived and wrote his Dictionary. Houses memorablia and manuscripts. - Also: Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, Breadmarket Street, in Staffordshire, where Johnson spent his fist 26 years - Note: The great American lexicographer and linguist Noah Webster claimed that Johnson's contribution to his subject had been equivalent to that of Newton to mathematics.

For further reading: Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson by Hester L. Piozzi (1786, reprinted in 1925, 1971,1975); Samuel Johnson by J. W. Krutch (1944); The achievement of Samuel Johnson by W.J. Bate (1955) Who is Who in Boswell? by J.L. Smith-Dampier (1970); Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography by James L. Clifford and Donald Greene (1970); Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate (1977); Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing by Paul Fussell (1971); The Unknown Johnson, ed. by J.J. Burke (1983); Samuel Johnson After Deconstruction by Steven Lynn (1992); The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. by Greg Clingham (1997); Samuel Johnson by Lawrence I. Lipking (1998); Bad Behavior by Martin Wechselblatt (1998)

LONDON, (1738)