Johnson, Samuel

known as Dr. Johnson

born Sept. 18, 1709, Lichfield, Staffordshire, Eng.

died Dec. 13, 1784, London

British man of letters, one of the outstanding figures of 18th-century England.

The son of a poor bookseller, he briefly attended Oxford University. He moved to London after the failure of a school he and his wife had started. He wrote for periodicals and was hired to catalog the great library of the earl of Oxford. In 1755, after eight years of labour, he produced his monumental Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the first great English dictionary, which brought him fame. He continued to write for such periodicals as The Gentleman's Magazine and The Universal Chronicle, and he almost single-handedly wrote and edited the biweekly The Rambler (1750–52). He also wrote plays, none of which succeeded on the stage. In 1765 he produced a critical edition of William Shakespeare with a famous preface that did much to establish Shakespeare as the centre of the literary canon. His travel writings include A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). His Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 10 vol. (1779–81), was a significant critical work. A brilliant conversationalist, he helped found the Literary Club (с 1763), which became famous for its members of distinction, including David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joshua Reynolds. His aphorisms helped make him one of the most frequently quoted of English writers. The biography of Johnson written by his contemporary James Boswell is one of the most admired biographies of all time.

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▪ English author

Introduction

byname  Dr. Johnson 

born Sept. 18, 1709, Lichfield, Staffordshire, Eng.

died Dec. 13, 1784, London

 English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters.

      Johnson once characterized literary biographies as “mournful narratives,” and he believed that he lived “a life radically wretched.” Yet his career can be seen as a literary success story of the sickly boy from the Midlands who by talent, tenacity, and intelligence became the foremost literary figure and the most formidable conversationalist of his time. For future generations, Johnson was synonymous with the later 18th century in England. The disparity between his circumstances and achievement gives his life its especial interest.

Early life

      Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller, and his wife, Sarah. From childhood he suffered from a number of physical afflictions. By his own account, he was born “almost dead,” and he early contracted scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands). Because of a popular belief that the sovereign's touch was able to cure scrofula, he was taken to London at the age of 30 months and touched by the queen, whose gold “touch piece” he kept about him for the rest of his life. This was succeeded by various medical treatments that left him with disfiguring scars on his face and neck. He was nearly blind in his left eye and suffered from highly noticeable tics that may have been indications of Tourette syndrome. Until he began to speak, new acquaintances sometimes took him for an idiot, as did the artist William Hogarth, who came to admire him greatly. Despite his many physical afflictions, Johnson was strong, vigorous, and, after a fashion, athletic. He liked to ride, walk, and swim, even in later life. He was tall and became huge. A few accounts bear witness to his physical strength—as well as his character—such as his hurling an insolent theatregoer together with his seat from the stage into the pit or his holding off would-be robbers until the arrival of the watch.

      From his earliest years Johnson was recognized not only for his remarkable intelligence but also for his pride and indolence. In 1717 he entered grammar school in Lichfield. The master of the school, John Hunter, was a learned though brutal man who “never taught a boy in his life—he whipped and they learned.” This regime instilled such terror in the young boy that even years later the resemblance of the poet Anna Seward to her grandfather Hunter caused him to tremble. At school he made two lifelong friends: Edmund Hector, later a surgeon, and John Taylor, future prebendary of Westminster and justice of the peace for Ashbourne. In 1726 Johnson visited his cousin, the urbane Reverend Cornelius Ford in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, who may have provided a model for him, though it was Ford's conviviality and scholarship rather than his dissipation (he is thought to be one of those depicted carousing in Hogarth's A Midnight Modern Conversation [1733]) that attracted Johnson.

      In 1728 Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford. He stayed only 13 months, until December 1729, because he lacked the funds to continue. Yet it proved an important year. While an undergraduate, Johnson, who claimed to have been irreligious in adolescence, read a new book, William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which led him to make concern for his soul the polestar of his life. Despite the poverty and pride that caused him to leave, he retained great affection for Oxford. He would later say with reference to the poets of his college, “We were a nest of singing birds.” In 1731, the year of his father's death, his first publication, a translation of Pope (Pope, Alexander)'s "Messiah" into Latin, appeared in A Miscellany of Poems, along with the poetry of other Oxford students. Pope was the leading poet of the age, and throughout most of his lifetime Johnson would comment on Pope's achievement in various writings.

      In the following year Johnson became undermaster at Market Bosworth grammar school, a position made untenable by the overbearing and boorish Sir Wolstan Dixie, who controlled appointments. With only £20 inheritance from his father, Johnson left his position with the feeling that he was escaping prison. After failing in his quest for another teaching position, he joined his friend Hector in Birmingham. In 1732 or 1733 he published some essays in The Birmingham Journal, none of which have survived. Dictating to Hector, he translated into English Joachim Le Grand's translation of the Portuguese Jesuit Jerome Lobo's A Voyage to Abyssinia, an account of a Jesuit missionary expedition. Published in 1735, this work shows signs of the mature Johnson, such as his praise of Lobo, in the preface, for not attempting to present marvels: “He meets with no basilisks that destroy with their eyes, his crocodiles devour their prey without tears, and his cataracts fall from the rock without deafening the neighbouring inhabitants.”

      In 1735 Johnson married Elizabeth Porter, a widow 20 years his senior. Convinced that his parents' marital unhappiness was caused by his mother's want of learning, he would not follow their example, choosing instead a woman whom he found both attractive and intelligent. His wife's marriage settlement enabled him to open a school in Edial, near Lichfield, the following year. One of his students, David Garrick (Garrick, David), would become the greatest English actor of the age and a lifelong friend, though their friendship was not without its strains. It was with Garrick that some of the unflattering accounts of Johnson's wife originated, and his mimicry of the couple later became a favourite comic setpiece of his. While at Edial, Johnson began his historical tragedy Irene, which dramatizes the love of Sultan Mahomet (Mehmed II) for the lovely Irene, a Christian slave captured in Constantinople. The school soon proved a failure, and he and Garrick left for London in 1737.

The Gentleman's Magazine and early publications

      In 1738 Johnson began his long association with The Gentleman's Magazine (Gentleman's Magazine), often considered the first modern magazine. He soon contributed poetry and then prose, including panegyrics on Edward Cave, the magazine's proprietor, and another contributor, the learned Elizabeth Carter. Johnson intended to translate the Venetian Paolo Sarpi's The History of the Council of Trent but was forestalled by the coincidence of another Johnson at work on the same project. However, his biography of Sarpi, designed as a preface to that work, appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine, as did a number of his early biographies of European scholars, physicians, and British admirals.

      In 1738 and 1739 he published a series of satiric works that attacked the government of Sir Robert Walpole (Walpole, Robert, 1st earl of Orford) and even the Hanoverian monarchy: London (his first major poem), Marmor Norfolciense, and A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage. London is an “imitation” of the Roman satirist Juvenal's third satire. (A loose translation, an imitation applies the manner and topics of an earlier poet to contemporary conditions.) Thales, the poem's main speaker, bears some resemblance to the poet Richard Savage, of whom Johnson knew and with whom he may have become friendly at this time. Before he leaves the corrupt metropolis for Wales, Thales rails against the pervasive deterioration of London (and English) life, evident in such ills as masquerades, atheism, the excise tax, and the ability of foreign nations to offend against “English honour” with impunity. The most famous line in the poem (and the only one in capitals) is: “SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESSED,” which may be taken as Johnson's motto at this time. When the poem appeared anonymously in 1738, Pope was led to predict that its author would be “déterré” (unearthed). Pope undoubtedly approved of Johnson's politics along with admiring his poetry and tried unsuccessfully to arrange patronage for him. Marmor Norfolciense satirizes Walpole and the house of Hanover. A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage is an ironic defense of the government's Stage Licensing Act of 1737 requiring the lord chamberlain's approval of all new plays, which in 1739 led to the prohibition of Henry Brooke's play Gustavus Vasa attacking the English monarch and his prime minister by Swedish analogy. The latter two works show the literary influence of the Irish writer Jonathan Swift (Swift, Jonathan).

      Johnson at this time clearly supported the governmental opposition, which was composed of disaffected Whigs, Tories, Jacobites (those who continued their allegiance to the Stuart line of James II), and Nonjurors (those who refused to take either the oath of allegiance to the Hanover kings or the oath of abjuration of James II and the Stuarts). Despite claims to the contrary, Johnson was neither a Jacobite nor a Nonjuror. His Toryism, which he sometimes expressed for shock value, was based upon his conviction that the Tories could be counted upon to support the Church of England as a state institution. When Johnson attacked Whiggism or defended Toryism (an ideology for him more than a practical politics, especially since Tories remained a minority throughout most of his lifetime), he always took an outsider's position. Later in life he expressed a high regard for Walpole.

      In 1739 Johnson published a translation and annotation of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Pierre de Crousaz (Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de)'s Commentary on Pope's philosophical poem An Essay on Man. Although he was able to show that many of Crousaz's critical observations rested on a faulty French translation, Johnson often agreed with his judgment that some of Pope's philosophical and social ideas are marred by complacency. About this time Johnson tried again to obtain a position as a schoolteacher. His translations and magazine writings barely supported him; a letter to Cave is signed “impransus,” signifying that he had gone without dinner. Despite his claim that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” he never made a hard bargain with a bookseller and often received relatively little payment, even for large projects. He also contradicted his assertion frequently by contributing prefaces and dedications to the books of friends without payment.

      From 1741 to 1744 Johnson's most substantial contribution to The Gentleman's Magazine was a series of speeches purporting to represent the actual debates in the House of Commons. This undertaking was not without risk because reporting the proceedings of Parliament, which had long been prohibited, was actually punished since the spring of 1738. The series was dubbed Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia, and this Swiftian expedient gives the speeches satiric overtones. Their status was complicated by the fact that Johnson, who had visited the House of Commons only once, wrote the debates on the basis of scant information about the speakers' positions. Hence they were political fictions, though paradoxically they appeared to be fact masquerading as fiction. Johnson later had misgivings about his role in writing speeches that were taken as authentic and may have stopped writing them for this reason. While Johnson's claim that he “took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it” has become notorious, Johnson's Walpole defends himself skillfully, and many of the debates seem even-handed.

      In the early 1740s Johnson continued his strenuous work for The Gentleman's Magazine; collaborated with William Oldys, antiquary and editor, on a catalog of the great Harleian Library; helped Dr. Robert James, his Lichfield schoolfellow, with A Medicinal Dictionary; and issued proposals for an edition of Shakespeare. His Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth (1745), intended as a preliminary sample of his work, was his first significant Shakespeare criticism. In 1746 he wrote The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language and signed a contract for A Dictionary of the English Language. His major publication of this period was An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (1744). If, as Johnson claimed, the best biographies were written by those who had eaten and drunk and “lived in social intercourse” with their subjects, this was the most likely of his many biographies to succeed. The Life was widely admired by, among others, the painter Joshua Reynolds, and it was reviewed in translation by the French philosopher Denis Diderot. Although Johnson had few illusions about his self-publicizing friend's conduct and character, he nonetheless became his defender to a significant extent. Johnson's title supports Savage (Savage, Richard)'s claim to be the bastard son of a nobleman—a claim of which others have been highly skeptical—but his biography, in its mixture of pathos and satire, at once commemorates and criticizes Savage. Johnson thought that Savage's poverty cost society a great deal:

On a bulk, in a cellar, or in a glasshouse among thieves and beggars, was to be found the author of The Wanderer, …the man whose remarks on life might have assisted the statesman, whose ideas of virtue might have enlightened the moralist, whose eloquence might have influenced senates, and whose delicacy might have polished courts.

      Yet the conclusion leaves no doubt about Johnson's ultimate judgment: “negligence and irregularity, long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.” If Johnson served as defense attorney throughout much of the biography, no prosecutor could have summed up the case against Savage more devastatingly.

Maturity and recognition

The Vanity of Human Wishes

      In 1749 Johnson published The Vanity of Human Wishes, his most impressive poem as well as the first work published with his name. It is a panoramic survey of the futility of human pursuit of greatness and happiness. Like London, the poem is an imitation of one of Juvenal's satires, but it emphasizes the moral over the social and political themes of Juvenal. Some of the definitions Johnson later entered under “vanity” in his Dictionary suggest the range of meaning of his title, including “emptiness,” “uncertainty,” “fruitless desire, fruitless endeavour,” “empty pleasure; vain pursuit; idle show; unsubstantial enjoyment; petty object of pride,” and “arrogance.” He portrays historical figures, mainly from England and continental Europe (Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Charles XII of Sweden, the Persian king Xerxes I), alternating them with human types (the traveler, the rich man, the beauty, the scholar), often in juxtaposition with their opposites, to show that all are subject to the same disappointment of their desires. The Vanity of Human Wishes is imbued with the Old Testament message of Ecclesiastes that “all is vanity” and replaces Juvenal's Stoic virtues with the Christian virtue of “patience.” The poem surpasses any of Johnson's other poems in its richness of imagery and powerful conciseness.

The theatre

      Johnson's connections to the theatre in these years included writing several prologues, one for Garrick's farce Lethe in 1740 and one for the opening of the Drury Lane theatre. Garrick, now its manager, returned the favours. Early in 1749 Johnson's play Irene was at last performed. Thanks to Garrick's production, which included expensive costumes, an excellent cast (including Garrick himself), and highly popular afterpieces for the last three performances, the tragedy ran a respectable nine nights. The audience objected to seeing the apostate Greek Christian Irene strangled by Sultan Mahomet—an innovation of Garrick's—and the murder was performed offstage thereafter. Irene is Johnson's least appealing major work, and he is reported to have said when hearing someone read it aloud, “I thought it had been better.”

From The Rambler to The Adventurer

      With The Rambler (Rambler, The) (1750–52), a twice-weekly periodical, Johnson entered upon the most successful decade of his career. He wrote over 200 numbers, and stories abound of his finishing an essay while the printer's boy waited at the door; in his last essay he confessed to “the anxious employment of a periodical writer.” The essays cover a wide range of subjects. A large number of them appropriately stress daily realities; others are devoted to literature, including criticism and the theme of authorship (particularly the early ones, driven by the writer's consciousness of his own undertaking) and to literary forms, such as the novel and biography, that had not received much examination. Whatever their topic, Johnson intended his essays to “inculcate wisdom or piety” in conformity with Christianity. In tone these essays are far more serious than those of his most important predecessor, Joseph Addison, published in The Spectator (1711–12; 1714). Johnson himself ranked them highly among his achievements, commenting “My other works are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.” Although The Rambler may have sold only 500 copies an issue on its first appearance—in his last number he claimed he had “never been much a favourite of the public”—it was widely reprinted in provincial newspapers and sold well in later editions.

      Johnson's Rambler series also was admired by his wife Elizabeth, who praised its author by saying, “I thought very well of you before this; but I did not imagine you could have written any thing equal to this.” She died on March 17, 1752, just three days after the publication of its last number. In her later years “Tetty” frequently lived away from him in Hampstead. Signs of marital tensions may be glimpsed in surviving letters and in Johnson's prayers, which were published after his death. He wrote a sermon for her funeral that praises her submissive piety—her “exact and regular” devotions—as well as her charitable disposition.

      A diary entry suggests that a year after Elizabeth's death Johnson was seeking a new wife “without any derogation from dear Tetty's memory.” The one he most probably had in mind was the pious Hill Boothby, to whom he wrote with some frequency in the years immediately following this resolve. Three dozen of her letters to him, rarely quoted by biographers, are in print. The relationship, however, came to an end with her death in 1756.

      During the course of one year starting in March 1753, Johnson contributed 29 essays to his friend John Hawkesworth's periodical The Adventurer, written in imitation of The Rambler. Johnson purposely (and ineffectively) lightened his style in order to hide his authorship. He wanted his essays unrecognized, for he had given them to Dr. Richard Bathurst, the friend whom he said he loved more than any other, to sell as his own, but he confessed his part to the persistent Hill Boothby.

The dictionary

      A Dictionary of the English Language (Dictionary of the English Language, A) was published in two volumes in 1755, six years later than planned but remarkably quickly for so extensive an undertaking. The degree of Master of Arts, conferred on him by the University of Oxford for his Rambler essays and the Dictionary, was proudly noted on the title page. Johnson henceforth would be known in familiar 18th-century style as “Dictionary Johnson” or “The Rambler.” There had been earlier English dictionaries, but none on the scale of Johnson's. In addition to giving etymologies, not the strong point of Johnson and his contemporaries, and definitions, in which he excelled, Johnson illustrated usage with quotations drawn almost entirely from writing from the Elizabethan period to his own time, though few living authors were quoted (the novelists Samuel Richardson and Charlotte Lennox, Garrick, Reynolds, and Johnson himself among them). His preface boldly asserts that the “chief glory of every people arises from its authors,” and his book (the phrase he always used for it) was his own claim to be ranked among them. He was pleased that what took the French Academy 40 years to perform for their language was accomplished by one Englishman in 9 years. It may have been his desire to fix the language by his work, yet he realized that languages do not follow prescription but are continually changing. Johnson did not work systematically from a word list but marked up the books he read for copying. Thus it is no surprise that some earlier dictionaries contain more words and that Johnson's has striking omissions (“literary” for one). Yet his definitions were a great improvement over those of his predecessors, and his illustrations from writers since the Elizabethan Age form an anthology and established a canon. Because he insisted not only on correct usage but also on morality and piety, the illustrations of words often come from sermons and conduct books as well as from a range of literature. The skeptical philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the writer Bernard de Mandeville, who praised the public benefits of brothels, were excluded on moral grounds, and in the Plan for the Dictionary Johnson explains that the inclusion of a writer could be taken as an invitation to read his work.

      Johnson had been persuaded to address his Plan to the Earl of Chesterfield (Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of) as his patron, but his appeal had been met with years of neglect. Johnson's defensive pride was awakened when the nobleman, learning of the impending publication of the Dictionary, praised it in two essays in The World, a weekly paper of entertainment. His letter to Chesterfield is often taken as sounding “the death-knell of patronage,” which it did not. But it did assert the dignity of the author.

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. The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known, and do not want it.

      The Dictionary defines “patron” as “one who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.”

      In its choice of authors and of illustrative selections, the Dictionary is a personal work. These give the whole the aspect of both an encyclopaedia and a conduct book. Even though Johnson defined “lexicographer” as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge,” the drudgery of the Dictionary fell into the decade of Johnson's most important writing and must be seen in part as enabling it. The payment for the Dictionary amounted to relatively little after deductions were made for his six amanuenses and his own expenses. He left his house in Gough Square (now the most famous of Johnson museums) for smaller lodgings in 1759, ending the major decade of his literary activity famous and poor.

The Literary Magazine

      From 1756 onward Johnson wrote harsh criticism and satire of England's policy in the Seven Years' War (1756–63) fought against France (and others) in North America, Europe, and India. This work appeared initially in a new journal he was editing, The Literary Magazine, where he also published his biography of the Prussian king, Frederick II (the Great). He also contributed important book reviews when reviewing was still in its infancy. His bitingly sardonic dissection of a dilettantish and complacent study of the nature of evil and of human suffering, A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, by the theological writer Soame Jenyns, may well be the best review in English during the 18th century:

This author and Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be borne. The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyments of the rich. They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of a malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh.

The Idler

      Johnson's busiest decade was concluded with yet another series of essays, called The Idler. Lighter in tone and style than those of The Rambler, its 104 essays appeared from 1758 to 1760 in a weekly newspaper, The Universal Chronicle. While not admired as greatly as The Rambler, Johnson's last essay series contained many impressive numbers, such as No. 84, in which he praised autobiography over biography and drew his self-portrait as “Mr. Sober,” a consummate idler. The original No. 22, his account of an old vulture explaining to her offspring man's propensities as a killer and concluding that man more than any other animal is “a friend to vultures,” was considered too strong to be included in the collected editions.

Rasselas

      Johnson's essays included numerous short fictions, but his only long fiction is Rasselas (originally published as The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale), which he wrote in 1759, during the evenings of a single week, in order to be able to pay for the funeral of his mother. This “Oriental tale,” a popular form at the time, explores and exposes the futility of the pursuit of happiness, a theme that links it to The Vanity of Human Wishes. Prince Rasselas, weary of life in the Happy Valley, where ironically all are dissatisfied, escapes with his sister and the widely traveled poet Imlac to experience the world and make a thoughtful “choice of life.” Yet their journey is filled with disappointment and disillusionment. They examine the lives of men in a wide range of occupations and modes of life in both urban and rural settings—rulers and shepherds, philosophers, scholars, an astronomer, and a hermit. They discover that all occupations fail to bring satisfaction. Rulers are deposed. The shepherds exist in grubby ignorance, not pastoral ease. The Stoic's philosophy proves hollow when he experiences personal loss. The hermit, miserable in his solitude, leaves his cell for Cairo. In his “conclusion in which nothing is concluded,” Johnson satirizes the wish-fulfilling daydreams in which all indulge. His major characters resolve to substitute the “choice of eternity” for the “choice of life,” and to return to Abyssinia (but not the Happy Valley) on their circular journey.

      Johnson never again had to write in order to raise funds. In 1762 he was awarded a pension of £300 a year, “not,” as Lord Bute, the prime minister, told him, “given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done.” This in all likelihood meant not only his literary accomplishments but also his opposition to the Seven Years' War, which the new king, George III, and his prime minister had also opposed. Although in his Dictionary Johnson had added to his definition of “pension,” “In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country,” he believed that he could accept his with a clear conscience.

Friendships and household

      In 1763 Johnson met the 22-year-old James Boswell (Boswell, James), who would go on to make him the subject of the best-known and most highly regarded biography in English. The first meeting with this libertine son of a Scottish laird and judge was not auspicious, but Johnson quickly came to appreciate the ingratiating and impulsive young man. Boswell kept detailed journals, published only in the 20th century, which provided the basis for his biography of Johnson and also form his own autobiography.

      Johnson participated actively in clubs. In 1764 he and his close friend Sir Joshua Reynolds (Reynolds, Sir Joshua) founded The Club (later known as The Literary Club), which became famous for the distinction of its members. The original nine members included the politician Edmund Burke, the playwright Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir John Hawkins, the historian of music whom Johnson was to call “unclubable.” Boswell, whose 1768 account of the Corsican struggle against Genoese rule and its revolutionary leader, General Pasquale Paoli, earned him a reputation throughout Europe, was admitted in 1773. Other members elected later included Garrick, the historian Edward Gibbon, the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith, and the Orientalist Sir William Jones. In 1749 Johnson had been one of 10 members of the Ivy Lane Club, and the year before his death he founded The Essex Head Club. These clubs, at which he often “talked for victory,” provided the conversation and society he desired and kept him from the loneliness and insomnia that he faced at home.

      This is not to say that his house was empty after the death of his wife. He had living with him at various times Anna Williams, a blind poet; Elizabeth Desmoulins, the daughter of his godfather Dr. Samuel Swynfen, and her daughter; Poll Carmichael, probably a former prostitute; “Dr.” Robert Levett, a medical practitioner among the poor; Francis Barber, Johnson's black servant, whom he treated in many ways like a son and made his heir; and Barber's wife Betsy. They were at once recipients of Johnson's charity and providers of company, but the relationship among them was not always amicable. In a letter of 1778 Johnson says, “We have tolerable concord at home, but no love. Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll loves none of them.”

      In 1765 Johnson established a friendship that soon enabled him to call another place “home.” Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and member of Parliament for Southwark, and his lively and intelligent wife, Hester (Piozzi, Hester Lynch), opened their country house at Streatham to him and invited him on trips to Wales and, in 1775, to France, his only tour outside Great Britain. Their friendship and hospitality gave the 56-year-old Johnson a new interest in life. Following her husband's death in 1781 and her marriage to her children's music master, Gabriel Piozzi, Hester Thrale's and Johnson's close friendship came to an end. His letters to Mrs. Thrale, remarkable for their range and intimacy, helped make him one of the great English letter writers.

The edition of Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William)

      The pension Johnson had received in 1762 had freed him from the necessity of writing for a living, but it had not released him from his obligation to complete the Shakespeare edition, for which he had taken money from subscribers. His long delay in bringing that project to fruition provoked some satiric notice from the poet Charles Churchill (Churchill, Charles):

He for subscribers baits his hook,

And takes their cash—but where's the book?

      The edition finally appeared in eight volumes in 1765. Johnson edited and annotated the text and wrote a preface, which is his greatest work of literary criticism. As editor and annotator he sought to establish the text, freed from later corruptions, and to explain diction that by then had become obsolete and obscure. Johnson's approach was to immerse himself in the books Shakespeare had read—his extensive reading for his Dictionary eased this task—and to examine the early editions as well as those of his 18th-century predecessors. His annotations are often shrewd, though his admiration reveals at times different concerns from those of some of his contemporaries and of later scholars.

      In his "Preface" Johnson addressed several critical issues. For one, he vigorously defends Shakespeare against charges of failing to adhere to the Neoclassical doctrine of the dramatic unities of time, place, and action. Johnson alertly observes that time and place are subservient to the mind: since the audience does not confound stage action with reality, it has no trouble with a shift in scene from Rome to Alexandria. Some critics had made similar points before, but Johnson's defense was decisive. He also questions the need for purity of dramatic genre. In defending Shakespearian tragicomedy against detractors, he asserts that “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.” Echoing Hamlet, Johnson claims that Shakespeare merits praise, above all, as “the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” He goes on to say that “in the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual: in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species” and that “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men.” These comments inveigh against the rigid notions of decorum upheld by critics, such as Voltaire, who would not allow kings to be drunkards or senators to be buffoons. Johnson's concern for “general nature” means that he is not much interested in accidental traits of a character, such as the “Romanness” of Julius Caesar or Brutus, but in traits that are common to all humanity.

Dr. Johnson

      In 1765 Johnson received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and 10 years later he was awarded the Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of Oxford. He never referred to himself as Dr. Johnson, though a number of his contemporaries did, and Boswell's consistent use of the title in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. made it popular. The completion of the Shakespeare edition left Johnson free to write by choice, and one such choice was his secret collaboration with Robert Chambers, professor of English law at the University of Oxford from 1766 to 1773. While it is difficult to determine just how much of Chambers' lectures Johnson may have written, his help was clearly substantial, and the skilled editor was valued by the dilatory professor.

Political pamphlets

      In the early 1770s Johnson wrote a series of political pamphlets supporting positions favourable to the government but in keeping with his own views. These have often appeared reactionary to posterity but are worth considering on their own terms. The False Alarm (1770) supported the resolution of the House of Commons not to readmit one of its members, the scandalous John Wilkes, who had been found guilty of libel. The pamphlet ridiculed those who thought the case precipitated a constitutional crisis. Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands (1771) argued against a war with Spain over who should become “the undisputed lords of tempest-beaten barrenness.” This pamphlet, his most admired and least attacked, disputes the “feudal gabble” of the Earl of Chatham and the complaints of the pseudonymous political controversialist who wrote the "Junius" letters. The Patriot (1774) was designed to influence an upcoming election. Johnson had become disillusioned in the 1740s with those members of the political opposition who attacked the government on “patriotic” grounds only to behave similarly once in power. This essay examines expressions of false patriotism and includes in that category justifications of “the ridiculous claims of American usurpation,” the subject of his longest tract, Taxation No Tyranny (1775). The title summarizes his position opposing the American Continental Congress, which in 1774 had passed resolutions against taxation by England, perceived as oppression, especially since the colonies (colonialism, Western) had no representation in parliament. Johnson argues that the colonists had not been denied representation but rather had willingly left the country where they had votes, that England had expended vast sums on the colonies, and that they were rightly required to support the home country. The tract became notorious in the colonies, contributing considerably to the caricature of Johnson the arch-Tory. Yet this view is too simplistic. His rhetorical question to the colonists, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” can be traced in large part to a principled and consistent stance against colonial oppression.

Journey to the Hebrides

      In 1773 Johnson set forth on a journey to the Hebrides. Given his age, ailments, and purported opinion of the Scots, Johnson may have seemed a highly unlikely traveler to this distant region, but in the opening pages of his A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) he confessed to a longstanding desire to make the trip and the inducement of having Boswell as his companion. He was propelled by a curiosity to see strange places and study modes of life unfamiliar to him. His book, a superb contribution to 18th-century travel literature, combines historical information with what would now be considered sociological and anthropological observations about the lives of common people. (Boswell's complementary narrative of their journey, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with its rich store of Johnson's conversation, was published only in 1785, the year after Johnson's death.)

The Lives of the Poets

      Johnson's last great work, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (conventionally known as The Lives of the Poets), was conceived modestly as short prefatory notices to an edition of English poetry. When Johnson was approached by some London booksellers in 1777 to write what he thought of as “little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets,” he readily agreed. He loved anecdote and “the biographical part” of literature best of all. The project, however, expanded in scope; Johnson's prefaces alone filled the first 10 volumes (1779–81), and the poetry grew to 56 volumes. Johnson was angered by the appearance of his name on the spines because he had neither “recommended” nor “revised” these poets, except for adding Isaac Watts, Sir Richard Blackmore, John Pomfret, Thomas Yalden, and James Thomson to the list.

      The lives are ordered chronologically by date of death, not birth, and range in length from a few pages to an entire volume. Among the major lives are those of Abraham Cowley, John Milton, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope; some of the minor ones, such as those of William Collins (Collins, William) and William Shenstone, are striking. Johnson's personal dislike of some of the poets whose lives he wrote, such as John Milton and Thomas Gray, has been used as a basis for arguing that he was prejudiced against their poetry, but too much has been made of this. His opinions of a poet and his work diverge at times as, for example, in the case of Collins. Johnson liked the man but disapproved of his poetic manner: “he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry.” He was justly proud of The Life of Cowley, especially of its lengthy discussion of the 17th-century Metaphysical poets, of whom Cowley may be considered the last representative. The Life of Pope is at once the longest and best. Pope's life and career were fresh enough and public enough to provide ample biographical material. Johnson found Pope's poetry highly congenial. His moving, unsentimental account of Pope's life is sensitive to his physical sufferings and yet unwilling to accept them as an excuse. His riposte to Pope's detractors, such as the poet Joseph Warton, is vigorous and memorable: “It is surely superfluous to answer the question that has once been asked, whether Pope was a poet? otherwise than by asking, in return, if Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?” Yet in his masterly comparison of Pope and Dryden he acknowledges Dryden as the greater poet.

      Johnson divided his biographies (biography) into three distinct parts: a narrative of the poet's life, a presentation of his character (summarized traits), and a critical assessment of his main poems. He adopted this method not because he failed to perceive relationships between a poet's life and his works but because he did not think that a good poet was necessarily a good man. His method allowed him to make use of his recognition that “a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings” can exist and to assign different purposes to his analysis of his subjects' lives and their poetry. Johnson expressed a hope that the biographical parts of his lives were composed “in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion of Piety,” and his moral intent is borne out in his readiness to chastise failings and to commend virtue. Johnson responded most favourably to the works of poets from Dryden to Pope and was skeptical of those produced in his own generation, including the poetry of Gray, Collins, and Shenstone, though he admired Gray's An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard.

Last years

      Throughout much of his adult life Johnson suffered from physical ailments as well as depression (“melancholy”). After the loss of two friends, Henry Thrale in 1781 and Robert Levett in 1782, and the conclusion of The Lives of the Poets, his health deteriorated. Above all, his chronic bronchitis and “dropsy” (edema), a swelling of his legs and feet, caused great discomfort. In 1783 he suffered a stroke. His last year was made still bleaker by his break with Mrs. Thrale over her remarriage. He compared himself at one point to those from whom confessions were extorted by the placement of heavy stones upon their chests. Yet he insisted on fighting: “I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.” A profoundly devout Anglican, Johnson was in dread at the prospect of death and judgment, for he feared damnation. Yet in the winter of 1784, following a day of prayer after which his edema spontaneously disappeared, he entered into a previously unknown state of serenity. He accepted this release from illness as a sign that he might be saved after all and referred to it as a “late conversion.” He died on December 13 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Achievement and reputation

      Johnson is well remembered for his aphorisms, which contributed to his becoming, after Shakespeare, the most frequently quoted of English writers. Many of these are recorded in Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., including his famous assertion: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” and his admonition: “Clear your mind of cant.” Others appear in his own writings, including: “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.” He possessed the gift of contracting “the great rules of life into short sentences.”

      Johnson's criticism (literary criticism) is, perhaps, the most significant part of his writings. His assessment of Dryden's critical works holds good for his own: “the criticism of Dryden is the criticism of a poet; not a dull collection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which perhaps the censorer was not able to have committed; but a gay and vigorous dissertation, where delight is mingled with instruction, and where the author proves his right of judgment by his power of performance.” Although some have spoken of Johnson as a “literary dictator,” he rejected the role for himself and in general spoke against the notion of enforcing precepts. As a critic and editor, through his Dictionary, his edition of Shakespeare, and his Lives of the Poets in particular, he helped invent what we now call “English Literature.”

      Religion was central to Johnson's understanding of literature and of the moral life generally. His personal uneasiness about religion seems traceable to an orthodox fear that he might be among the damned. He saw himself as someone who did not practice what he preached and lived in dread that he would be, in the words of St. Paul, a castaway. His watch bore in Greek the biblical text, “The night cometh,” a reminder of death and work left undone.

      Johnson is more complex than he is often taken to be. His wide range of interests included science and manufacturing processes, and his knowledge seemed encyclopaedic. Although his late political tracts in defense of the government are antidemocratic, Johnson combined a high regard for monarchy with a low opinion of most kings. He frequently expressed minority or unpopular views, such as his principled stands against slavery, colonialism, and mistreatment of indigenous peoples. He also urged better treatment of prisoners of war, prostitutes, and the poor generally, and he once tried to save a convicted forger from the gallows.

      If, as has often been claimed—largely because of Boswell's biography—we know Johnson as we know few other people in history (or few other characters in literature), we know him primarily as a man who overcame a host of difficulties to become the leading scholar and writer of his age. His imposing scope made him what might now be called a public intellectual. In the 19th century the interest in Johnson centred on his personality, the subject of Boswell's biography. In the 20th century his writings regained their rightful prominence.

Robert Folkenflik

Additional Reading

The standard bibliography is William P. Courtney and David Nichol Smith, A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson (1915, reprinted 1984); it is supplemented by R.W. Chapman and Allen T. Hazen, “Johnsonian Bibliography: A Supplement to Courtney,” in Oxford Bibliographical Society, Proceedings and Papers, vol. 5, pt. 3, p. 117–166 (1938, reprinted 1984). James L. Clifford and Donald J. Greene, Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (1970), contains around 4,000 items; it is supplemented by Donald Greene and John A. Vance, A Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, 1970–1985 (1987). Recent work can be found in The Age of Johnson (annual); and Johnsonian News Letter (quarterly). Other bibliographic aids include J.D. Fleeman, A Preliminary Handlist of Documents and Manuscripts of Samuel Johnson (1967); Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson's Library: An Annotated Guide (1975); and Helen Louise McGuffie, Samuel Johnson in the British Press, 1749–1784: A Chronological Checklist (1976).The number of biographical and critical studies of Johnson is enormous and rapidly growing. Among contemporary accounts are James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), available in many later editions, and The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), also available in numerous editions—the best one is ed. by George Birkbeck Hill, rev. and enlarged by L.F. Powell, 6 vol. (1934–50, reissued 1979); The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, ed. by Frederick A. Pottle, 15 vol. (1950–81), particularly vol. 2, The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, ed. by Marshall Waingrow (1968); James Boswell, James Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. by Marshall Waingrow (1994– ), an edition of the original manuscript; John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787, reprinted 1974); Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. by Arthur Sherbo (1974); Arthur Murphy, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1792, reprinted 1970); and George Birkbeck Hill (ed.), Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vol. (1897, reprinted 1966), with many anecdotes as well as selections from the early biographies. O M Brack, Jr., and Robert E. Kelley (eds.), The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (1974), reprints fourteen lives. Also of interest are Robert E. Kelley and O M Brack, Jr., Samuel Johnson's Early Biographers (1971); and Mary Hyde, The Impossible Friendship: Boswell and Mrs. Thrale (1972). Two famous essays by Thomas Babington Macaulay, one a review of J.W. Croker's edition of Boswell's Life, “Samuel Johnson,” The Edinburgh Review (September 1831), also available in his Critical and Historical Essays, Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, vol. 1 (1843), pp. 353–407, and the other, “Johnson, Samuel,” in The Encyclopædia Britannica, 8th ed., vol. 12 (1856), pp. 793–803, set the tone for 19th-century denigration of Johnson's work. Johnson's genealogy and other finely sifted information has been assembled by Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, 11 vol. (1909–52, reprinted 11 vol. in 10, 1968). Early critical reception is collected in James T. Boulton (ed.), Samuel Johnson: The Critical Heritage (1971).Twentieth-century biographies and biographical studies include James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (1955, reissued 1981), and Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson's Middle Years (1979). Also authoritative are W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (1977); Thomas Kaminski, The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (1987); and Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson (1993). Johnson's involvement with Richard Savage is explored in Richard Holmes, Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (1993).Among general studies are Bertrand H. Bronson, Johnson Agonistes, and Other Essays (1946, reissued 1965); W. Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (1955, reissued 1978); Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson, updated ed. (1989); Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (1971, reissued 1986); J.P. Hardy, Samuel Johnson: A Critical Study (1979); Isobel Grundy, Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (1986); and Pat Rogers, Johnson (1993), a brief work.Special studies include Maurice J. Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion (1964); Chester F. Chapin, The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson (1968); James Gray, Johnson's Sermons: A Study (1972); Charles E. Pierce, Jr., The Religious Life of Samuel Johnson (1983); Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (1988); Paul K. Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (1967); John Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World (1991); Gloria Sybil Gross, This Invisible Riot of the Mind: Samuel Johnson's Psychological Theory (1992); Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the New Science (1971), and Daily Life in Johnson's London (1983); Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed. (1990); John Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (1994); Robert Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson, Biographer (1978); David Wheeler (ed.), Domestick Privacies: Samuel Johnson and the Art of Biography (1987); John A. Vance, Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History (1984); Carey McIntosh, The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction (1973); Edward Alan Bloom, Samuel Johnson in Grub Street (1957); Benjamin B. Hoover, Samuel Johnson's Parliamentary Reporting (1953); W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (1941, reissued 1972); William Edinger, Samuel Johnson and Poetic Style (1977); Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel (1976); Robert DeMaria, Jr., Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986); Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson's Dictionary, 1746–1773 (1990); and Daisuke Nagashima, Johnson the Philologist (1988).A helpful introduction to the varieties of Johnson's writing is Greg Clingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (1997). Books on Johnson's criticism include Jean H. Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism (1952, reissued 1967); Leopold Damrosch, Jr., The Uses of Johnson's Criticism (1976); Charles Hinnant, “Steel for the Mind”: Samuel Johnson and Critical Discourse (1994); Arthur Sherbo, Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare (1956, reprinted 1978); R.D. Stock, Samuel Johnson and Neoclassical Dramatic Theory: The Intellectual Context of the Preface to Shakespeare (1973); G.F. Parker, Johnson's Shakespeare (1989); and Edward Tomarken, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: The Discipline of Criticism (1991). Johnson's significant contribution to the law lectures of Robert Chambers is assessed in Robert Chambers and Samuel Johnson, A Course of Lectures on the English Law, ed. by Thomas M. Curley, 2 vol. (1986). Johnson's relation to the visual arts is considered in Paul Alkon and Robert Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson: Pictures and Words (1984); Morris R. Brownell, Samuel Johnson's Attitude to the Arts (1989); and Herman W. Liebert, “Portraits of the Author: Lifetime Likenesses of Samuel Johnson,” in J. Douglas Stewart and Herman W. Liebert, English Portraits of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1974), pp. 47–88. The fullest exhibition catalogue is Kai Kin Yung et al., Samuel Johnson (1984).Robert Folkenflik

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