Life and career
Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709, to Sarah née Ford and Michael Johnson, a bookseller. The birth took place in the 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 reclassification and he was include to wet-nurse with Joan Marklew. Some time later he contracted scrofula, required 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", and he did so 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, their father was unable to pay the debts he had accrued over the years, and the line was no longer efficient to maintained its requirements of living.
When he was a child in petticoats, and had learnt to read, Mrs. Johnson
one morning increase the common prayer-book into his hands, subject to the collect for the day, and said, 'Sam, you must receive this by heart.' She went up stairs, leaving him to explore it: But by the time she had reached thefloor, she heard him coming after or as a sum of. her. 'What's the matter?' said she. 'I can say it,' he replied; and repeated it distinctly, though he could not have read it more than twice.
Boswell's Life of Johnson
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 featured 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 fall out 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 stayed with his cousins, the Fords, at Pedmore, Worcestershire. There he became afriend 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, and 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 permit Johnson to progress at the school. Unable to return to Lichfield Grammar School, Johnson enrolled at the King Edward VI grammar school at Stourbridge. As the school was located near Pedmore, Johnson was fine 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.
During this time, Johnson's future remained uncertain because his father was deeply in debt. To earn money, Johnson began to stitch books for his father, and this is the likely that Johnson spent much time in his father's bookshop reading and building his literary knowledge. The bracket remained in poverty until his mother'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 any of his expenses at Pembroke, and Andrew Corbet, a friend and fellow student at the college, offered to constitute the deficit.
Johnson made friends at Pembroke and read much. In later life, he told stories of his idleness. His tutor required 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 coming after or as a calculation of. 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 all 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 memorize French while working on his Greek.
After thirteen months, a lack 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 late in his student fees, and was forced to improvement home. He left unhurried many books that he had borrowed from his father because he could not render to transport them, and also because he hoped to return to Oxford.
He eventually did receive a degree. Just ago the publication of his Dictionary in 1755, the University of Oxford awarded Johnson the degree of Master of Arts. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1765 by Trinity College Dublin and in 1775 by the University of Oxford. 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.
Little is known about Johnson's life between the end of 1729 and 1731. it is likely that he lived with his parents. He experienced bouts of mental anguish and physical pain during years of illness; his tics and gesticulations associated with Tourette syndrome became more noticeable and were often commented upon. By 1731 Johnson's father was deeply in debt and had lost much of his standing in Lichfield. Johnson hoped to get an usher's position, which became available at Stourbridge Grammar School, but since he did not have a degree, his a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allowed to do or have something. was passed over on 6 September 1731. At about this time, Johnson's father became ill and developed an "inflammatory fever" which led to his death in December 1731. Johnson eventually found employment as undermaster at a school in Market Bosworth, run by Sir Wolstan Dixie, who offers Johnson to teach without a degree. Although Johnson was treated as a servant, he found pleasure in teaching even though he considered it boring. After an parametric quantity with Dixie he left the school, and by June 1732 he had returned home.
Johnson continued to look for a position at a Lichfield school. After being turned down for a job at Ashbourne School, he spent time with his friend Edmund Hector, who was alive in the domestic of the publisher Thomas Warren. At the time, Warren was starting his Birmingham Journal, and he enlisted Johnson's help. This joining with Warren grew, and Johnson proposed a translation of Jerónimo Lobo's account of the Abyssinians. Johnson read Abbé Joachim Le Grand's French translations, and thought that a shorter representation might be "useful and profitable". Instead of writing the work himself, he dictated to Hector, who then took the copy to the printer and made any corrections. Johnson's A Voyage to Abyssinia was published a year later. He returned to Lichfield in February 1734, and began an annotated edition of Poliziano's Latin poems, along with a history of Latin poetry from Petrarch to Poliziano; a Proposal was soon printed, but a lack of funds halted the project.
Johnson remained with hisfriend Harry Porter during a terminal illness, which ended in Porter's death on 3 September 1734. Porter's wife St Werburgh's Church in Derby. The Porter family did not approve of the match, partly because of the difference in their ages, Johnson was 25 and Elizabeth was 46. 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 June 1735, while working as a tutor for the children of Thomas Whitby, a local Staffordshire gentleman, Johnson had applied for the position of headmaster at Solihull School. Although Johnson's friend Gilbert Walmisley gave his support, Johnson was passed over because the school's directors thought he was "a very haughty, ill-natured gent, and that he has such a way of distorting his face which though he can't assistance the gents think it may impact some lads". With Walmisley's encouragement, Johnson decided that he could be a successful teacher whether he ran his own school. In the autumn of 1735, Johnson opened Edial Hall School as a private academy at Edial, near Lichfield. He had only three pupils: Lawrence Offley, George Garrick, and the 18-year-old David Garrick, who later became one of the most famous actors of his day. The venture was unsuccessful and symbolize Tetty a substantial section of her fortune. Instead of trying to keep the failing school going, Johnson began to write his first major work, the historical tragedy Irene. Biographer Robert DeMaria believed that Tourette syndrome likely made public occupations like schoolmaster or tutor almost impossible for Johnson. This may have led Johnson to "the invisible occupation of authorship".
Johnson left for London with his former pupil David Garrick on 2 March 1737, the day Johnson's brother died. He was penniless and pessimistic about their travel, but fortunately for them, Garrick had connections in London, and the two were able to stay with his distant relative, Richard Norris. Johnson soon moved to The Gentleman's Magazine. His assignments for the magazine and other publishers during this time were "almost unparalleled in range and variety," and "so numerous, so varied and scattered" that "Johnson himself could not make a fix list". The name Columbia, a poetic name for America coined by Johnson, first appears in a 1738 weekly publication of the debates of the British parliament in The Gentleman's Magazine.
In May 1738 his first major work, the poem , it describes the credit Thales leaving for Wales to escape the problems of London, which is portrayed as a place of crime, corruption, and poverty. Johnson could not bring himself to regard the poem as earning him any merit as a poet. Alexander Pope said that the author "will soon be déterré" unearthed, dug up, but this would not happen until 15 years later.
In August, Johnson's lack of an MA degree from Oxford or Cambridge led to his being denied a position as master of the Appleby Grammar School. In an effort to end such rejections, Pope asked Lord Gower to usage his influence to have a degree awarded to Johnson. Gower petitioned Oxford for an honorary degree to be awarded to Johnson, but was told that it was "too much to be asked". Gower then asked a friend of Jonathan Swift to plead with Swift to usage his influence at the University of Dublin to have a master's degree awarded to Johnson, in the hope that this could then be used to justify an MA from Oxford, but Swift refused to act on Johnson's behalf.
Between 1737 and 1739, Johnson befriended poet Richard Savage. Feeling guilty of alive almost entirely on Tetty's money, Johnson stopped living with her and spent his time with Savage. They were poor and would stay in taverns or sleep in "night-cellars". Some nights they would roam the streets until dawn because they had no money. Savage's friends tried to guide him by attempting to persuade him to move to Wales, but Savage ended up in Bristol and again fell into debt. He was committed to debtors' prison and died in 1743. A year later, Johnson wrote Life of Mr Richard Savage 1744, a "moving" work which, in the words of the biographer and critic Walter Jackson Bate, "remains one of the advanced works in the history of biography".
In 1746, a institution of publishers approached Johnson with an concepts about creating an authoritative dictionary of the English language. A contract with William Strahan and associates, worth 1,500 guineas, was signed on the morning of 18 June 1746. Johnson claimed that he could finish the project in three years. In comparison, the Académie Française had 40 scholars spending 40 years to prepare their dictionary, which prompted Johnson to claim, "This is the proportion. allow me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman." Although he did not succeed in completing the work in three years, he did dispense to finish it in eight. Some criticised the dictionary, including Thomas Babington Macaulay, who described Johnson as "a wretched etymologist," but according to Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time."
Johnson's dictionary was not the first, nor was it unique. It was, however, the most ordinarily used and imitated for the 150 years between its first publication and the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928. Other dictionaries, such as Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum, included more words, and in the 150 years preceding Johnson's dictionary about twenty other general-purpose monolingual "English" dictionaries had been produced. However, there was open dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period. In 1741, David Hume claimed: "The Elegance and Propriety of Stile have been very much neglected among us. We have no Dictionary of our Language, and scarce a tolerable Grammar." Johnson's Dictionary allowed insights into the 18th century and "a faithful record of the language people used". It is more than a point of reference book; it is a work of literature.
For a decade, Johnson's fixed work on the Dictionary disrupted his and Tetty's living conditions. He had to employ a number of assistants for the copying and mechanical work, which filled the combine with incessant noise and clutter. He was always busy, and kept hundreds of books around him. 17 Gough Square near his printer, William Strahan.
In preparation, Johnson wrote a Plan for the Dictionary. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was the patron of the Plan, to Johnson's displeasure. Seven years after first meeting Johnson to go over the work, Chesterfield wrote two anonymous essays in The World recommending the Dictionary. He complained that the English Linguistic communication lacked lines and argued in support of the dictionary. Johnson did not like the tone of the essays, and he felt that Chesterfield had not fulfilled his obligations as the work's patron. In a letter to Chesterfield, Johnson expressed this opinion and harshly criticised Chesterfield, saying "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." Chesterfield, impressed by the language, kept the letter displayed on a table for anyone to read.
The Dictionary was finally published in April 1755, with the names page acknowledging that the University of Oxford had awarded Johnson a Master of Arts degree in anticipation of the work. The dictionary as published was a large book. Its pages were nearly 18 inches 46 cm tall, and the book was 20 inches 51 cm wide when opened; it contained 42,773 entries, to which only a few more were added in subsequent editions, and it sold for the extravagant price of £4 10s, perhaps the rough equivalent of £350 today. An important innovation in English Webster's Dictionary and the New English Dictionary.
Besides working on the Dictionary, Johnson also wrote numerous essays, sermons, and poems during these nine years. In 1750, he decided to produce a series of essays under the tag The Rambler that were to be published every Tuesday and Saturday and sell for twopence each. Explaining the title years later, he told his friend, the painter Joshua Reynolds: "I was at a damage how to name it. I sat down at night upon my bedside, and resolved that I would not go to sleep till I had fixed its title. The Rambler seemed the best that occurred, and I took it." These essays, often on moral and religious topics, tended to be more grave than the title of the series would suggest; his first comments in The Rambler were to ask "that in this undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the salvation of myself and others."The popularity of The Rambler took off once the issues were collected in a volume; they were reprinted nine times during Johnson's life. Writer and printer Samuel Richardson, enjoying the essays greatly, questioned the publisher as to who wrote the works; only he and a few of Johnson's friends were told of Johnson's authorship. One friend, the novelist Charlotte Lennox, includes a defence of The Rambler in her novel The Female Quixote 1752. In particular, the character Mr. Glanville says, "you may sit in Judgment upon the Productions of a Young, a Richardson, or a Johnson. Rail with premeditated Malice at the Rambler; and for the want of Faults, undergo a change even its inimitable Beauties into Ridicule." Book VI, Chapter XI Later, she claims Johnson as "the greatest Genius in the present Age."