Samuel Johnson is the towering figure of 18th Century English letters. His influence in his own time was so profound that the latter half of the century is often simply called the Age of Johnson. Although Johnson wrote a small number of outstanding poems, he is perhaps best remembered for his other literary achievements and as the subject of the first great English Biography: James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791).
Samuel Johnson was born the son of bookseller Michael Johnson near Birmingham, England in the town of Lichfield in 1709. He developed a tubercular condition from a wet nurse that left him severely disfigured, nearly blind, and deaf in the left ear. A later childhood infection of smallpox left his face more disfigured. Johnson was always fiercely independent, and even as a child worked to ensure that his appearance and medical problems did not make him the object of pity. He developed into a capable boxer, swimmer, and climber. Despite his life long connection to the city (indeed Johnson is often considered one of the great Urban Poets), and his enormous size he remained a capable sportsman throughout his life, even going on an intrepid journey with Boswell to the remote Hebrides in 1775 described in his 'Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland', 1775.
In 1728, Johnson went to Pembroke College, Oxford, but lack of money forced him to leave shortly after a year. While at Oxford, he read Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, With an Enquiry Into the Origin of Moral Virtue and William Law's book Serious Call To a Devout and Holy Life two books that were to have strong influence on his personal and literary philosophy. The influence of these books can be seen in his early poem 'The Young Author' and in his poetic masterpiece 'The Vanity of Human Wishes', both of which share the common theme of not being deceived by false hope.
He never returned to the University life that was so befitting a man of his talents, but was awarded an honorary degree from Dublin University in 1765 and another from Oxford in 1766. Johnson's early financial difficulty made him extremely sensitive to the suffering of the poor. Even later in life when he was well established Johnson remained something of a champion of the poor. In the review of a philosophical book that supported the view that the poor were somehow better off than the rich because they seemingly had less about which to be concerned, Johnson wrote:
The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions of the rich. They are not pained by incivility, nor mortified by the mutilation of a compliment, but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh.
For two years after leaving Oxford, Johnson was in a state of severe depression. He would wander around London in a haze and was often so disoriented that people who encountered him thought him to be an idiot. Johnson was given to extreme fits of melancholy. Though one often thinks of him today as the supreme figure of the rational age, he was, at times, a dark and brooding man. A private journal entry from September 18, 1768 reads: I have now begun the sixtieth year of my life. How the last year has past I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking.
Johnson was fortunate to encounter the Porter family during his deepest state of depression. Henry Porter was a merchant, and he and his wife Elizabeth were both enchanted by Johnson's brilliant mind and gift for conversation. Despite his shockingly unpleasant appearance, the Porters helped Johnson pull out of his depression. When Henry died, Johnson married Elizabeth Tetty despite her being 20 years his senior. Remarkable prayers from Johnson's diary after her death from a variety of illnesses exacerbated by alcohol and opium in 1752 only serve to reinforce that their relationship was both profoundly satisfying one of mutual love.
After the marriage, Johnson opened a private school. The school failed after only one year, but one of his students David Garrick remained a lifelong friend and went on to become the most accomplished stage actor of the era. At this time Johnson also found his first commercial and financial success through writing with the satirical poem London. Stints as a writer for magazines followed. Much of the writing was beneath a man of his talents, but afforded him some comforts as well as a rounded education in science, archaeology, and other subjects. He was still far from wealthy, and was known to wander the streets of London all night when he was unable to pay for a place to sleep.
In 1746 Johnson commenced work on the Dictionary. The task required six assistants and seven years to complete, though Johnson was quick to point out that the French dictionary was written by forty men over the span of fifty-five years. Although the dictionary is largely an anachronism today it formed the foundation for all ensuing English dictionaries, and also allowed Johnson?s wit to shine with some of the definitions. These were often cross-referenced from literary works by Dryden, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and others. An example: oats: "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
The accomplishment of the Dictionary is all the more remarkable when one considers that at the time Johnson was writing some of his most intense political essays as well as his poetic opus The Vanity of Human Wishes. As with his earlier poem London, The Vanity of Human Wishes is a direct indictment of a world which can only offer dissatisfaction and yet the folly of people to deceive themselves into believing that it could be otherwise. Johnson was also at this time engaged in the debate over slavery and was an outspoken critic of slavery in British Colonies as well as the practice of expropriating lands from native inhabitants. He once compared the British and the French to thieves fighting over a stolen booty when asked about their conflicts in the New World.
From 1750 to 1752 Johnson published essays in a periodical called the Rambler. The essays were concerned with matters of morality, but not from an explicitly Christian point of view. In 1756, he undertook the monumental task of compiling a new edition of Shakespeare?s plays. The book took him nine years to complete, and contains many unfortunate edits that have made Johnson to appear both a prude and, to many, a butcher of the original Shakespeare canon. Despite some of his liberties with the texts of the plays, the preface and notes remain valuable tools to students of Shakespeare and literature.
The edition of Shakespeare was followed by a short novel The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia in 1759. The book was in the same vein of other picaresque novels that were popular during the 18th Century. In 1762, more than 30 years after being forced to leave Oxford because of his lack of money, he was awarded a pension for life from the British government. The following year he met his biographer James Boswell who had come to London to meet his hero Johnson. Boswell wrote the biography ten years later, and it is still considered by many to be the greatest biography ever written.
Johnson's opinions on other authors and literature have at times been mocked, but his criticism has withstood the test of time. Johnson's critical influence has been too great and vast to explore in detail here. He made some errors in judgment: on Laurence Sterne's comic masterpiece Tristram Shandy Johnson said: Nothing odd will do long, Tristram Shandy did not last. However, he is also fearless in approaching seemingly sacred texts like Paradise Lost where he asserts that the poem lacks human interest despite its greatness and notes Shakespeare's lack of moral purpose. Whatever the relative merits of his opinions, Johnson's criticism has shaped literary opinions from the eighteenth century onward, and continues to do so today.
In June, 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, and in the following November was greatly swollen with the dropsy. During a journey to Derbyshire he felt a temporary relief; but in 1784 he suffered both from dropsy and from asthma. His diseases were evidently irremediable. On Monday, the 13th December, 1784, he expired in his house in Bolt Court; on the 20th of the month his remains, with due solemnity and a numerous attendance of his friends, were buried in Westminster Abbey, near the foot of Shakespear's monument.
With a rough exterior, overbearing manners, and many odd peculiarities and habits, Johnson possessed almost all the virtues which grace and dignify human nature. He was humane, charitable, affectionate, and generous; and ever his sallies of temper were the effect of a morbid irritability of system. Goldsmith used to say that 'he had nothing of the bear but in his skin.' To a strong and steady judgement he united a vigorous and excursive imagination, his apprehension was remarkably quick and acute, his memory extraordinarily tenacious.
Picture from:
The Dr. Johnson's House Trust.
www.drjh.dircon.co.uk/
