Samuel Johnson, the most distinguished man of letters in English history, was born three hundred years ago on September 18, 1709. Poet, biographer, lexicographer, essayist, editor, reviewer and brilliant conversationalist and epigrammatist, he created one of the most famous dictionaries in history, a dictionary pre-eminent in its field from its publication in 1755 until the arrival of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later. He was also the subject of the most famous biography in English literature, James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, published just seven years after Johnson’s death in 1784.
EARLY YEARS
Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709, the son of a bookseller. He almost died at birth and soon caught ‘scrofula’ from his wet nurse. Medical treatment left him with scars on his face and neck. He was also nearly blind in his left eye, partially deaf and suffered from tics and involuntary convulsions. Largely self-educated, he went to Oxford University at the age of 19, but poverty (his father was deeply in debt) forced him home after just 13 months.
In 1735, he married Elizabeth Porter, a rich widow 20 years older than him. Using her money, they established a school, which quickly failed. In 1737, a desperate, penniless Johnson left for London, hoping to make a living by writing. His wife soon followed him. For the next 25 years, his only income was his writing, which included articles for magazines, poetry, biographies and reports of Parliamentary debates. Although often deeply depressed by his poverty, alleviated by walking the streets all night long, he slowly built up an excellent reputation in the literary world. In 1746, Johnson was commissioned by a group of printers to produce a dictionary of the English language. There was a growing feeling that English spelling, grammar and even the meaning of words were in a chaotic state. Many experts wanted an au- thoritative, national dictionary to remedy this situation.
JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY
Johnson rented a house near Fleet Street and started work with the help of six assistants, who copied out the references that he had chosen from the hundreds of books that he consulted. Johnson’s wife, lonely and depressed at their lack of money, took to drink and opium, which finally killed her in March 1752.
Johnson would suffer from depres- sion and guilt for the rest of his life. In 1755, Johnson’s masterpiece, A Dictionary of the English Language, the dictionary that truly defined the English language for the first time, was finally published. A huge best- seller, it made Johnson famous. (see Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary)
FAMOUS BUT POOR
Johnson was now a celebrity, but he was still terribly poor. He was even arrested for debt twice in the three years after the dictionary’s publication, and friends had to lend him money. He was even forced to write a short story, Rasselas, to pay for his mother’s funeral in January 1759. Johnson finally found financial security in 1762 when the Government gave him an annual pen- sion of £300.
Just one year later, Johnson met the man who would make him famous forever. James Boswell was a young, drunken, dissolute Scottish lawyer, who would record Johnson’s brilliant conversation and activities for the next 21 years. Boswell was helped by Johnson’s decision in 1763 to form ‘The Club’, a tavern- based social group made up of friends such as the painter Joshua Reynolds, the statesman Edmund Burke, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edward Gibbon and the economist Adam Smith. In this group, however, there was only one leader – “In the boisterous world of Georgian London,” says The Daily Telegraph, “with its taverns, coffee houses and raucousprint culture, he had no equal.” (see Johnson According to Boswell)
Johnson continued to produce brilliant work. He published a revolutionary edition of Shakespeare’s works in 1765, The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, in which he explained the genius of the Elizabethan master to the general public for the first time ever. The work had taken him no less than nine years! In 1781, he published a huge six-volume work, Lives of the English Poets, a ground-breaking critical and biographical study of England’s greatest poets.
THE FINAL YEARS
Johnson spent most of his final years living with Henry and Hester Thrale, a generous, wealthy couple that he had met in 1765. Hester Thrale helped Johnson through his depressive, unstable periods. After she moved to Italy, however, Johnson’s health deteriorated and his last years were traumatic, filled with mental anguish and religious delusions. He died on December 13, 1784, and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey seven days later.
THE ‘AGE OF JOHNSON’
Samuel Johnson dominated his age, the ‘Age of Johnson’, as it is now known. He died the leading scholar and writer of his time, and was held in great affection by friends and public alike. Through his dictionary, his edition of Shakespeare’s works and his Lives of the Poets, he helped define what we now know as ‘English Literature’. Not bad for the half-blind, half-deaf son of a humble bookseller, who had suffered most of his life from poverty and severe depression.
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary
While experts in Italy and France took 30 and 55 years respectively to create their dictionaries, Samuel Johnson spent just nine years over his masterpiece, producing definitions while sitting at an old table in a rented house on a three-legged chair propped against the wall for balance.
The two-volume work had 42,773 entries on its 2,500 pages, which measured 46cm by 25cm. Johnson’s most important innovation was using literary quotations – 14,000 of them – to illustrate the meanings of words. Entries were incredibly complete: the word ‘take’, for example, had 134 definitions, explained in 8,000 words on five pages.
Johnson’s sense of humour, eccentric character and personal prejudices can be seen in many famous definitions: ‘Dull’ – ‘... to make dictionaries is dull work’; ‘Lexicographer’ – ‘... a harmlessdrudge’; ‘Oats’ – ‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’; ‘Stammel’ – ‘Of this word I know not the meaning’. Johnson’s monumental work encompassed the voice and history of a people, and would help to create their future too. His dictionary would be turned to in years to come by such literary giants as Dickens, Austen and Wilde.
