Everything about Dr Johnson totally explained
Samuel Johnson (–
13 December 1784), who is regularly referred to simply as
Dr Johnson, is among
England's best known literary figures. Dr Johnson was an
essayist,
poet,
biographer,
lexicographer and a
critic of
English Literature. Also considered to be a great wit and prose stylist, he was well known for his
aphorisms. The single most quoted English writer after
Shakespeare, Dr Johnson has been described as being among the most outstanding figures of 18th-century England.
Biography
Early life and education
Lichfield,
Staffordshire. He attended
Lichfield Grammar School.
On
31 October 1728, a few weeks after he turned nineteen, he entered
Pembroke College, Oxford, as a
fellow-commoner. After thirteen months, however, poverty forced him to leave Oxford without taking a degree and he returned to Lichfield.
Just before the publication of his Dictionary in 1755,
Oxford University awarded Johnson the degree of Master of Arts. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1765 by
Trinity College Dublin and in 1775 by
Oxford University.
He attempted to work as a
teacher and schoolmaster, initially being turned down by the headmaster of
Adams' Grammar School,
Rev Samuel Lea, but then finding work at a school in
Stourbridge. Aged twenty-five, he married
Elizabeth "Tetty" Porter, a widow twenty-one years his elder. His first work published in 1735 was a translation from the French of
Lobo's
A Voyage to Abyssinia.
In 1736, Johnson established a
private academy at
Edial, near Lichfield. He had only three pupils, but one of them was
David Garrick, who remained his friend, while becoming the most famous actor of his day. He began the writing of his first major work there, the historical tragedy
Irene, which was later produced by Garrick in 1749.
Early career
In 1737, penniless Johnson left for
London with his former pupil David Garrick. There he found employment with
Edward Cave, writing for
The Gentleman's Magazine. For the next three decades, Johnson wrote biographies, poetry, essays, pamphlets and parliamentary reports. These were presented as if they'd been recorded verbatim, but were actually second-hand reports based on interviews with witnesses. He also prepared a catalogue for the sale of the
Harleian Library. He continued to live in poverty for much of this time. The poem
London (1738) and the
Life of Savage (1745; a biography of Johnson's friend and fellow writer
Richard Savage, who had shared in Johnson's poverty and died in 1744) are important works from this period.
The Dictionary
Between 1745 and 1755, Johnson wrote perhaps his best-known work,
A Dictionary of the English Language. During King Henry VIII's rule, England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant emphasis on
sola scriptura led William Tyndale to translate the Bible into English, and many people began to study scripture for themselves. This contributed to a significant rise in literacy rates, requiring a compilation of standard grammatical and spelling formats.
Furthermore, England felt a need to keep up with France. By 1635, France had already appointed a group of scholars to compile a dictionary. It can be noted that, aside from various assistances, Johnson wrote the dictionary entirely himself.
It was on the morning of
June 18,
1746 that Johnson, over breakfast at the Golden Anchor tavern in London, signed a contract with the booksellers/publishers William Strahan and associates to produce an authoritative dictionary of the English language. The contract stated that Johnson was to be paid 1500
Guineas (£1,575) in instalments based on delivery of manuscript pages; all expenses relating to the project,
ie ink, paper, assistants,
etc to be at Johnson's cost and responsibility. It was assumed by Johnson himself that the project would take approximately three years. It would take, in fact, nearly ten years.
During the decade he worked on "the Dictionary", Johnson, needing to augment his precarious income, also wrote a series of semi-weekly essays under the title
The Rambler. These essays, often on moral and religious topics, tended to be more grave than the title of the series would suggest. They ran until 1752. Initially they were not popular, but once collected as a volume they found a large audience. Johnson's wife died shortly after the final issue appeared.
During his work on the dictionary, Johnson made many appeals for financial help in the form of subscriptions: patrons would get a copy of the first edition as soon as it was printed in compensation for their support during its compilation.
Despite common assumptions, Johnson's wasn't the first dictionary of the English language. In the preceding 150 years there had been about twenty "English" dictionaries. The first, published in 1538, was a small Latin-English dictionary by
Sir Thomas Elyot.
Robert Cawdrey's
"Table Alphabeticall", published in 1604, was the first monolingual English dictionary.
Status achieved
In July 1762 the twenty-four year old King
George III granted Johnson an annual pension of £300.. While not making Johnson rich, it allowed him a modest yet comfortable independence for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. The award came largely through the efforts of
Thomas Sheridan and the
Earl of Bute.
A few months later, Johnson met
James Boswell, later to become his biographer, for the first time.
Around the same time, Johnson formed "
The Club", a social group that included his friends
Joshua Reynolds,
Edmund Burke,
David Garrick and
Oliver Goldsmith.
By now, Johnson was a celebrated figure. He received an
honorary doctorate from
Trinity College, Dublin in 1765, followed by one from Oxford ten years later.
Image:JoshuaReynoldsParty.jpg|A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds - 1781. The painting shows the friends of Reynolds - many of whom were members of "The Club" - use cursor to identify. |180px|thumb
poly 133 343 124 287 159 224 189 228 195 291 222 311 209 343 209 354 243 362 292 466 250 463 Dr Johnson - Dictionary writer
poly 76 224 84 255 43 302 62 400 123 423 121 361 137 344 122 290 111 234 96 225 Boswell - Biographer
poly 190 276 208 240 229 228 247 238 250 258 286 319 282 323 223 323 220 301 200 295 Sir Joshua Reynolds - Host
poly 308 317 311 270 328 261 316 246 320 228 343 227 357 240 377 274 366 284 352 311 319 324 David Garrick - actor
poly 252 406 313 343 341 343 366 280 383 273 372 251 378 222 409 228 414 280 420 292 390 300 374 360 359 437 306 418 313 391 272 415 Edmund Burke - statesman
rect 418 220 452 287 Pasqual Paoli - Corsican independent
poly 455 238 484 253 505 303 495 363 501 377 491 443 429 439 423 375 466 352 Charles Burney - music historian
poly 501 279 546 237 567 239 572 308 560 326 537 316 530 300 502 289 Thomas Warton - poet laureate
poly 572 453 591 446 572 373 603 351 562 325 592 288 573 260 573 248 591 243 615 254 637 280 655 334 705 396 656 419 625 382 609 391 613 453 Oliver Goldsmith - writer
rect 450 86 584 188 prob.The Infant Academy 1782
rect 286 87 376 191 unknown painting
circle 100 141 20 An unknown portrait
poly 503 192 511 176 532 176 534 200 553 219 554 234 541 236 525 261 506 261 511 220 515 215 servant - poss. Dr Johnson's hier
rect 12 10 702 500 Use button to enlarge or use hyperlinks
desc bottom-left
In 1765, Johnson met
Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and
Member of Parliament, and Thrale's wife,
Hester. They quickly became friends and soon Johnson became a member of the family. He stayed with the Thrales for fifteen years until Henry's death in 1781, sometimes staying in rooms at Thrale's
Anchor Brewery in
Southwark. Hester Thrale's reminiscences of Johnson, together with her diaries and correspondence, are second only to Boswell as a source of biographical information on Johnson.
Boswell, Johnson and the "Journey"
In 1773, eleven years after Johnson had met
Boswell, the two of them set out on
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, the title Johnson used for his account of their travels published in 1775. (Boswell's account,
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, was published in 1786, as a preliminary to his
Life of Johnson.) Their visit to the
Scottish Highlands and the
Hebrides took place while the post-
Jacobite pacification was crushing the
Scottish clan system, at a moment when the
romanticisation of
Gaelic culture was accelerating. Johnson proceeded to attack the claims that
James Macpherson's
Ossian poems were translations of ancient Scottish literature, on the grounds that "in those times nothing had been written in the
Earse language." However, Johnson also aided Scottish Gaelic culture by calling for a
Bible translation, which was produced soon afterward. Until then, Scottish Gaels had only Bedell's
Irish translation.
Final works
In the 1770s, Johnson, who had tended to be an opponent of the government early in life, published a series of pamphlets in favour of various government policies. In 1770 he produced
The False Alarm, a political pamphlet attacking
John Wilkes. In 1771, his
Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands appeared, cautioning against war with
Spain. In 1774 he printed
The Patriot, a critique of what he viewed as false patriotism. The last of these pamphlets,
Taxation No Tyranny, 1775, made the case against American colonists, then clamouring loudly for independence. On the evening of
April 7,
1775, he's believed to have made the famous statement, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
Johnson's final major work was the
Lives of the English Poets, a project commissioned by a consortium of London booksellers. The
Lives, which were critical as well as biographical studies, appeared as prefaces to selections of each poet's work. Johnson died in 1784 and was buried at
Westminster Abbey.
Character sketch
Large and powerfully built, Johnson had poor eyesight, was hard of hearing and had a scarred face as a result of childhood
scrofula. At the age of two, he was brought to "royal touch" ceremony with
Queen Anne, although this practice was fading into obsolescence. He also had a number of
tics and other involuntary movements; the symptoms described by Boswell suggest that Johnson had
Tourette syndrome and
obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Johnson was a devout, conservative
Anglican, a staunch
Tory and a compassionate man, supporting a number of poor friends under his own roof. He was an opponent of slavery and once proposed a toast to the "next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies". He had a black manservant,
Francis Barber (Frank), whom Johnson made his heir. He admitted to sympathies for the
Jacobite cause but by the reign of
George III he'd come to accept the
Hanoverian Succession. He remained a fiercely independent and original thinker, which may explain his deep affinity for
John Milton's work despite Milton's intensely radical — and, for Johnson, intolerable — political and religious outlook.
It is widely believed, through many out-of-context humorous quotations and asides, that Johnson despised the Scots. However, careful reading of Boswell and of Johnson shows that, while Johnson cited ignorance and laziness as a primary cause for the degraded conditions under which most Scots lived, he frequently tempered his censure with a measure of empathy. He undertook a lengthy tour of Scotland with his great friend, himself a
Lowland Scot,
James Boswell. While Johnson's record of these travels tended toward social commentary and amateur ethnography, Boswell's account is primarily a study of Johnson, whom he'd more thoroughly cover after the latter's death. The first conversation between Johnson and Boswell is frequently quoted:
» Boswell: Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I can't help it.
Johnson: That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen can't help.
Among students of
philosophy, Dr Johnson is perhaps best known for his "refutation" of
Bishop Berkeley's idealism. During a conversation with his biographer, Johnson became infuriated at the suggestion that Berkeley's idealism couldn't be refuted. In his anger, Johnson powerfully stomped a nearby stone and proclaimed of Berkeley's theory, "I refute it
thus!".
Johnson used a curious form of shorthand when writing poetry: he'd compose a line in his head, then only write down the first half. It appears that he'd remember the second half by the rhyme. Then, when he'd more time, he'd go back through the manuscript and complete each line. Scholars have often noted that the ink colour is consistent between all the beginning half-lines and between all the ending halflines, but that it frequently differs between the first half of a line and the second half. This method is reminiscent of the feats of memory that enabled a Celtic bard to remember over a hundred long tales or Homer to recite the
Iliad and the
Odyssey.
Legacy
Johnson's fame in the wider world is due in large part to the enormous success of Boswell's
Life of Johnson. Boswell, however, met Johnson after Johnson had already achieved a degree of fame and stability, leading Boswell's biography to emphasize the latter part of Johnson's life. Consequently, Johnson has been seen more as a gruff but lovable society figure than as the struggling and poverty-stricken writer he was for much of his life.
Before arriving in London, Johnson stayed in
Birmingham, where he's remembered in a
frieze within the Old Square.
Birmingham Central Library holds a Johnson collection, containing around two thousand volumes of his works (including many first editions) and literary periodicals and books about him.
In popular culture, Johnson (played by
Robbie Coltrane) was featured in the third series of
Blackadder (in the episode titled
Ink and Incapability), presenting his
dictionary to
Prince George for his patronage, whereupon it's thrown on the fire by the servant
Baldrick to serve as kindling. Johnson was also played by Coltrane in the film
Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands.
American author
Lillian de la Torre wrote a series of detective stories featuring Johnson and Boswell as early versions of
Sherlock Holmes and
Doctor Watson, most of which were published in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
His quote, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man" serves as epigraph to
Hunter S. Thompson's
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and also in the Avenged Sevenfold song "Bat Country".
Major works
Essays, pamphlets, periodicals
|
| 1747 |
Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language |
| 1750–1752 |
The Rambler |
| 1753–1754 |
The Adventurer |
| 1755 |
Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language |
| 1758–1760 |
The Idler (1758-1760) |
| 1765 |
Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare |
| 1770 |
The False Alarm |
| 1771 |
Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands |
| 1774 |
The Patriot |
| 1775 |
Taxation No Tyranny
|
Poetry
|
| 1738 |
London |
| 1747 |
Prologue at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury Lane |
| 1749 |
The Vanity of Human Wishes |
|
|
Biography
|
| 1779–1781 |
Lives of the Poets |
Criticism
|
| 1765 |
The Plays of William Shakespeare |
Dictionary
|
| 1755 |
A Dictionary of the English Language |
Novellas
|
| 1759 |
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia |
Further Information
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