Authors: Samuel Johnson

In the grammar schools of Lichfield and Stourbridge, and for some thirteen months at Oxford University, Johnson was well grounded in the classics, but because of financial difficulties he left the university in 1729 without a degree. During the next few years, all attempts to find a permanent post as a teacher failed; then, in 1735, he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow more than twenty years his senior, with whose small fortune he set up his own school. When this, too, proved unsuccessful, he and his wife moved to London late in 1737. There followed a decade of poverty and distress in the city, as Johnson eked out a meager livelihood as translator and writer. He aided Edward Cave in editing the Gentleman’s Magazine, providing fictionalized accounts of the proceedings in Parliament as well as short biographies, essays, and poems. Independently, he was involved in other large projects, and con amore wrote a revealing life of his erratic friend in misery, Richard Savage. An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers is now recognized as an important milestone in the development of the art of biography.

In 1746, he signed a contract with a group of booksellers to produce a dictionary of the English language, but it was not until 1755 that the work, in two large folio volumes, finally appeared. Meanwhile, he had written two imitations of Juvenal, London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal and The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated, proclaimed by T. S. Eliot to be “among the greatest verse Satires of the English or any other language.” Johnson’s blank-verse work Irene: A Tragedy was produced at Drury Lane in February 1749, with meager success. Early in the 1750s, he wrote some two hundred periodical essays collectively titled The Rambler.

With the publication of A Dictionary of the English Language: To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar in 1755, his reputation was established, but fame brought little immediate financial return. So in June 1756, he issued proposals for a new edition of Shakespeare and in the same year was largely responsible for a new periodical, The Literary Magazine or Universal Review. From April 1758, to April 1760, he contributed a weekly essay under the title of The Idler to a newspaper, the Universal Chronicle. Depressed by the fatal illness of his mother, whom he had not seen for almost twenty years, and needing money for her expenses, he dashed off in the evenings of a single week what is perhaps his most characteristic work, the philosophical tale known as Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia: A Tale by S. Johnson.

After the death in 1752 of his beloved wife, Johnson more and more sought diversion and companionship in the coffee houses and taverns, gradually drawing around him a brilliant circle, including some of the most eminent men of his age, among them Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, and David Garrick. As the years passed, Johnson’s fame as a talker and sage equaled his reputation as a writer.

In 1762, his financial difficulties were alleviated by a royal pension of three hundred pounds a year, and for the rest of his life he wrote only what he wished. Thus began the period so brilliantly chronicled by the young Scot, James Boswell, whom he met in May 1763. In January 1765, Johnson met the brewer Henry Thrale and his talkative wife, Hester, in whose comfortable homes he spent much time during the next eighteen years. Of his late published works, the most notable were a series of political pamphlets hurriedly written in the early 1770s, an account of his journey with Boswell to the western islands of Scotland, and a series of biographical and critical prefaces to an extensive edition of the English poets of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that came to be known as The Lives of the Poets. Subject to asthma and a number of other ailments, he died on December 13, 1784, in London.

In his day, Johnson was best known as a lexicographer, essayist, and critic. Because of Boswell’s genius and a general shift of sensibility, the next century regarded him chiefly as an eccentric character in a great book. He was loved and admired as the epitome of British bullheadedness and as the patron saint of “clubbability,” but only rarely were his works taken down from the shelves. The twentieth century again took Johnson seriously as a creative artist and critic.

The basic quality of his mind was skepticism, except regarding religion, which he would never allow himself to question. He was always searching for truth but, despite dogmatic remarks made in the heat of argument, never certain of finding it. It was this fundamental Pyrrhonism that made him politically conservative, for he could never be convinced of the perfectibility of human institutions. Good individuals, he believed, were more to be desired than changes of government. For him, abstract moral principles carried more weight than political or economic considerations.

As a literary critic, he was neither a rigid theorist nor a bigoted follower of neoclassical rules; he tended to rely instead on common sense and empirical knowledge. While his aesthetic appreciation was limited by an insistence, as he was reading, on understanding clearly how each rhetorical figure worked, within his own frame of reference he was a perceptive and acute judge. Always ready to shift ground if necessary, he had one criterion in mind: the power of a work to please and instruct. Nothing produced by human beings, he was convinced, could be perfect. Thus it was the duty of a critic to point out defects as well as merits in every work of art. Because of his forceful style, however, the listing of defects is often more memorable than extensive general praise.

At its worst Johnson’s prose is overly formal and ponderous; at its best, it is forceful, direct, and pungent. Its difficulty for some modern readers stems not from any excessive use of difficult words or long sentences, for many of his most characteristic utterances are monosyllabic, but from a constant stress on abstract ideas. Such a style is appropriate to one who is remembered as a powerful thinker and moralist.