English
writer and lexicographer, a major figure in 18th-century literature as an
arbiter of taste, renowned for the force and balance of his prose style.Early Life Johnson, usually referred to as Dr. Johnson by his contemporaries and later generations, was born in Lichfield on September 18, 1709, the son of a bookseller. He attended the local school, but his real education was informal, conducted primarily among his father's books as he read and studied the classics, which influenced his style greatly.
In 1728 Johnson entered Pembroke College at the University of Oxford. A brilliant but eccentric young man, he was plagued by a variety of ailments from which he suffered the rest of his life. He left in poverty, without taking a degree and having suffered the first of two emotional breakdowns. During this time of despondency his reading of devotional literature led him to a profound religious faith.
After his father died in 1731, Johnson tried teaching and later organized a school in Lichfield. His educational ventures were not successful, however, although one of his students, David Garrick, later famous as an actor, became a lifelong friend. At the age of 26 Johnson married Elizabeth Jarvis Porter, a widow about 20 years his senior, who brought a measure of calm and self-confidence to his life.
In 1737 Johnson, having given up teaching, went to London to try the literary life. Thus began a long period of hack writing for the Gentleman's Magazine. Johnson's long, sonorous poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, based on the tenth satire of the Latin poet Juvenal, appeared in 1749; generally considered Johnson's finest poem, it marked the beginning of a period of great activity. He founded his own periodical, The Rambler, in which he published, between 1750 and 1752, a considerable number of eloquent, insightful essays on literature, criticism, and moral theory.
The Dictionary
Beginning in 1747, while busy with other kinds of writing and always burdened with poverty, Johnson was also at work on a major project—compiling a dictionary commissioned by a group of booksellers. After more than eight years in preparation, the Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755. This remarkable work contains about 40,000 entries elucidated by vivid, idiosyncratic, still-quoted definitions and by an extraordinary range of illustrative examples.
Later Writings
Despite anxieties about his productivity, Johnson published another periodical, The Idler, between 1758 and 1760; and in 1759, to pay for his mother's funeral, he hurriedly completed Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, a prose romance about a young man's search for a happy life.
"Dictionary Johnson" (as he has been called) was now a celebrity. In 1764 he and the eminent English portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds founded the Literary Club; its membership included such luminaries as Garrick, the statesman Edmund Burke, the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a young Scottish lawyer, James Boswell. From their first meeting in 1763 Johnson and Boswell were drawn to each other; for the next 21 years Boswell minutely observed and recorded the conversation and activities of his hero. Boswell's monumental Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest biographies ever written, was published in 1791.
Trinity College in Dublin awarded Johnson an honorary doctorate of civil law in 1765, the same year that he published his edition of Shakespeare with its acute commentary on the characters in the plays. Sometime after 1760 Johnson experienced a second mental breakdown. The great hospitality of his friend Hester Lynch Thrale brought him some peace, and her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) provides valuable insights into the mind and heart of Johnson during this period of personal turmoil. In 1773, however, he was well enough to undertake and enjoy a trip with Boswell to Scotland and the Hebrides, a trip vividly recounted in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).
Johnson's last major work, The Lives of the English Poets, was begun in 1778, when he was nearly 70 years old, and completed—in ten volumes—in 1781. The work is a distinctive blend of biography and literary criticism. Johnson died three years later on December 13, 1784.
Modern Interest in Johnson
Nineteenth-century biographers fostered the image of Johnson as an awkward, unkempt eccentric, whose conversation was certainly lively and memorable, but whose literary influence was slight. A full-scale scholarly evaluation of Johnson's contributions as a writer began only in the mid-20th century. The psychological study Samuel Johnson (1944), by American critic Joseph Wood Krutch opened up new ways of thinking about the man and his work. The most comprehensive and penetrating scholarship has been that of Walter Jackson Bate, another American literary scholar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Samuel Johnson (1977). In these studies Johnson emerges as a troubled but undaunted man, compassionate to the poor and oppressed, relentless in his quest for truth, a humanist par excellence. His writing, in defense of reason against the wiles of unchecked fancy and emotion, championed the values of artistic and moral order.