Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) was an English writer, lexicographer, poet, essayist, literary critic and biographer, often referred to simply as Dr Johnson. [1] He compiled A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, which remained the standard English dictionary until the Oxford English Dictionary appeared more than a century later. [2] His moral essays, his edition of Shakespeare and his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets made him the leading literary figure of eighteenth-century England.
Early life and education
Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, the son of a bookseller. [1] Illness in infancy left him with lasting damage to his sight and hearing and with the involuntary movements and vocal tics later described by contemporaries. He was educated at King Edward VI School in Lichfield and for a period at King Edward VI College, Stourbridge, reading widely in his father's stock of books.
In 1728 he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, but lack of money forced him to leave after little more than a year without taking a degree. [2] He worked briefly as a schoolmaster, married Elizabeth Porter, a widow some twenty years his senior, and in 1737 travelled to London to make a living by writing.
Grub Street and the Dictionary
In London Johnson wrote for the Gentleman's Magazine, producing essays, biographies and reconstructed reports of parliamentary debates. His verse satire London appeared in 1738 and The Vanity of Human Wishes in 1749. [3]
In 1746 a group of booksellers commissioned him to compile a dictionary of English. Working with a handful of copyists in his house off Fleet Street, he produced A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, defining some forty thousand words and illustrating their use with quotations drawn from English literature. [2] The method of illustrative quotation, more than the definitions themselves, established the pattern for later historical lexicography, and the work brought him lasting fame if little immediate wealth.
Essays, criticism and conversation
Between 1750 and 1752 Johnson wrote the twice-weekly essays of The Rambler, followed by The Idler, works of moral reflection that were widely reprinted. His short philosophical novel Rasselas appeared in 1759, written, by his own account, to pay for his mother's funeral. [1]
A government pension granted in 1762 freed him from hack work. He published an edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1765, whose preface defended the dramatist against neoclassical objections, and between 1779 and 1781 he wrote the critical and biographical prefaces collected as Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. [4] He was a central figure of a London circle that included Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith.
Later life and legacy
In 1773 Johnson toured the Hebrides with the young Scottish lawyer James Boswell, an expedition each of them recorded in print. Honorary doctorates from Trinity College Dublin and from Oxford gave him the title by which he is still known. He died in London on 13 December 1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. [1]
Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, preserved his conversation in unusual detail and is regarded as a founding work of modern biography. Johnson is among the most frequently quoted writers in English, and his dictionary remains a landmark in the recording of the language. [2]
