Biography of Samuel Johnson

Biography of  Samuel Johnson

Introduction :

 Samuel Johnson, byname Dr. Johnson, (born September 18, 1709, Lichfield, Staffordshire, England—died December 13, 1784, London), English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters.

Johnson once characterized literary biographies as “mournful narratives,” and he believed that he lived “a life radically wretched.” Yet his career can be seen as a literary success story of the sickly boy from the Midlands who by talent, tenacity, and intelligence became the foremost literary figure and the most formidable conversationalist of his time. For future generations, Johnson was synonymous with the later 18th century in England. The disparity between his circumstances and achievement gives his life its especial interest.

Early life and education:

Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709, to Sarah (née Ford) and Michael Johnson, a bookseller. The birth took place in the family home above his father's bookshop in Lichfield, Staffordshire. His mother was 40 when she gave birth to Johnson. This was considered an unusually late pregnancy, so precautions were taken, and a "man-midwife" and surgeon of "great reputation" named George Hector was brought in to assist. The infant Johnson did not cry, and there were concerns for his health. His aunt exclaimed that "she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street".The family feared that Johnson would not survive, and summoned the vicar of St Mary's to perform a baptism. Two godfathers were chosen, Samuel Swynfen, a physician and graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Richard Wakefield, a lawyer, coroner, and Lichfield town clerk.

Johnson's health improved and he was put to wet-nurse with Joan Marklew. Some time later he contracted scrofula, known at the time as the "King's Evil" because it was thought royalty could cure it. Sir John Floyer, former physician to King Charles II, recommended that the young Johnson should receive the "royal touch", and he did so from Queen Anne on 30 March 1712. However, the ritual proved ineffective, and an operation was performed that left him with permanent scars across his face and body. With the birth of Johnson's brother, Nathaniel, a few months later, their father was unable to pay the deb

Johnson displayed signs of great intelligence as a child, and his parents, to his later disgust, would show off his "newly acquired accomplishments". His education began at the age of three, and was provided by his mother, who had him memorise and recite passages from the Book of Common Prayer. When Samuel turned four, he was sent to a nearby school, and, at the age of six he was sent to a retired shoemaker to continue his education.A year later Johnson went to Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin. During this time, Johnson started to exhibit the tics that would influence how people viewed him in his later years, and which formed the basis for a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.He excelled at his studies and was promoted to the upper school at the age of nine.During this time, he befriended Edmund Hector, nephew of his "man-midwife" George Hector, and John Taylor, with whom he remained in contact for the rest of his life.

At the age of 16, Johnson stayed with his cousins, the Fords, at Pedmore, Worcestershire.There he became a close friend of Cornelius Ford, who employed his knowledge of the classics to tutor Johnson while he was not attending school.Ford was a successful, well-connected academic, and notorious alcoholic whose excesses contributed to his death six years later. After spending six months with his cousins, Johnson returned to Lichfield, but Mr Hunter, the headmaster, "angered by the impertin

During this time, Johnson's future remained uncertain because his father was deeply in debt. To earn money, Johnson began to stitch books for his father, and it is likely that Johnson spent much time in his father's bookshop reading and building his literary knowledge. The family remained in poverty until his mother's cousin Elizabeth Harriotts died in February 1728 and left enough money to send Johnson to university.On 31 October 1728, a few weeks after he turned 19, Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford. The inheritance did not cover all of his expenses at Pembroke, and Andrew Corbet, a friend and fellow student at the college, offered to make up the deficit.

Johnson made friends at Pembroke and read much. In later life, he told stories of his idleness. His tutor asked him to produce a Latin translation of Alexander Pope's Messiah as a Christmas exercise. Johnson completed half of the translation in one afternoon and the rest the following morning. Although the poem brought him praise, it did not bring the material benefit he had hoped for. The poem later appeared in Miscellany of Poems (1731), edited by John Husbands, a Pembroke tutor, and is the earliest surviving publication of any of Johnson's writings. Johnson spent the rest of his time studying, even during the Christmas holiday. He drafted a "plan of study" called "Adversaria", which he left unfinished, and used his time to learn French while working on his Greek.

The Gentleman’s Magazine and early publications of Samuel Johnson:

In 1738 Johnson began his long association with The Gentleman’s Magazine, often considered the first modern magazine. He soon contributed poetry and then prose, including panegyrics on Edward Cave, the magazine’s proprietor, and another contributor, the learned Elizabeth Carter. Johnson intended to translate the Venetian Paolo Sarpi’s The History of the Council of Trent but was forestalled by the coincidence of another Johnson at work on the same project. However, his biography of Sarpi, designed as a preface to that work, appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, as did a number of his early biographies of European scholars, physicians, and British admirals.

In 1738 and 1739 he published a series of satiric works that attacked the government of Sir Robert Walpole and even the Hanoverian monarchy: London (his first major poem), Marmor Norfolciense, and A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage. London is an “imitation” of the Roman satirist Juvenal’s third satire. (A loose translation, an imitation applies the manner and topics of an earlier poet to contemporary conditions.) Thales, the poem’s main speaker, bears some resemblance to the poet Richard Savage, of whom Johnson knew and with whom he may have become friendly at this time. Before he leaves the corrupt metropolis for Wales, Thales rails against the pervasive deterioration of London (and English) life, evident in such ills as masquerades, atheism, the excise tax, and the ability of foreign nations to offend against “English honour” with impunity. The most famous line in the poem (and the only one in capitals) is: “SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESSED,” which may be taken as Johnson’s motto at this time. When the poem appeared anonymously in 1738, Pope was led to predict that its author would be “déterré” (unearthed). Pope undoubtedly approved of Johnson’s politics along with admiring his poetry and tried unsuccessfully to arrange patronage for him. Marmor Norfolciense satirizes Walpole and the house of Hanover. A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage is an ironic defense of the government’s Stage Licensing Act of 1737 requiring the lord chamberla.

Johnson at this time clearly supported the governmental opposition, which was composed of disaffected Whigs, Tories, Jacobites (those who continued their allegiance to the Stuart line of James II), and Nonjurors (those who refused to take either the oath of allegiance to the Hanover kings or the oath of abjuration of James II and the Stuarts). Despite claims to the contrary, Johnson was neither a Jacobite nor a Nonjuror. His Toryism, which he sometimes expressed for shock value, was based upon his conviction that the Tories could be counted upon to support the Church of England as a state institution. When Johnson attacked Whiggism or defended Toryism (an ideology for him more than a practical politics, especially since Tories remained a minority throughout most of his lifetime), he always took an outsider’s position. Later in life he expressed a high regard for Walpole.

In 1739 Johnson published a translation and annotation of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Pierre de Crousaz’s Commentary on Pope’s philosophical poem An Essay on Man. Although he was able to show that many of Crousaz’s critical observations rested on a faulty French translation, Johnson often agreed with his judgment that some of Pope’s philosophical and social ideas are marred by complacency. About this time Johnson tried again to obtain a position as a schoolteacher. His translations and magazine writings barely supported him; a letter to Cave is signed “impransus,” signifying that he had gone without dinner. 

Maturity and recognition of Samuel Johnson

The Vanity of Human Wishes

In 1749 Johnson published The Vanity of Human Wishes, his most impressive poem as well as the first work published with his name. It is a panoramic survey of the futility of human pursuit of greatness and happiness. Like London, the poem is an imitation of one of Juvenal’s satires, but it emphasizes the moral over the social and political themes of Juvenal. Some of the definitions Johnson later entered under “vanity” in his Dictionary suggest the range of meaning of his title, including “emptiness,” “uncertainty,” “fruitless desire, fruitless endeavour,” “empty pleasure; vain pursuit; idle show; unsubstantial enjoyment; petty object of pride,” and “arrogance.” He portrays historical figures, mainly from England and continental Europe (Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Charles XII of Sweden, the Persian king Xerxes I), alternating them with human types (the traveler, the rich man, the beauty, the scholar), often in juxtaposition with their opposites, to show that all are subject to the same disappointment of their desires. The Vanity of Human Wishes is imbued with the Old Testament message of Ecclesiastes that “all is vanity” and replaces Juvenal’s Stoic virtues with the Christian virtue of “patience.” The poem surpasses any of Johnson’s other poems in its richness of imagery and powerful conciseness.

Johnson’s connections to the theatre in these years included writing several prologues, one for Garrick’s farce Lethe in 1740 and one for the opening of the Drury Lane Theatre. Garrick, now its manager, returned the favours. Early in 1749 Johnson’s play Irene was at last performed. Thanks to Garrick’s production, which included expensive costumes, an excellent cast (including Garrick himself), and highly popular afterpieces for the last three performances, the tragedy ran a respectable nine nights. The audience objected to seeing the apostate Greek Christian Irene strangled by Sultan Mahomet—an innovation of Garrick’s—and the murder was performed offstage thereafter. Irene is Johnson’s least-appealing major work, and he is reported to have said when hearing someone read it aloud, “I thought it had been better.”

From The Rambler to The Adventurer

With The Rambler (1750–52), a twice-weekly periodical, Johnson entered upon the most successful decade of his career. He wrote over 200 numbers, and stories abound of his finishing an essay while the printer’s boy waited at the door; in his last essay he confessed to “the anxious employment of a periodical writer.” The essays cover a wide range of subjects. A large number of them appropriately stress daily realities; others are devoted to literature, including criticism and the theme of authorship (particularly the early ones, driven by the writer’s consciousness of his own undertaking) and to literary forms, such as the novel and biography, that had not received much examination. Whatever their topic, Johnson intended his essays to “inculcate wisdom or piety” in conformity with Christianity. In tone these essays are far more serious than those of his most important predecessor, Joseph Addison, published in The Spectator (1711–12; 1714). Johnson himself ranked them highly among his achievements, commenting “My other works are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.” Although The Rambler may have sold only 500 copies an issue on its first appearance—in his last number he claimed he had “never been much a favourite of the public”—it was widely reprinted in provincial newspapers and sold well in later editions.

A diary entry suggests that a year after Elizabeth’s death Johnson was seeking a new wife “without any derogation from dear Tetty’s memory.” The one he most probably had in mind was the pious Hill Boothby, to whom he wrote with some frequency in the years immediately following this resolve. Three dozen of her letters to him, rarely quoted by biographers, are in print. The relationship, however, came to an end with her death in 1756.

During the course of one year starting in March 1753, Johnson contributed 29 essays to his friend John Hawkesworth’s periodical The Adventurer, written in imitation of The Rambler. Johnson purposely (and ineffectively) lightened his style in order to hide his authorship. He wanted his essays unrecognized, for he had given them to Dr. Richard Bathurst, the friend whom he said he loved more than any other, to sell as his own, but he confessed his part to the persistent Hill Boothby.

Health of Samuel Johnson:

The health of Samuel Johnson has been a focus of the biographical and critical analysis of his life. His medical history was well documented by Johnson and his friends, and those writings have allowed later critics and doctors to infer diagnoses of conditions that were unknown in Johnson's day.

His health and conditions had "damaging effects on Johnson's personal and professional lives" likely causing him to lose opportunities to teach at prominent schools, while leading him "towards the invisible occupation of authorship".