Samuel Johnson 1709 - 1784

Greenwich resident

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life;
for there is in London all that life can afford."

Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, and died on 13 December 1784 in London. He was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller in Lichfield. In 1728 he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, but a lack of money forced him to leave thirteen months later.

In 1737 he went to London with his pupil, David Garrick, hoping to complete and sell his tragedy, Irene and make a living as a writer. He had no luck with it; it finally appeared, thanks to Garrick's help, only in 1749 so he took miscellaneous writing jobs. He wrote biographies (including the Life of Savage), political satires (Marmor Norfolciense), and reports on the debates in Parliament.  His first hit came in 1738; a poem called London, an imitation of a satire by the Latin poet Juvenal. His other most famous poem is The Vanity of Human Wishes, from 1749.

In 1746 or so, after a planned edition of Shakespeare fell through, he settled on the plan of publishing a dictionary. In popular accounts, the Dictionary of the English Language he brought out in 1755 is often but incorrectly called the first English dictionary.

Definition of "oats": "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people."

While working on the Dictionary, he published a series of periodical essays ;  called The Rambler, which appeared twice a week from 1750 to 1752. He later wrote or contributed to two other series of essays, The Idler and The Adventurer.

On London: "Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists."

In 1759 came Rasselas, an oriental tale;  It was written to defray the costs of his mother's funeral. Johnson had scraped a living together from his writing, but was never anywhere near rich.   But the ministry of George III gave him a pension of 300 pounds a year in 1762.

James Boswell came to London in 1762, and he met his hero, Johnson, in May 1763. From then until Johnson's death in 1784, the two spent only around 240 days together, including a trip through the Hebrides in 1773, which Johnson described in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1775 and Boswell discussed in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson in 1785. But in spite of the relatively few days they spent together, Boswell collected the anecdotal material for his Life in this period.

A long-promised edition of Shakespeare's works appeared in eight volumes in 1765.  In the 1770s, Johnson returned to miscellaneous and political writings, few of which catch the attention of amateur readers. But between 1779 and 1781 came a series originally called Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, better  known today as The Lives of the Poets.

Johnson was famous during his lifetime as an important literary figure, and a number of biographies appeared shortly after his death. The most famous was Boswell's in 1791.

He died in 1784, and is buried at Westminster Abbey

Links

• The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page

• Dr Johnson's House 17 Gough Square London

• The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum.
• The Will of Samuel Johnson The last will and testament of Samuel Johnson