Samuel Johnson
(1709–1784)

Many readers know Samuel Johnson only through the biography written by his contemporary and ardent admirer, James Boswell. That is unfortunate, because the Samuel Johnson who is revealed through his own writings is a man with much to say on a variety of subjects—a man who, despite the excellence of Boswell's portrait, is best read firsthand. During his own lifetime, Johnson was widely recognized as the most influential literary figure of his day as well as a brilliant and witty conversationalist. Indeed, the second half of the eighteenth century is often called the Age of Johnson.

Johnson's success was hard-won. The son of a bookseller in Lichfield, a small town north of Birmingham, he grew up in poverty. He described himself as a "diseased infant." A series of childhood illnesses left him physically weak and facially disfigured. A brilliant child who read Hamlet at the age of eight, Johnson feared that insanity would deprive him of his single advantage, his intellect. He entered Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1728, but was forced to leave after fourteen months because of lack of funds. For six years thereafter, until deciding to pursue a literary career in earnest, he was a Lichfield bookseller and schoolmaster, reading widely and occasionally working on translations. At the age of twenty-six he married a widow much older than he, to whom he remained devoted until her death.

In 1737, he moved to London. Despite critical praise for his early writing, he failed to gain a large audience. It was Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, which earned him a permanent place in English letters. For the next two years, he wrote The Idler, a series of articles for a weekly newspaper, in addition to completing one of his best-loved works, Rasselas, a moral romance.

Johnson was awarded an annual pension of three hundred pounds in 1762, which made him something of a man of leisure. The next year he and twenty-three-year-old James Boswell met for the fist time in the back parlor of Tom Davis's bookshop. It was a fateful meeting, one that led, after many further meetings, to Boswell's Life of Johnson, a book generally regarded as the finest biography in English.

In 1765, Johnson published an acclaimed edition of Shakespeare. His last important work, The Lives of the Poets, appeared in ten volumes between 1779 and 1781. It is a group of fifty-two critical biographies that cover about two hundred years of English literary history. Late in life, Johnson received honorary degrees from Oxford and Trinity College, Dublin—thus the "Dr." that often precedes his name. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

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