Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson, often called Dr Johnson, was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, and died on 13 December 1784. He was an English writer and polymath of the 18th century, active as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has called him “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history,” a measure of how widely his work touched English letters.

Johnson’s early life mixed learning, illness, and financial strain. He was born above his father Michael Johnson’s bookshop, to Michael and Sarah Johnson, née Ford. As a child he showed great intelligence, and his mother began his education at age three by having him memorise and recite passages from the Book of Common Prayer. He later attended Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin, and at 16 spent time with the Fords at Pedmore, where Cornelius Ford used his knowledge of the classics to tutor him. Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford, but lack of funds forced him to leave.

After working as a teacher, Johnson moved to London and began writing for The Gentleman’s Magazine. His early works included the poem London (1738), the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), the poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), and the play Irene (1749). The work for which he is best known, A Dictionary of the English Language, appeared in 1755 after nine years of effort. With 42,733 entries, it was acclaimed as “one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship” and remained pre-eminent at least until the Oxford English Dictionary arrived about 150 years later.

Johnson continued to write across many forms. He published The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia in 1759 and The Plays of William Shakespeare in 1765. In 1763 he befriended James Boswell, with whom he travelled to Scotland, later describing those travels in a 1775 book on the Western Islands of Scotland. Near the end of his life, Johnson wrote Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781), a large and highly influential series of biographies and critical appraisals of 52 poets from the 17th and 18th centuries.

His mind was shaped by close study, religious conviction, political commitment, bodily hardship, and mental struggle. Johnson was a devout Anglican Christian and a committed Tory. He was tall and robust, but deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, and he had regular uncontrolled gestures and tics that disconcerted some people who met him. Boswell and other biographers recorded these mannerisms in such detail that they later informed a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome, a condition neither defined nor manageable in Johnson’s lifetime. He also lived through extended periods of loneliness and mental struggle.

By his later years, Johnson had become a celebrity, described as “the acknowledged Head of Literature in this kingdom.” After his death, he was increasingly recognised for his effect on literary criticism, biography, and Modern English. Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD (1791) became one of literature’s most famous biographies. Johnson’s words still carry weight because they come from a writer who studied conduct, language, faith, and suffering with unusual steadiness. As he put it, “Prosperity is apt to prevent us from examining our conduct; but adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is beneficial to us.”