Samuel Johnson

NAME Samuel Johnson. He was commonly referred to simply as "Dr. Johnson" or "Dr. Samuel Johnson," titles that carried immense literary and cultural authority in 18th-century Britain. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Samuel Johnson was an English writer, poet, essayist, biographer, and lexicographer. He was considered the preeminent man of letters of his age, best remembered for compiling A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, his brilliant conversational wit recorded by James Boswell, and his major literary works including Rasselas and The Lives of the Poets. 

BIRTH Samuel Johnson was born on September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. 

FAMILY BACKGROUND He was born to Michael Johnson, a poor bookseller, and his wife, Sarah Ford. His father’s bookshop was located in Market Square, Lichfield, where the family lived in an old house directly above the shop. The building survives today as the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum. (2)

The family only escaped poverty when his mother's cousin, Elizabeth Harriotts, died in February 1728 and left enough money to send Johnson to university. 

Johnson's birthplace in Market Square, Lichfield

CHILDHOOD Johnson spent his early years in Lichfield immersed in his father's books. At the age of three, he suffered from scrofula (a tubercular swelling of the lymph glands), and as was custom at the time, he was taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne in hopes of a royal cure. Though it was considered a wonder that he survived, the illness left his face deeply scarred and rendered him half-blind and hard of hearing. (2)

Johnson was an avid reader with a photographic memory but also developed a nervous tic, growing into a twitchy, anxious youth. As a result of his childhood illness he suffered nervous tics and compulsive head waggings that intensely embarrassed him throughout his life. 

EDUCATION An avid reader with an exceptional memory, Johnson attended Lichfield Grammar School and King Edward VI School in Stourbridge. On October 31, 1728, a few weeks after turning 19, he entered Pembroke College, Oxford. However, after just thirteen months, severe financial shortages forced him to leave Oxford without completing his degree, and he returned home to Lichfield in disappointment.  (2)

CAREER RECORD Johnson began his literary career writing essays for the Birmingham Journal and translating from French a Portuguese Jesuit's account of travels in Abyssinia. 

1735 Opened Edial Hall School near Lichfield as a private academy, though it quickly failed with only three pupils, including young David Garrick. 

1737 Moved to London with David Garrick to make his fortune and began writing regularly for Edward Cave's The Gentleman's Magazine, producing biographies, essays, poetry, and Parliamentary reports. 

1755 Published A Dictionary of the English Language, establishing his reputation as the leading scholar of his era. 

1759 Authored his celebrated novella The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. 

1762 Awarded a Crown pension of £300 a year, allowing him to focus on lecturing, editing Shakespeare, and legendary literary conversation. (1), (2)

1764 Co-founded "The Club" with Sir Joshua Reynolds, bringing together London's top intellectuals and cultural figures. 

1775 Published A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland following his famous tour with James Boswell.

APPEARANCE Johnson was large and powerfully built, standing tall with a heavy frame, but his appearance was heavily marked by illness. His face was deeply scarred by childhood scrofula, and he possessed poor eyesight and impaired hearing. He was plagued by involuntary nervous tics, compulsive head-waggings, and bodily spasms, which made him appear ungainly and twitchy. (3)

Artist Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a famous portrait of him around 1775 (see below) emphasizing his visual impairment; Johnson famously criticized the artwork, stating he would not be known to posterity as "Blinking Sam." (2)

FASHION Dr. Johnson was notorious for being slovenly dressed. He routinely wore an uncombed, un-powdered, ill-fitting wig, wrinkled stockings, and a rusty, worn-out waistcoat, showing little regard for the fashionable standards of London high society. (2)

CHARACTER Despite a curmudgeonly exterior, Johnson was a deeply compassionate and generous man who routinely put pennies into the hands of homeless children sleeping on London streets. 

He suffered from severe bouts of depression (what he termed "a vile melancholy and a horrible hypochondria") and lyssophobia (a fear of insanity). To ward off his dark moods, he actively sought out company and conversation, becoming the center of London's intellectual circles. 

According to James Boswell, Johnson also exhibited obsessive-compulsive behaviors, such as an anxious ritual of entering or exiting doorways by a precise number of steps. (2)

SPEAKING VOICE Johnson was renowned for his powerful, authoritative, and formidable speaking style, delivered in a sonorous voice with a pronounced Staffordshire accent. Boswell described his manner of argument as having a distinctive "bow-wow" style — blunt, forceful, and commanding — and it is his prowess as a talker for which Johnson is mainly remembered today, though in his own time he was considered the most brilliant literary man of his age.

He spoke with immense eloquence and rapid wit, capable of demolishing opponents in conversation almost instantly; Boswell went so far as to suggest he might have been "the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation." His speech was occasionally accompanied by involuntary physical twitches, gasps, and vocal grunts, mannerisms now widely believed by scholars to indicate Tourette syndrome, a condition unrecognized in the 18th century and one that embarrassed Johnson rather than serving any theatrical purpose. (4)

SENSE OF HUMOUR He possessed a sharp, razor-edged, and legendary wit, often delivered through dry satire or crushing put-downs. When two women complimented him on omitting coarse or obscene words from his Dictionary, Johnson immediately retorted: "What! My Dears! Then you have been looking for them!" (2)

RELATIONSHIPS At the age of 26, Johnson married Elizabeth "Tetty" Porter, a 46-year-old widow, at St. Werburgh Church, Derby, on July 9, 1735. Though some contemporaries described Tetty unflatteringly, the couple were devoted to each other, and Johnson was devastated when she died on March 17, 1752. 

Elizabeth "Tetty" Porter

After Tetty's death, Johnson formed an attachment to a pious, well-born woman known as Miss Boothby, but his hopes of remarriage ended with her death, plunging his middle years into sadness. (2)

James Boswell became Johnson's closest friend after they first met in a London bookshop on May 16, 1763, when Johnson was 53 and Boswell just 21; their friendship produced one of the greatest biographies ever written. Boswell's wife, however, was scornful of her husband's devotion, remarking, "I have seen many a bear led by a man, but I never before saw a man led by a bear." 

Around this time Johnson formed "The Club," a social circle that included Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith. In 1765 he met the wealthy brewer Henry Thrale and his wife Hester, quickly becoming close to the family and staying with them for fifteen years until Henry's death in 1781. (2)

MONEY AND FAME Johnson struggled financially for most of his life. Despite receiving a 1,500-guinea advance for his dictionary, the heavy expenses of its nine-year production left him impoverished; six months after its publication in 1755, he was arrested for a debt of £5 and 18 shillings, saved only by a gift from novelist Samuel Richardson. 

His financial burden was finally lifted in 1762 when King George III granted him a Crown pension of £300 a year, cementing his status as a celebrated national figure. 

Although his dictionary was widely praised and enormously influential, Johnson profited little from it financially, having borne the expenses of nine years of composition rather than the three he originally anticipated. (2)

FOOD AND DRINK Johnson was a passionate lover of tavern dining, declaring: "There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn." His favorite meal at London's Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese inn was a massive pudding loaded with beefsteak, kidneys, mushrooms, oysters, and larks. 

Image by Gemini

He disliked fish because his poor eyesight forced him to feel for bones with his fingers, and he held a comical disdain for cucumbers, claiming they should be sliced, dressed with vinegar, "and then thrown out, as good for nothing." 

Though he once drank 36 glasses of port in a single sitting and famously declared "Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy," he generally preferred tea, consuming vast quantities of Twinings tea out of tiny cups. (2)

MUSIC AND ARTS Johnson had little appreciation for music, once complaining that "All animated nature loves music except myself." Upon hearing a difficult piece performed by a celebrated violinist, he remarked: "Difficult do you call it, sir? I wish it were impossible." However, during his tour of the Hebrides, he admitted to a liking for the bagpipes, once noting that "Had I learnt to fiddle, I should have done nothing else." (2)

A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was one of those undertakings that seemed perfectly reasonable at the outset and increasingly deranged the longer it went on. In 1746, a consortium of London booksellers hired Johnson to compile a comprehensive dictionary, offering him 1,500 guineas for the job. Johnson estimated that he could finish in three years, which was an impressively optimistic assessment for a man who had apparently not yet considered the English language itself. In the end, the work took more than eight years, with Johnson assisted by a small team and armed with an enormous collection of books dating back to the 16th century.

The finished dictionary appeared on April 15, 1755, in two enormous folio volumes, with an initial print run of 2,000 copies. It contained 42,773 entries and 140,871 definitions, making it less a book than a determined assault on the entire vocabulary of the nation. Johnson drew on earlier dictionaries, including Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum and John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, but his great innovation was to show how words actually behaved in the wild. He illustrated definitions with roughly 114,000 literary quotations, many taken from Shakespeare and other major writers, thereby giving readers examples of words doing useful work rather than simply standing around looking authoritative.

Johnson also brought something to the enterprise that dictionaries are not normally expected to possess: a personality. His definitions occasionally became miniature essays in irritation. He defined "excise" as a "hateful tax levied upon commodities," administered, in his view, by "wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid." His definition of "lexicographer" was rather more modest: "a harmless drudge." It is difficult to imagine a modern dictionary editor submitting either definition to the legal department and receiving an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

The dictionary was dedicated to Lord Chesterfield, although Chesterfield had provided little meaningful support while Johnson was struggling to complete the work and only became interested once it was safely finished. Johnson, meanwhile, did not become rich from his monumental achievement, having absorbed much of the cost and endured the eight-year slog required to produce it. This was perhaps the sort of project in which the chief reward was discovering, several years in, that you had become the leading authority on something you could no longer bear to think about.

Samuel Johnson's Folio (1755) and Abridged (1756) Dictionaries together By Jkarjalainen

LITERATURE The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia was Johnson's only novel, a satirical work romanticizing what is now Ethiopia, written in a single week in 1759 to pay for his mother's funeral. In 1775 he published A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, recounting his travels with James Boswell, while Prayers and Meditations, a devotional classic, was published a year after his death. He also produced major critical editions of Shakespeare, landmark essay series (The Rambler and The Idler), and Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. (2)

NATURE Johnson showed little enthusiasm for rugged or wild landscapes, generally preferring the intellectual and social bustle of London to natural scenery; his famous remark that 'when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life' reflects this urban sensibility, and his tour of the Scottish Highlands revealed more curiosity about local customs and history than admiration for the terrain itself.

PETS Johnson was a devoted cat lover. His most famous pet was a cat named Hodge, for whom Johnson personally walked to the fishmonger to buy oysters so the servants wouldn't resent the animal. Johnson fondly noted of him: "I have had cats whom I liked better than this… but he is a very fine cat." (2)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS In his youth, Johnson enjoyed swimming, leaping, and climbing, activities he continued, at least occasionally, into old age — even leaping hedges on visits to Lichfield in his seventies. In adulthood his principal pastimes became vigorous intellectual debate, extensive reading, and walking the streets of London, though he remained surprisingly strong and physically capable throughout his life. (5)

Johnson's chief pleasure was conversation, which he pursued avidly once his pension freed him from financial worry in 1762. 

A literary party, 1781, of Johnson (second from left) and other members of "The Club"

SCIENCE AND MATHS Johnson held a keen, lifelong interest in chemical experiments and natural philosophy, a passion Hester Thrale recorded when she noted that "Dr. Johnson was always exceeding fond of chemistry." The couple even set up a small laboratory at the Thrales' Streatham estate, where they "diverted ourselves with drawing essences and colouring liquors," and Johnson gave detailed instructions for building a proper chemical furnace.

One of his favorite pursuits was distilling ether from alcohol and sulfuric acid, a genuinely hazardous process he undertook with real care despite his poor eyesight, which forced him to work uncomfortably close to open flames. The writer Arthur Murphy, on first meeting Johnson in 1754, found him "in a little room, intent on making ether... covered with soot like a chimney-sweeper," until Henry Thrale, alarmed at the danger, eventually ordered a halt to "all further chemical enterprise". (6)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Dr. Johnson was a traditional Anglican churchman; William Law's religious book A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life inspired the young Samuel and prompted him to think seriously about Christianity for the first time. He opposed religious enthusiasm but also criticized the intellectual and moral weaknesses he saw within the church. 

Johnson maintained regular private devotions and insisted that prayer was as natural as exercise, believing people should pray first and debate the theology of prayer afterward. 

He had mixed feelings about the Wesleys, founders of Methodism, remarking of John Wesley, "His conversation is good, but he is never at leisure... This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk, as I do."

Late in life, Johnson intended to invite Wesley's impoverished sister Martha to live in his home, though he passed away before it could be arranged. (2)

POLITICS Johnson was a staunch Tory and a fierce opponent of tyranny and the transatlantic slave trade. To the shock of his friend Boswell, Johnson once raised his glass at Oxford to toast "The next rebellion of the slaves in the West Indies." (2)

SCANDAL Though personally moral, Johnson raised eyebrows in polite society by employing Francis Barber, a freed Black former slave from Jamaica, as his domestic servant and treating him almost as an adopted son — educating him, refusing to let him perform demeaning tasks, and ultimately naming him the principal heir to his estate, a bequest many contemporaries found controversial. (7) 

Portrait possibly of Barber, attributed either to James Northcote or Sir Joshua Reynolds 1770s

MILITARY RECORD Samuel Johnson had no military record, having devoted his life entirely to writing, scholarship, and London literary society. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Johnson suffered from poor health his entire life, including childhood scrofula, severe depression, gout, dropsy, and asthma. He was prone to lyssophobia, a fear of insanity, and often begged his wife to lock him in his room and shackle his legs, convinced he was going mad. 

According to Boswell, Johnson displayed behavior suggestive of obsessive-compulsive disorder, including "an anxious care to go out or in at a door or passage by a certain number of steps from a certain point." Modern scholars have also suggested his lifelong tics and involuntary gestures may indicate Tourette syndrome, a condition unrecognized in the 18th century. 

In 1783, he suffered a stroke that temporarily deprived him of speech; he tested his mental clarity by praying in Latin verse. In his final illness, when his physician admitted recovery would require a miracle, Johnson refused further medicines or opiates, insisting on rendering his soul to God unclouded. (2)

HOMES Johnson spent his childhood above his father's bookshop in Market Square, Lichfield, now preserved as a museum. In 1748 he moved into Gough House at 17 Gough Square, just off Fleet Street in London, where he compiled his dictionary in the attic. 

Whenever he returned to his birthplace of Lichfield as an adult, he stayed with Boswell at the Three Crowns Inn, located two doors down from his childhood home. (2)

TRAVEL Though he famously remarked that "a man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority," Johnson never made it to Italy. However, in 1773 he embarked on a famous journey through Scotland and the Hebrides with James Boswell, recording his impressions in A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775). Despite his travels there, Johnson was famous for his playful anti-Scottish banter. (2)

DEATH Samuel Johnson died on December 13, 1784, at his home in Bolt Court, London, at age 75. His final recorded words, addressed to a young woman named Miss Morris, were  "God bless you, my dear." 

He was buried in Westminster Abbey's south transept (Poets' Corner), close to Shakespeare's memorial, on Monday, December 20, 1784. The funeral procession moved from his home on Bolt Court to the Abbey, and the burial service was performed by his boyhood friend, the Reverend John Taylor. (8)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA  Johnson was most famously depicted by Robbie Coltrane in the classic British comedy series Blackadder the Third (1987).

His life and words have inspired numerous biographies, documentaries, and dramatizations, most famously stemming from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the most celebrated biographies in the English language. 

In 2009, the Royal Mail included him among ten figures honored in its "Eminent Britons" commemorative postage stamp series, and Google marked his 308th birthday with a dedicated Doodle in 2017. 

ACHIEVEMENTS Johnson's greatest achievement remains A Dictionary of the English Language, a solo scholarly feat that stood as the definitive English dictionary for 150 years. 

He was also a celebrated poet, essayist, biographer, and critic whose Lives of the Poets shaped literary criticism.

His reputation as a wit and conversationalist, immortalized by Boswell, secured his lasting place as one of the great personalities of English letters. 

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Encyclopedia of Trivia (3) BBC History (4) Cambridge University Press (5) Justus Anglican (6) Samuel Johnson's House Museum (7) Goodman Ray (8) Harvard Library