Samuel Johnson(1709–1784)

Samuel Johnson was born on the eighteenth of September 1709 at his father's bookshop on the corner of Breadmarket Street and Market Square, Lichfield, Staffordshire, second and only surviving son of Michael Johnson, a Lichfield bookseller and town magistrate, and Sarah Ford of Edial. He was a sickly child (scrofula, the King's Evil, contracted in infancy, left him scarred and partly blind in the left eye and deaf in the left ear for life), was touched for the cure by Queen Anne in 1712 in his fourth year, the last reigning English monarch to perform the ceremony, and was schooled at Lichfield Grammar and at Stourbridge, where he absorbed in his teens the Latin and Greek classical syllabus on which his life's work rested. He went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, in October 1728 in his twentieth year, left fourteen months later for lack of funds without taking a degree, and through the 1730s combined undermastership at Market Bosworth Grammar School with the running of his father's bookshop after the father's death in 1731.

He married Elizabeth Porter, a widow of Birmingham twenty years his senior, in 1735, opened with her money the small private school at Edial Hall near Lichfield (the school's only lasting pupil was David Garrick, the future actor-manager), and on the second of March 1737 set out for London with Garrick in their pockets a half-finished tragedy and a few pounds. He took lodgings near the Strand and joined the Grub Street magazine trade as a working journalist for Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine, the leading English-language periodical of the day, for which he wrote across the next decade the parliamentary reports (composed largely from memory of the few notes he was permitted to take from the Commons gallery; his Parliamentary Reports were for years the only published account of Commons proceedings), the long Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), the literary biographies and the famous prose monthly that founded his London reputation.

In 1746 he signed a contract with five London booksellers led by Robert Dodsley for the Dictionary of the English Language, an undertaking the booksellers had originally planned as a three-year project. Johnson took nine years on it, working alone with six paid amanuenses at his garret in 17 Gough Square off Fleet Street, and on the fifteenth of April 1755 published the Dictionary in two folio volumes containing forty-two thousand defined words illustrated with over a hundred and fourteen thousand quotation citations from the body of English literature. It was the first English-language dictionary to define words by living usage rather than by theoretical etymology, the first to illustrate every definition with a quotation from the canon of English authors, and remained the standard authority on the English language for the next hundred and fifty years until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in the early twentieth century. Oxford University awarded him an honorary MA in February 1755 on the eve of publication; Trinity College Dublin awarded him an honorary LLD in 1765, and Oxford a further LLD in 1775.

He wrote across the 1750s and 1760s the body of essay-and-fiction work that runs alongside the Dictionary: the Rambler essays (1750 to 1752), the Idler essays (1758 to 1760), the Oriental tale Rasselas (1759, written in a single week to pay his mother's funeral expenses), the Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare (1765, with the long edition of the plays Johnson edited himself), and the great Lives of the Poets (1779 to 1781), the ten-volume series of critical biographies of fifty-two English poets from Cowley to Gray that founded the form of English-language literary biography. From 1762 he held the King's Pension of three hundred pounds a year, the financial security on which his late work depended. He met James Boswell of Auchinleck in May 1763 in the back parlour of Tom Davies's bookshop in Russell Street; the friendship of the next twenty-one years produced the Boswell journals and finally the Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, the great biography Boswell published in 1791 seven years after Johnson's death, on every modern list of the central works of biography in the English language.

He died at his house at 8 Bolt Court off Fleet Street on the thirteenth of December 1784 in his seventy-fifth year and was buried with full ceremonial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey beside Garrick. The Dictionary held the field for a hundred and fifty years; the Lives of the Poets remains in print; Rasselas is on every undergraduate course in English literature in the English-speaking world; the Boswell Life of Johnson has not been off the shelves since 1791. The house at 17 Gough Square in the City of London has been the Dr Johnson's House museum since 1911. The Johnson name in modern English-language letters carries the weight of the Lichfield bookseller's son who put the English vocabulary on its modern footing and founded the form of English-language literary biography.