This is the second in a series, the first being here.
Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in the English Midlands, on September 18, 1709. If one scans what is known of his parents, the resemblance to his father, Michael, a bookseller and stationer, seems stronger--both were large men with quick minds and saturnine dispositions. He had a younger brother, Nathaniel, who died in his 20s. Young Samuel was afflicted with scrofula, near sightedness, and deafness in one ear, all of which tormented him through his life. He later developed odd motor and vocal tics, like those now associated with Tourette's.
He was a lazy but excellent student and, upon completion of the public education offered at Lichfield, his father, making use of a small inheritance from a cousin, took him in the fall of 1728 to Oxford and enrolled him at Pembroke College. Beset by poverty, hypochondria, and depression, he returned to Lichfield at the end of 1729. His one-year college career was marked by wide but unsystematic reading, a revived religious devotion, and intellectual self-assurance tending toward a bullying arrogance. In one surviving anecdote, he told a professor: "Sir, you have sconced me twopence for non-attendance at a lecture not worth a penny."
At Lichfield, he helped around his father's shop, wrote poetry in the manner of Pope, and continued to read widely. His father died in 1731. Johnson moved to Birmingham and in 1733, confined to bed by some malady, perhaps the recurring hypochondria, dictated to an old schoolfriend his first book, an abridged English version of a French translation of Voyage to Abyssinia, by Jerome Lobo, a 17th-century Portugese Jesuit. Two years later, at age 25, he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow nearly twice his age who has been described as "flaring and fantastic," fat, large-busted, and rosy from the over use of paint and liqueurs. Her dowry temporarily relieved his poverty and he opened a school near LIchfield for the instruction of young men in Greek and Latin. He may never have had more than three students, but one was David Garrick, who would become the famous actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in London. Garrick told about how the boys would peep through the keyhole of their master's bedchamber to observe his "tumultuous and awkward fondness" for his corpulent wife.
In 1737 Johnson gave up on the school and moved to London, where biography occasionally loses sight of him through the next roughly 15 years. He found literary hack work but suffered extreme poverty, including it seems intermittent homelessness. It is not clear how his wife fared. Though a royalist and a Tory, he forever felt a kinship with the downtrodden. When years later a pious second-rate philosopher urbanely explained that God in his mercy had compensated the poor by making them less concerned with small annoyances, Johnson retorted, in a review (I think it is almost his finest moment):
The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyment of the rich. They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh.
His hack work included imitating debates, sometimes on no more evidence than the name of the speaker and his subject, in the Parliament. These were published as the actual speeches of statesmen, and according to legend Johnson, once hearing the eloquence of a certain politician praised in a tavern, exclaimed: "Sir, that speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street!"
Despite many hardships his fortunes slowly rose. By 1746 his reputation was such that he contracted with a group of London booksellers to turn out, for 1575 pounds, a Dictionary of the English Language. For the next eight years, aided only by six amanuenses, he labored over his definitions, many of which he augmented with instances of proper use culled from the classics of English literature. Since the 1575 pounds, a substantial sum, nevertheless was not sufficient to sustain him through these years, he worked simultaneously on other projects: he allowed Garrick to produce in 1749 an early tragedy, Irene (of which he famously remarked after seeing it performed, "I had thought it better"); he published his best poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, in the same year; and from 1750-52 he wrote and published, twice weekly, the series of essays known as The Rambler. The Dictionary was finished in 1755. Boswell, whom he did not meet until 1763, summed up the reaction:
The Dictionary, with a Grammar and History of the English Language, being now at length published, in two volumes folio, the world contemplated with wonder so stupendous a work achieved by one man, while other countries had thought such undertakings fit only for whole academies.
Writing nearly 200 years later, the biographer and critic Walter Jackson Bate confirmed this opinion, adding that Johnson's Dictionary
easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who labored under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time.
He was now "Dictionary Johnson," a formidable self-made man, but his difficulties continued. When his mother died in 1759, he covered the cost of her funeral and paid a few of her outstanding debts by composing, in the evenings of a single week, Rasselas, an Oriental tale of novella length that inculcates from its first words his theme of themes:
Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow--attend to the history of Rasselas, prince of Abyssinia.
These "phantoms of hope" and, from a later chapter, the "hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life"--what we usually call "wishful thinking"--must be banished in order that we may learn sensibly to rely on what can be expected of life, which isn't much: it is "everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed."
In 1762 Johnson's services to literature were recognized by the Crown with the offer of a 300 pound annual pension. Of "pension," his Dictionary had noted, "In English it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country"--but he accepted and, at age 52, years of gnawing want were at an end. His wife had died while he labored on the Dictionary, and the next year he met Boswell. In my Modern Library Edition of The Life of Johnson, the narrative of his acceptance of the Crown's pension occurs on page 236 of 1243, so you can see that 80% of that very enjoyable book's bulk is given over to the period in which Johnson, to deploy his own phrases, would "fold his legs" and enjoy the "bread and tea of life."
He had been working for years on an edition of Shakespeare, and the long delay, the occasion of wry speculation among friends, was probably made longer still by the receipt of pension payments. He held that no man but a blockhead wrote except to make money. It was finally ready, however, in 1765, and secured for him a place in the pantheon of Shakespearean critics. The famous Preface falls naturally into two sections, praise and censure. Regarding the former, Shakespeare's "drama is the mirror of life," a long procession of "scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions." Having elaborated generously on these ideas, he proceeds to the faults, which are twelve in number. The first is that Shakespeare "seems to write without any moral purpose"; several of the others might be grouped under a single heading of general sloppiness. These points are elucidated by his copious notes to the plays. Of course some are unwilling to allow that Shakespeare can ever be at fault but the sloppiness is there to behold: it might be explained, I think, by the simple fact that Shakespeare was every inch a man of the theatre and his work was necessarily affected by professional pressures--exigencies that Johnson, of all people, should have recognized. The standard retort to charge #1 is that Johnson was a Christian moralist and Shakespeare was not. But perhaps this dismisses too easily Johnson's case. If nothing else, his commentary on King Lear should impress upon more casual readers the desolating force of the conclusion to that play.
An aspect of Shakespeare's sloppiness, according to Johnson, was that toward the end of many of his plays, when the final events were in his mind and sights, he remitted his efforts and raced to the end in order to "snatch the profit." Thus the latter parts are comparatively weak. I shall now provide an example of what he meant. Of Johnson's later years, his conversation at club and picaresque adventures as a traveller, Boswell is an admirable source. His remaining notable work, The Lives of the Poets, which appeared in two parts in 1779 and 1781, is a worthy companion to the Dictionary and the Shakespeare. I have neglected to mention The Idler, a second series of essays in the manner of The Rambler that appeared in 1758-60. I also have not said much about his Christian faith, the one thing he put up opposite his otherwise dim view of life. His Prayers and Meditations seem to be written by someone other than the acerbic bully who "talked for victory." On Good Friday, 1779, he wrote:
I am now to review the last year, and find little but dismal vacuity, neither business nor pleasure; much intended, and little done. My health is much broken; my nights afford me little rest. I have tried opium, but its help is counterbalanced with great disturbance; it prevents the spasms, but it hinders sleep. O God, have mercy on me.
Last week I published the Lives of the Poets, written, I hope, in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety.
In this last year I have made little acquisition; I have scarcely read anything. I maintain Mrs. [Desmoulins] and her daughter. Other good of myself I know not where to find, except a little charity.
But I am now in my seventieth year; what can be done, ought not to be delayed.
He died on December 13, 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20.
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