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Samuel Johnson LL.D. (September 18 [O.S. September 7] 1709 – December 13, 1784), often referred to simply as Dr Johnson, was one of England's greatest literary figures: a poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer and often considered the finest critic of English literature. He was also a great wit and prose stylist whose bons mots are still frequently quoted in print today.

Among students of philosophy, Dr Johnson is perhaps best known for his "refutation" of Bishop Berkeley's idealism. During a conversation with his biographer, Johnson became infuriated at the suggestion that Berkeley's idealism could not be refuted. In his anger, Johnson powerfully kicked a nearby stone and proclaimed of Berkeley's theory, "I refute it thus!".

Early life and education

The son of a poor bookseller, Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire. He attended Lichfield Grammar School. On October 31, 1728, a few weeks after he turned nineteen, he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, as a fellow-commoner. After thirteen months, however, poverty forced him to leave Oxford without taking a degree and he returned to Lichfield. In 1764, Oxford University awarded him an honorary doctorate.

He attempted to work as a teacher and schoolmaster, initially being turned down by the headmaster of Adams' Grammar School, Rev Samuel Lea, but then finding work at a school in Stourbridge. Aged twenty-five, he married Elizabeth "Tetty" Porter, a widow twenty-one years his elder. His first work published in 1735 was a translation from the French of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia.

In 1736, Johnson established a private academy at Edial, near Lichfield. He had only three pupils, but one of them was David Garrick, who remained his friend, while becoming the most famous actor of his day. He began the writing of his first major work there, the historical tragedy Irene, which was later produced by Garrick in 1749.

In 1737, penniless Johnson left for London with his former pupil David Garrick. There he found employment with Edward Cave, writing for The Gentleman's Magazine. For the next three decades, Johnson wrote biographies, poetry, essays, pamphlets and parliamentary reports. These were presented as if they had been recorded verbatim, but were actually second-hand reports based on interviews with witnesses. He also prepared a catalogue for the sale of the Harleian Library. He continued to live in poverty for much of this time. The poem London (1738) and the Life of Savage (1745; a biography of Johnson's friend and fellow writer Richard Savage, who had shared in Johnson's poverty and died in 1744) are important works from this period.

Establishing career

Between 1747 and 1755, Johnson wrote perhaps his best-known work, A Dictionary of the English Language. Although widely praised and enormously influential, Johnson did not make much money from it as he had to bear the expense of its long composition. During this time, Johnson also wrote a series of semi-weekly essays under the title The Rambler. These essays, often on moral and religious topics, tended to be more grave than the title of the series would suggest. They ran until 1752. Initially they were not popular, but once collected as a volume they found a large audience. Johnson's wife died shortly after the final number appeared.

During his work on the dictionary, Johnson made many appeals for financial help in the form of subscriptions: patrons would get a copy of the first edition as soon as it was printed, in compensation for their support during its compilation. Among the patrons to whom he appealed in vain was Lord Chesterfield. After the dictionary was finally published, Chesterfield sent Johnson a large cheque. Johnson returned it with his now famous Letter to Chesterfield, in which he compares himself to a drowning man who calls for help vainly, then slowly swims to shore and crawls up on the beach, only to be offered a belated rescue by a lifeguard.

He later altered a line in "The Vanity of Human Wishes:

   These ills the Scolars life entail,
   Toil, Envy, Want, The Garrett and the Jail

by replacing the word "Garrett" with "Patron".

Johnson began another series, The Idler, in 1758. These were shorter and lighter than The Rambler and ran weekly for two years. Unlike his independent publication of The Rambler, The Idler was published in a weekly news journal.

In 1759, Johnson published his philosophical novella Rasselas, written in one week to pay for his mother's funeral and settle her debts. Some years later, however, Johnson gained a notoriety for dilatory writing; contemporary poet Charles Churchill teased Johnson for the delay in producing his long-promised edition of Shakespeare: "He for subscribers baits his hook / and takes your cash, but where's the book?"

Status achieved

In 1762, Johnson was awarded a government pension of three hundred pounds a year, largely through the efforts of Thomas Sheridan and the Earl of Bute. Johnson met James Boswell, his future biographer, the following year. Around the same time, Johnson formed "The Club", a social group that included his friends Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick and Oliver Goldsmith. By now, Johnson was a celebrated figure. He received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin in 1765, followed by one from Oxford ten years later.

It is widely believed, through many out of context humorous quotations and asides, that Johnson despised the Scots; however, careful reading of Boswell and of Johnson shows that, while Johnson disliked the conditions under which most Scots lived (the rain and the poverty), he actually liked the people. ("A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist, who does not love Scotland better than truth: he will always love it better than inquiry; and if falsehood flatters his vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it.") He undertook a lengthy tour of Scotland with his great friend and Scottish biographer, James Boswell. The first conversation between Johnson and Boswell is frequently quoted:

   Boswell: Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.
   Johnson: That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.

In 1765, Johnson met Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and Member of Parliament, and Thrale's wife, Hester. They quickly became friends and soon Johnson became a member of the family. He stayed with the Thrales for fifteen years until Henry's death in 1781, sometimes staying in rooms at Thrale's Anchor Brewery in Southwark. Hester Thrale's reminiscences of Johnson, together with her diaries and correspondence, are second only to Boswell as a source of biographical information on Johnson.

Boswell, Johnson and the "Journey"

In 1773, eleven years after Johnson had met Boswell, the two of them set out on A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, the title Johnson used for his account of their travels published in 1775. (Boswell's account, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, was published in 1786, as a preliminary to his Life of Johnson.) Their visit to the Scottish Highlands and the Hebrides took place while the post-Jacobite pacification was crushing the Scottish clan system, at a moment when the romanticisation of Gaelic culture was accelerating. Johnson proceeded to attack the claims that James Macpherson's Ossian poems were translations of ancient Scottish literature, on the false basis that Earse "never was a written language." He was right nonetheless, for Macpherson could not produce his postulated manuscripts. However, Johnson also aided Scottish Gaelic culture by calling for a Bible translation, which was produced soon afterward. Until then, Scottish Gaels had only Bedell's Irish translation.

Final works

In the 1770s, Johnson, who had tended to be an opponent of the government early in life, published a series of pamphlets in favour of various government policies. In 1770 he produced The False Alarm, a political pamphlet attacking John Wilkes. In 1771, his Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands appeared, cautioning against war with Spain. In 1774 he printed The Patriot, a critique of what he viewed as false patriotism. The last of these pamphlets, Taxation No Tyranny, 1775, made the case against American colonists, then clamouring loudly for independence.

Johnson's final major work was the Lives of the English Poets, a project commissioned by a consortium of London booksellers. The Lives, which were critical as well as biographical studies, appeared as prefaces to selections of each poet's work. Johnson died in 1784 and was buried at Westminster Abbey.

Character sketch

Large and powerfully built, Johnson had poor eyesight, was hard of hearing and had a scarred face as a result of childhood scrofula. He also had a number of tics and other involuntary movements; the symptoms described by Boswell suggest that Johnson had Tourette syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the medical terms of his own period, he tended towards melancholia.

Johnson was a devout, conservative Anglican, a staunch Tory and a compassionate man, supporting a number of poor friends under his own roof. He was an opponent of slavery and once proposed a toast to the "next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies". He had a black manservant, Francis Barber (Frank), whom Johnson made his heir. He admitted to sympathies for the Jacobite cause but by the reign of George III he had come to accept the Hanoverian Succession. He remained a fiercely independent and original thinker, which may explain his deep affinity for John Milton's work despite Milton's intensely radical — and, for Johnson, intolerable — political and religious outlook.

Johnson used a curious form of shorthand when writing poetry: he would compose a line in his head, then only write down the first half. It appears that he would remember the second half by the rhyme. Then, when he had more time, he would go back through the manuscript and complete each line. Scholars have often noted that the the ink colour is consistent between all the beginning half-lines and between all the ending halflines, but that it frequently differs between the first half of a line and the second half. This method is reminiscent of the feats of memory that enabled a Celtic bard to remember over a hundred long tales or Homer to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Legacy

Johnson's fame is due in part to the success of Boswell's Life of Johnson. Boswell, however, met Johnson after Johnson had already achieved a degree of fame and stability, leading Boswell's biography to emphasize the latter part of Johnson's life. Consequently, Johnson has been seen more as a gruff but lovable society figure than as the struggling and poverty-stricken writer he was for much of his life.

Before arriving in London, Johnson stayed in Birmingham, where he is remembered in a frieze within the Old Square. Birmingham Central Library holds a Johnson Collection, containing around two thousand volumes of his works (including many first editions) and literary periodicals and books about him.

In popular culture, Johnson (played by Robbie Coltrane) was featured in the third series of Blackadder (in the episode titled 'Ink and Incapability'), presenting his dictionary to idiot Prince George for his patronage, whereupon it is believed to have been burnt by the servant Baldrick; Blackadder then attempts to rewrite the entire book in one night, out of fear of Johnson and his companions. Johnson is often able to find ways of comparing things or people with dogs. The burning theme comes from John Stuart Mill's servant burning the finished draft of Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution.

Johnson was also played by Coltrane in the film Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands.

One of Johnson's famous sayings, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man" is quoted in the introduction to the book and movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (by Hunter S. Thompson) and also in Hell's Angels; the song "Bat Country" by Avenged Sevenfold, dedicated to Hunter S. Thompson, uses the same quotation at the beginning of the music video and in the introduction to the song.

Johnson was referenced and quoted in the 1976 Wonder Woman episode Judgement from Outer Space. In the episode Steve Trevor tells Diana Prince that the government's plan to kill a powerful alien is a patriotic necessity. To this Diana says, "To quote Dr Samuel Johnson: Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels'."

Major works

Essays, pamphlets, periodicals

1747 Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language 1750-1752 The Rambler 1758-1760 The Idler (1758-1760) 1765 Preface to Shakespeare in love " 1770 The False Alarm 1774 The Patriot 1775 Taxation No Tyranny

Poetry

1738 London 1747 Prologue at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury Lane 1749 The Vanity of Human Wishes Irene, a Tragedy The Dictionary 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. Novellas 1759 The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

• Samuel Johnson

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