Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer, critic and lexicographer, author of A Dictionary of the English Language, the moral tale Rasselas, The Lives of the Poets and essays in The Rambler and The Idler. His conversation, recorded by James Boswell in one of the most famous biographies in English, made him a legend.
Genres
essays, novels and stories
Works
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
Lichfield and London
Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, the son of a bookseller. As a baby he caught scrofula, which damaged his sight and hearing and scarred his face. He read voraciously in his father's shop and went to Pembroke College, Oxford, but had to leave after a year for lack of money.
In 1735 he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow twenty years older, whom he called Tetty, and opened a school that failed. In 1737 he set off for London with one of his pupils, the future actor David Garrick, and lived for years as a hack writer, often in great poverty.
The Dictionary
In 1746 a group of booksellers commissioned Johnson to write a dictionary of the English language. With a few assistants, he worked for nine years, defining some forty thousand words and illustrating them with about a hundred and fourteen thousand quotations from English writers.
A Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755 and made him famous. During these years he also wrote the essays of The Rambler, and in 1759, to pay for his mother's funeral, he wrote in a week the philosophical tale Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.
The great talker
In 1762 King George III granted him a pension, which freed him from want. The next year he met the young Scottish lawyer James Boswell, who began to record his conversation. Johnson founded The Club, where he met Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith, and published an edition of Shakespeare.
In 1773 he toured the Scottish Highlands and the Hebrides with Boswell. His last major work was The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. He died in London in 1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson appeared in 1791.
Anecdotes
A harmless drudge
In his Dictionary, Johnson defined a lexicographer, with self-mocking humour, as a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge. Other definitions were famously personal, such as oats, a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
Hodge the cat
Johnson was devoted to his cat Hodge, for whom he went out himself to buy oysters, so that his servant would not come to dislike the animal. A bronze statue of Hodge sitting on a copy of the Dictionary stands outside Johnson's house in Gough Square, London.
Frequently asked questions
What is Samuel Johnson famous for?
His Dictionary of the English Language (1755), his essays, Rasselas, The Lives of the Poets, and his conversation, recorded in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.
Was Johnson's Dictionary the first English dictionary?
No, but it was the most comprehensive and influential of its time, and remained the standard for more than a century.
Who was James Boswell?
A Scottish lawyer and writer, Johnson's friend from 1763, whose Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is one of the most famous biographies in English.