Chapter Content
Okay, so, Samuel Johnson, right? We all know him, "Dictionary Johnson," that kinda guy. But, wow, his early years? Total obscurity. I mean, seriously, if you read his early letters, you wouldn't think, like, "Oh, this guy's gonna be a literary giant." He comes across as a total hack, you know? Scrabbling around for money, just trying to get by. Like a hen pecking for scraps in the dirt, or something. You wouldn't even guess he'd be, um, inspiring Jane Austen or be the subject of, like, one of the most massive biographies ever written. He was just… nothing. No hint of what was to come. And all those rejections, all those disappointments? They really took a toll. I mean, he even said later that, "Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul." Pretty heavy stuff.
Honestly, if he'd died at, say, forty, he'd have just been a footnote, you know? A few poems, some journalism, read only by, like, super hardcore scholars. It would have been almost impossible to see how he could have amounted to anything more. He was a failure before he was famous.
He really, really hated being poor when he was young. Apparently, he had, like, *one* clean shirt that he had to save for the day he made house visits. Talk about rough. And before London, he started this school that totally flopped and lost most of his wife's money. Then, his play, *Irene*, which he thought would be the great tragedy of the age, well, it was just kinda…meh. Moderately successful, but nothing special, never revived. And that's when he started hanging out with this, uh, let's just say *colorful* character named Richard Savage, drinking and wandering around London at night. He was in his early thirties, living apart from his wife. But hey, that friendship actually led to his *Life of Savage*, which is considered one of the first great literary biographies in English, so, you know, silver linings.
Later on, Boswell described Johnson’s mind as this, like, gladiator in the Colosseum, constantly fighting off these "lions of despair." I mean, he saw the guy's mind as this vast amphitheater, and his judgment as this gladiator, you know, battling these anxieties that were, like, wild beasts in cells, just waiting to pounce. He'd beat them back, but they'd keep coming. He had this incredible defiance, though. He even said when he was really sick, "I will be conquered; I will not capitulate." A really, you know, stubborn guy! Someone even called his life "His resolute fight to become Samuel Johnson." Which, yeah, pretty much sums it up.
I think the thing that's often missed about Johnson is that, firstly, the importance of his networks. He didn't just magically become great. He developed these connections, you know, in his uncertain, uh, commercial career, and they really helped him out. And also, you know, his denial that everyone suffers mental decline as they age.
His first real break was with *The Gentleman's Magazine*, edited by Edward Cave. His initial contact with Cave? A bit presumptuous, if I'm honest. Johnson, who was nobody at the time, basically offered to, like, "fill a column" for cheap. And he even told Cave he could "improve" the poetry column! We don't know if that's why they didn't speak for a few years, but maybe it was. And get this, a year later, he wrote to a friend saying not much had happened to him, he didn't have much to say! This just after starting the school that didn't take off.
His wife, Elizabeth, or "Tetty" as he called her, she was a really important turning point for him. He was kinda drifting before her. I mean, he was twenty-five, no degree, unhappy schoolmaster – lucky to get the job. He had no literary prospects, because of bad eyesight, convulsions, a tendency to melancholy and sloth...and a superior attitude, like, he was too good for some work.
But then he fell in love with Tetty. She was older, but she seemed to be the only woman who truly loved him. And suddenly, he was writing, trying to find work, setting up the school, getting his act together. A good marriage, it turns out, was really the making of young Johnson. Jolted him right out of his indolence. He even did his first serious literary work around this time, translating this Portuguese Jesuit's travels. It took him so long to do it, he ended up dictating to a friend from his bed, can you imagine? Before Tetty, he was just adrift. Who knows where he would have ended up without her?
By 1737, though, that school had failed. Johnson went to London to look for work. He wanted fame, of course! He wrote to Edward Cave again, talking about Cave's "uncommon offers of encouragement." He also said he was a "stranger in London." He offered to translate something. Again, nothing came of it. But, then in 1738, when he was twenty-nine, he got his first big poem published in Cave's magazine. It's based on a satire, really good stuff, but Johnson wasn't a poet at heart. His real genius, you know, was for moral judgment.
At about this time, he couldn't get a job at a grammar school because he didn't have his degree, he'd left Oxford because he was broke. So, he wrote in his poem *London*, "SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPREST." Even though his writing career was starting, it wasn't his first choice. He apparently became an author "against his will." Someone even said that Johnson "never would work, but in order to eat." It took him a long time to really settle into being a writer. He didn't put his name on his work until 1748, a decade later, in his poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes."
And even later on, he met a friend from Oxford he hadn't seen in, like, fifty years. This friend was telling Boswell that Johnson should have been a lawyer. Johnson agreed! He apparently "often speculated" on how much better life might have been if he'd become a lawyer. Someone even told him he could have been Lord Chancellor if he had a law degree. That really hit a nerve. Johnson got visibly upset and said, "Why will you vex me by suggesting this, when it is too late?" Back in 1750, he had already written, "Converse with almost any man grown old in a profession, and you will find him regretting that he did not enter into some other course." But look, I'm sure that he wasn't seriously unhappy in his choice.
Johnson also had this ambition, this drive to achieve fame through literature because, well, other paths were closed to him. He knew that everyone has to "take existence on the terms on which it is given to him." Melancholy, poverty, lack of qualifications, even his pride, all prevented Johnson from, like, being successful in a "normal" profession. He was bad at networking, apparently. His play flopped partly because of this.
But he did his best. He made the most of what he had. He also believed that we aren't born to do one thing. He wrote that the "true Genius" is a mind with general powers. It's just, you know, accidentally directed to something. He could have been writing about himself, really.
So, it’s kind of amazing that it worked out, right? But Johnson's early struggles in London? They really made him who he was. They made him commercially minded, they made him read so much, and gave him so much knowledge of life. He wouldn't have become the writer he did without seeing so much of London.
He even said once that if he'd lived on an island, he would still be himself if he had lived there from fifteen to twenty-five because he would have been able to read, but if he had lived there from twenty-five to thirty-five - without the exposure to London, he would have been so different. Johnson thought all of life could be found at Charing Cross. To know London, you had to know the alleys and the side streets. He once picked up a prostitute in the street and carried her back to his place, where she stayed for weeks to recover. He loved taverns. A great city, he thought, was a "school for studying life." He became the writer he did by studying life as much as reading books.
He visited Oxford in 1754, the year before the Dictionary was published. He visited a college friend who seemed to have great promise but didn't make it. He saw it as an opportunity. "About the same time of life, Meeke was left behind at Oxford...and I went to London to get my living." This slow building of his reputation, his connections, is what led to the booksellers commissioning him to write the dictionary. It wasn't easy. But London matched him with an opportunity.
This might be the most important fact of his life: Oxford was all to young Johnson. Status, security, position. But that would have reduced the opportunities for his abilities to collide with what made him great. London put him under better influences. He benefited from those early writing scrambles. By adapting, Johnson developed as a writer for an audience, not just academics. And he also had the scholarly side. You know, it all came together for him. Leaving Oxford felt like a failure. But it turned out to be one of the best things that happened to him.
But being in London wasn't enough. He needed to find the right people to influence him. Someone even wrote that most of his published works were conceived in association with others, that he rarely travelled unless he was taken anywhere, and he didn't speak until spoken to. He even admitted that he needed others to do things for him, "thanks to the initiative of others," one biographer wrote. I mean, that's exaggerated because Johnson started a school, went to London, wrote *Irene* and *London* himself, and he acquired encyclopedic knowledge alone. But it's not entirely false.
He needed help to make him commercially successful and to bring him projects. And before the Dictionary, someone who had predicted great things wrote that he was "a great genius – quite lost both to himself and to the world." He needed partnerships.
It wasn't until middle age that he got the opportunities he needed. But there was more to it than luck. Johnson became commercially minded. His dad was a bookseller, so he knew the business.
Johnson was well known as a talented writer in Grub Street, but that was it. None of his projects had gotten past the proposal stage.
The Dictionary was a booksellers' project. Johnson was friends with bookseller and publisher Robert Dodsley, who was well connected. Dodsley had the entrepreneurial spirit Johnson lacked. When he first suggested the Dictionary, Johnson said it was a good idea, but that he "shouldn't undertake it." Dodsley knew Johnson. He had bought *London* from him. He knew how to convince Johnson to do it. Dodsley persuaded other booksellers to invest in the project. He was like Johnson's agent, as well as his publisher. Johnson called him his patron.
Dodsley also had good connections. He moved to London and got a job in Charles Dartiquenave's house, and Dartiquenave was well connected in literary London. Dodsley published many big names.
This was the connection that Johnson needed. And Johnson had the capacity to make Dodsley's vision real. Who else could have done it? Johnson was one of the most knowledgeable people of his time. It was an age of information, newspapers, books, sermons, dictionaries. Codifying knowledge was everywhere. Johnson called it "this age of dictionaries."
All of the members of The Club, the dining club for Johnson that Sir Joshua Reynolds created, were engaged in intellectual work. Adam Smith was the father of economics; Reynolds founded the Royal Academy; and Joseph Banks was a famous botanist and president of the Royal Society. At The Club, Johnson "talked for victory." He could hold his own among all these men.
What made Johnson stand out was his ability to work alone. It was Johnson who read the source material, selected the quotations, and wrote the definitions. His selection of quotations became an anthology of moral and literary wisdom, helping to define the canon of English writing. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française had taken fifty-five years to his nine and forty workers to his six. Similarly, When Diderot edited the Encyclopédie he had material from one hundred and forty writers. When Henry Murray worked on the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1880s, 750 people were involved.
The same thing that made him the center of The Club made him Dictionary Johnson: his vast reading. "You can never be wise unless you love reading."
Johnson had read books people at Oxford hadn't. They wondered that a schoolboy should know Macrobius.
He said young people should read five hours a day to acquire a great deal of knowledge. "In my early years I read very hard." He even said, "I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now." When he was seventy, he said, "It is a man’s own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.”
He found it impossible to stick to any plan of study. "I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.”
The range of subjects Johnson knew about is extraordinary. In 1734, he translated The Voyage to Abyssinia. In the 1740s, he offered to write a play about Charles XII of Sweden and produce a history of the British Parliament. He could explain the process of making enamel lining for pots out of bones. Johnson paid close attention to all sorts of details, even his belly. This wasn’t mere gluttony. Boswell reports that "he was, or affected to be, a man of very nice discernment in the science of cooking." In a few surviving letters from the period when he wrote the dictionary, he requested to borrow (or have returned) the following books: A Treatise on Opium; A Serious Call to Devout and Holy Life; A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy; Angliae Notitiae, or the Present State of England; Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion; and the catalogue of the library of 'historian, diplomat, churchman, and bibliophile Jacques-Auguste De Thou'.
Johnson learned wherever he went. He was advised “to obtain some general principles of every science”.
He was supposed to be able to read a page by little more than looking at it. He was unmethodical. He claimed never to have finished a book or a poem. When he made a plan for the systematic study of all branches of knowledge he abandoned it. He was an erratic, unsystematic worker, who sometimes struggled to concentrate. But Adam Smith thought Johnson the best read man he knew. And he read intensely.
Johnson grew up in a bookshop. The customers of Michael Johnson’s shop were used to seeing the awkward boy sitting in the shop, a book held close to his good eye. Instead of going to church on Sunday, he went to the local fields where he walked and read.
It is the range of Johnson’s knowledge that makes the Dictionary so astonishing. It was often used for general education as well as a reference work. Johnson was "a man of facts and truths." It was the Dictionary’s "clearness of definition" as well as its "solidity, honesty, insights, and successful method” that really shone through. He created a unique, inventive, useful, serious and entertaining book. It made him famous, justly so, and gave him an enduring reputation as the great celebrity of his age.
But success was not what it might have been. Johnson spent most of the money he was paid for the Dictionary paying his literary assistants. To pay for living expenses, he wrote The Rambler, a twice-weekly essay. It was not always so popular with early readers. He was incredibly earnest, but “His difficulty was in providing enough light entertainment to satisfy ordinary readers.” There was a recognition of Johnson’s superb achievement among the elite.
He had waited and waited for his success. At forty he was an unsuccessful poet and dramatist who made his money as a hack. He was two years into his work on the Dictionary and had to redesign his entire scheme of work. Before he finished writing the Dictionary his wife died and then his mentor Edward Cave. Shortly after he finished the work, he spent the night in debtors’ jail.
Johnson was always nervous about the possibility of mental collapse. He said, "It is yet more dreadful to consider that the powers of the mind are equally liable to change, that understanding may make its appearance and depart, that it may blaze and expire.” This was his great productive period - the Dictionary, The Rambler, The Vanity of Human Wishes. He then worked on his edition of Shakespeare, The Idler and Rasselas. And throughout, he was nervous that his mind might blaze and expire.
By 1762, the fifty-three-year-old Johnson had finally done his work. He was famous, but not as famous as he had hoped. And he was anxious about his idleness. Scared that he had wasted his God-given talents, before he died he was sometimes literally terrified of going to hell. That is why, aged sixty-eight, he accepted a commission from three publishers to write The Lives of the Poets. Work would keep him sane.
His early years of immersive learning seem to have been important to him as well.
He was a firm believer that getting older didn’t have to mean getting less intelligent. Writing The Lives of the Poets was a way to demonstrate that his powers were not in decline.
Johnson was more condemnatory about the idea of mental decline. "That is not true, Sir...You, who perhaps are forty-eight, may still improve if you will try." There was never any excuse, for Johnson, to settle for what we are or to stop trying. There were benefits to work: "Employments... prevent melancholy.”
Johnson wrote, "That natural jealousy which makes every man unwilling to allow much excellence in another, always produces a disposition to believe that the mind grows old with the body; and that he, whom we are now forced to confess superior, is hastening daily to a level with ourselves.”
Lives was also a way of working on his character and what we would call his mental health.
He was a firm believer that getting older didn’t have to mean getting less intelligent. Writing The Lives of the Poets was a way to demonstrate that his powers were not in decline.
His resolutions were often so similar because a good resolution will help us make progress but never be complete. Wisdom is the work of a lifetime. He wasn’t just trying to be a great writer; he was working to be a good man, to have a calm state of mind, to be at peace with himself. He wrote in the Life of Pope: "The distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility.”
Every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes – that could be a motto for Johnson and for so many late bloomers. He spent his whole life dedicated to learning and practicing good morals. As a biographer, Johnson was not concerned with "vulgar greatness" but with "the minute details of daily life.” "The heroes of literary as well as civil history, have been very often no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved."
His letters are full of moral advice to improve life in small ways and big.
His sense of moral purpose informed his literary criticism. He believed "the end of writing is to instruct."
This is what makes Boswell's biography so splendid. It is full of Johnson's practical wisdom. Johnson loved business, loved to have his wisdom actually operate on real life. He was known for his near obsession with truthfulness. He had much to say on the regulation of mood: "Vivacity is much an art and depends greatly on habit.” And on the regulation of your own character. His moral advice deals with almost anything, unified by the idea that "of the short life we have" we ought to "make the best use for yourself and your friends.”
Being a genius isn’t enough. “Nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.” Our lives, if they are well lived, are long works. Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. Resolve, work, fail and resolve again.
"The time comes at last, in which life has no more to promise” and all we can do then is remember our lives; and "virtue will be all that we can recollect with pleasure.”