Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

Samuel Johnson was born on September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller of modest and declining fortunes, and Sarah Ford. He was a sickly infant, afflicted with scrofula, the "king's evil," for which his mother carried him to London in 1712 to be touched by Queen Anne, a ceremony that did nothing for him. The disease left him scarred, half-blind in one eye, and partly deaf, and he would later be marked by involuntary tics and convulsive gestures that unsettled strangers. He grew up in his father's shop among books, reading whatever he pleased, and his memory and appetite for learning were evident early. Lichfield Grammar School gave him a thorough grounding in Latin, and he moved to Stourbridge for a time before his father's finances allowed one year at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1728. Poverty forced him to leave in 1729 without a degree. Oxford later honored him with a master's degree in 1755 and a doctorate in civil law in 1775, which is why he is remembered as Dr. Johnson.

The years after Oxford were hard. He failed as an assistant schoolmaster and ran a short-lived school of his own near Lichfield. In 1735 he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow some twenty years his senior, whom he called Tetty and loved devotedly until her death in 1752. In 1737 he left for London with a former pupil, David Garrick, and lived by his pen in the world of Grub Street, writing for Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine, composing parliamentary reports, and producing the poem London in 1738. His great poem The Vanity of Human Wishes followed in 1749, and the periodical essays of The Rambler ran from 1750 to 1752.

His religious life was earnest, anxious, and largely hidden. He was raised in the Church of England, and he remained a High Church Anglican and a Tory throughout his life. As a young man at Oxford he had read William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which he later said was the first book to make him take religion seriously. He prayed regularly and kept private devotional records, later published as Prayers and Meditations, which reveal a man tormented by fear of damnation, by guilt over his idleness, and by repeated failed resolutions to rise early and order his days. He suffered from what we would now call severe depression, which he feared might tip into madness, and he dreaded death more than most of his friends could understand. His biographer James Boswell recorded this fear with unusual candor.

In 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to produce a dictionary of the English language. He had hoped for the patronage of Lord Chesterfield, who offered little help until the work was nearly finished, and Johnson's famous letter rejecting the belated attention remains a landmark in the history of patronage. He worked on the project for nine years with a small team of assistants in his Gough Square house, and A Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755. It was the first work of its kind to illustrate meanings with quotations drawn from the best English authors, and it made his reputation.

Tetty's death in 1752 left him in lasting grief. In 1762 the Crown granted him a pension of three hundred pounds a year, which ended his financial insecurity. He founded the Literary Club in 1764 with Joshua Reynolds, and his circle came to include Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and, from 1763, Boswell. His later friendship with Hester Thrale and her family gave him a second home until her remarriage in 1784 hurt him deeply. He published an edition of Shakespeare in 1765 and Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets between 1779 and 1781. His health declined through the early 1780s, and he died in London on December 13, 1784, receiving communion beforehand, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

His Writing and Its Influence

Johnson began writing for money and never entirely lost the habit of regarding the pen as a trade. His early work for Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine was anonymous and hurried, but it taught him the compression and moral precision that became his signature. His chief influences were the classical satirists, Juvenal above all, whom he imitated in London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, together with the Anglican divines of the seventeenth century and the sermon tradition of his own church. William Law's A Serious Call set the terms of his private religion, and the sceptical and melancholy strain of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a book he once said got him out of bed earlier than he wished, spoke to his own temperament.

His writing is best understood as moral reflection conducted in public. The Vanity of Human Wishes surveys ambition, learning, military glory, and long life, and finds each of them wanting, concluding that the only reasonable petition is for a mind submitted to heaven. The Rambler and the later Idler essays apply the same eye to the daily self-deceptions of ordinary people: procrastination, envy, the fear of solitude, the flight into projects and amusements. His moral tale Rasselas, written in the evenings of a single week in 1759 to pay for his mother's funeral, sends a prince out of a pleasant valley in search of a fulfilled life and brings him home with none found, the point being that earthly happiness is a chase and the only durable settlement lies beyond it. The Dictionary and the Lives of the Poets belong to a different order of achievement, but even there the moralist keeps appearing. His sermons, many written for others and published after his death, and the prayers and meditations, which were published posthumously, show the devotional centre of the man more plainly than anything he put his name to in life.

His theology was conventional by the standards of the Church of England of his day: he believed in a real atonement, in the authority of the Church, in the rightness of the established order, and in the necessity of fear alongside trust. What marks him out is not novelty of doctrine but the refusal to make religion comfortable. He distrusted enthusiasm, whether Methodist or mystical, and had little patience for those who claimed assurance of salvation. He held that the Christian life is a labour of repentance and obedience whose outcome remains uncertain until the end, and he practised this view in his own tormented prayers.

The Christian reception of Johnson has been steady and largely admiring. Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, fixed his image as a great Christian moralist and made his sayings part of the English inheritance. Nineteenth-century Anglicans and Tractarians, drawn to his High Church loyalties and his gravity before death, claimed him as one of their own, and later writers, among them T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis, praised the moral seriousness and plain good sense of his criticism. The publication of his private prayers revealed how much anguish lay under the public confidence, and modern readers, including many Christians who struggle with depression or scrupulosity, have found in him a rare example of faith held without consolation and sustained by discipline rather than feeling. His reputation has never suffered serious eclipse, though critics have sometimes questioned his Toryism and his harshness toward Scotland, dissenters, and the American colonists.

Who should read Johnson: Readers of this library who want to see how an educated, honest Anglican of the eighteenth century held faith alongside doubt, fear, and failure, and who would like a counterweight to the optimism of later devotional writing. He is especially useful to those who know the evangelical revival and the Wesleyan tradition from within and want to meet the High Church sensibility that stood across from them. He is not a teacher of spiritual formation and does not offer a method of prayer or a map of the inner life. He is for readers willing to sit with a mind that took sin, judgment, and death seriously and never claimed more peace than it had.