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The house in which Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September, 1709, still stands at the corner of the market-place in Lichfield. His father was a small bookseller in that town, so that from the first Johnson grew up in the company of books. So widely had he read by the time he went to Oxford at the age of eighteen that his tutor told him “he was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there.” Although “miserably poor” and subject to fits of melancholy that were at times divided only by a thin partition from madness, and cursed by a kind of St. Vitus’s dance and by scrofula which had disfigured his face and deprived him of the use of one eye, Johnson determined to “fight his way by his literature and his wit.” After leaving Oxford, he made various unsuccessful attempts to get regular employment. At the age of twenty-six he married a widow twenty years his senior, who, according to Garrick, was “a fat woman with red painted cheeks, fantastic dress, and affected manners.” But the marriage was a love match on both sides, and in spite of ridicule Johnson’s affection remained constant and unshakable. His wife brought him a meagre fortune, and with this he opened a school for “young gentlemen” near Lichfield. But the number of his pupils never exceeded seven, of whom the Garrick brothers were two. So early in 1737 he set out for London with three acts of a tragedy, Irene, which he offered to Drury Lane without success. In the following year he began writing his parliamentary debates for The Gentleman’s Magazine. In 1744 he wrote his powerful Life of Savage—forty-eight octavo pages at a sitting. In 1747 he issued the plan of his dictionary inscribed to Lord Chesterfield and began work on it at Gough Square. Two years later Garrick produced Irene at Drury Lane, and although it brought Johnson quite a nice little sum of money, it was judged on the whole to be a failure. In 1750, “while he was bearing his burden with dull patience and beating the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution,” he began writing The Rambler, which appeared twice a week and lasted for two years. Mrs. Johnson died in March 1751 and Johnson wrote a sermon for her funeral that was never preached. By 1755 the dictionary was ready for publication, and Chesterfield, who had ignored the prospectus, delivered himself of a few flippant remarks at Johnson’s expense in The World. It was on account of this that he brought down on his head the formidable letter of February the seventh. The dictionary appeared in two volumes on 15 April. In 1759 Johnson’s mother died, and he wrote Rasselas to pay the expenses of the funeral. Three years later, with the accession of George the Third, he received a pension of £300 a year, and from that time he was free of pecuniary troubles and able to spend the rest of his life talking in the midst of a brilliant company. Among his friends were Gibbon, Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith, Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, R. B. Sheridan, and Sir William Jones, the Orientalist. At this time he lived with Miss Williams, the blind orphan daughter of a man of learning, and a Mr. Levett, “an obscure practiser in physic.”

It is unnecessary to detail the events of the remaining twenty-two years, as they were passed in comparative indolence. His friendship with Henry Thrale began about 1759, and the Thrales’ fine house at Streatham Park became, until 1782, Johnson’s chief asylum. The Thrales, he said, “soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched.” On 16 May, 1768, he met Boswell. The famous journey to the Highlands was made in 1773, and in 1774 he visited Wales, and the next year Paris. After 1782 his health rapidly declined, and he died after an attack of dropsy on 13 December, 1784, in Bolt Court, Fleet Street.

His chief works are as follows: A translation of Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, 1735. London, 1738. Life of Savage, 1744. Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, 1745. The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749. Irene, 1749. A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 1759. A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, 1775. Lives of the English Poets, 1779. See Boswell, Johnson’s Letters, ed. by Birkbeck Hill, Essay on Life and Genius by Arthur Murphy, Anecdotes by Madame Piozzi, Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, also Johnson and his Critics by Birkbeck Hill.