The plaque, on the
east wall of the building, reads:
| |
Erected by the
Dr
Samuel
Johnson
Author.
Lived here.
B. 1709.
D. 1784.
Society of Arts
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The Samuel Johnson
website [visit link]
gives a brief biography:
"A brief
biography of Samuel Johnson is a difficult task, but here we go. Samuel
Johnson's life covers many points, but it's a story about overcoming
considerable adversity, to ultimately become one of the best known men of his
age.
Johnson was
born in Lichfield, England, on September 18, 1709; his father Michael was a
bookseller. Johnson was not a healthy infant, and there was considerable
question as to whether he would survive: he was baptized almost immediately.
Johnson was scarred from scrofula, and suffered a loss of hearing and was blind
in one eye, thanks largely to nursing from a tubercular nursemaid. During his
toddler years, he had an open "issue" in his arm, to drain fluids. Stop for a
moment, and think about a small child being singled out in this way, and what it
must have meant.
In spite of
these infirmities, there are early tales of his independence. Once, when his
babysitter failed to pick him up on time from nursery school, Johnson decided he
would get home on his own, crawling on all fours in order to see the gutter and
avoid falling in. The babysitter followed at some distance, but when Johnson saw
her watching, protested against her following him, vehemently.
The
availability of the books in his father's shop, and his natural proclivity for
learning, contributed to his having extensive knowledge at an early age. When
Johnson spent time with an elder cousin, he was exposed to a broad range of
thinking and cultivation, of the sort he wouldn't have ordinarily seen in
Lichfield. He later attended Oxford for about a year, but left for financial
reasons. His poverty at Oxford was noticed by another student, who left a pair
of new shoes outside Johnson's door during the night; while Johnson's poverty
was itself humiliating, the fact that another would notice and make Johnson a
beneficiary of charity enraged him.
So Johnson had
to leave Oxford; it must have been a horrible disappointment to someone who was
so learned, to leave for financial reasons, and see his academic inferiors
succeed in an arena where he couldn't. During this period he went into a severe
depression; his friend Edmund Hector helped him remain productive, in spite of
the depression.
In 1735,
Johnson married Elizabeth "Tetty" Porter, a woman several years older than him:
she was 46, and he 25.
As a young
man, Johnson tried his hand at a career as a schoolmaster, and was
unsuccessful-- largely because he didn't have a degree. To some extent, his
ungainly appearance, twitches, and mannerisms made it difficult to maintain the
respect of his students. He eventually (1737) went to London to seek his
fortune, and found employment as a writer for various periodicals. In addition
to writing book reviews and derivative biographies, at one point he was assigned
the task of writing thinly disguised reports of the debates in Parliament.
(Censorship ruled out actual reportage, so Johnson had to write from
surreptitiously-taken notes, filling them out in much the same way as a TV movie
made today might embellish a skeleton of fact into a drama. The identities of
the speakers were thinly disguised; readers could tell who was who, and the
government was unwilling to admit to the underlying truth.)
Johnson
obtained some notice with his works London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes
(1749) -- both of which are considered great poems -- but his efforts in the
1750's are part of why he's considered a titan. This decade saw the creation of
his Dictionary (1755), his Rambler essays (1750-52), his Idler essays (1758-60),
and Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). This was a trying decade for him: his
wife died in 1752 (just after the cessation of the Rambler essays), and she was
often on his mind.
Johnson
received a government pension in 1762. He was reluctant to accept it, but on
accepting the purpose as being for past efforts, and not future efforts, he
accepted it. The funds were a significant help, and the periods where he was
threatened with debtor's prison were put behind him.
Shortly after
this period, Johnson met a young Scot named James Boswell (in 1763) in Thomas
Davies bookstore in London. The two became fast friends. Boswell took notes of
their conversations, and leveraged those notes and other material into the
mammoth, landmark biography "The Life of Samuel Johnson." (The full title is a
bit longer.)
Johnson's
output included far more than just his output of the 1750's, of course. It also
includes a complete edition of Shakespeare; a number of frequently cited
political tracts; sermons; a description of his 1773 tour to Scotland with
Boswell, with considerable discussion of the change of an era; and a series of
biographies of numerous British poets (The Lives of the Poets), commissioned to
accompany reprints of each poet's works.
Johnson died
on December 13, 1784. Boswell's biography was published in 1791. Boswell's
biography, by the way, was not the first, nor was it the last; it is, however, a
popular place to start."