Samuel Johnson
From Conservapedia
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), almost invariably referred to in literary circles as Dr. Johnson, was an English writer and lexicographer based in London.
The son of a bookseller of modest means, he attended local schools and spent a year at Oxford. He was largely self-educated, using the stock in the family bookstore as his base. (There were no public libraries.) Unable to obtain a teaching position he started to write for money; in 1735 he married a wealthy widow Elizabeth Porter, née Jervis (1689–1752), twenty years his senior. He moved to London in 1737, working as a political journalist and translator and starting to earn some money from his poetry; he had no children.
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The Dictionary
In 1746 a consortium of publishers contracted with Johnson to produce a dictionary; he used the advance money to hire assistants and finished in nine years.
His master work is his Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, it was the first great dictionary of English (or any language), and was based on 100,000 quotations that displayed his complete mastery of the body of English literature as well as the technical sources in law, medicine and engineering. Each word was defined precisely and each supported with quotations showing the historical usages. (A religious man, Johnson refused to quote writers he deemed irreligious.) The Dictionary not only shaped all subsequent dictionaries (such as that by American Noah Webster), but it helped shape and standardize the language and he prepared three new enlarged editions; other editors kept expanding the work in the next century.
By 1764 Johnson was the center of the Literary Club, which featured many of the leading intellectuals and artists of London; he dominated by his quick wit and vast range of knowledge.
Johnson was a conservative supporter of King George III. He wrote "Taxation No Tyranny" (March 1775) to instruct Americans that they should quietly and obediently pay their taxes. Johnson often ridiculed the American Revolution -- as indeed he ridiculed most politicians in London in his brilliant conversations, which were often recorded in the touchstone of all English biographies, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.
A man of enormous energy despite perpetual poor health and erudition, Johnson was a polymath with an unusually wide range of knowledge. He wrote for nearly all genres excelling in literary criticism, satire, plays, biography, the moral essay, fiction, scholarly editing, travel writing, political pamphleteering, journalism, and of course lexicography. He wrote fine both in English and in Latin, composed noteworthy sermons and impressive prayers, and left a candid diary, and superb letters.
Bibliography
Works
- A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755. (Available online from Google Book Search.)
- The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759.
- A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775.
- Lives of the Poets, 1799-81.
- Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene, 2009. (excerpt and text search)
Biographies
- Bate, Walter Jackson. Samuel Johnson. Harcourt, 1977.
- Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. 1791. (available online from Project Gutenberg)
- DeMaria, Robert. The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography. Blackwell, 1993.
- Lipking, Lawrence. Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author. Harvard UP, 1998.
- Martin, Peter. Samuel Johnson: A Biography (2008), standard scholarly biography
- Nokes, David. Samuel Johnson: A Life. Macrae/Holt, 2009.
- Rogers, Pat. "Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004) online edn, May 2009
Critical studies
- Reddick, Allen. The Making of Johnson's Dictionary, 1746-1773. Cambridge UP, 1990.
