Samuel Johnson

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. They moved to London in 1737, working as a political journalist and translator and starting to earn some money from his poetry. 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 tens of thousands of quotations that displayed a 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 as 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.

Johnson was a conservative and 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.

further reading

• Boswell's Life, downloadable etext from Project Gutenberg
• Martin, Peter. Samuel Johnson: A Biography (2008), standard scholarly biography
• Rogers, Pat. "Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004) online edn, May 2009

Primary sources

• Johnson, Samuel. Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, ed. by Donald Greene (2009) excerpt and text search