Johnson, Samuel, known as Dr Johnson 1709-84
English writer, critic, lexicographer, and conversationalist

Dr Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, the son of a bookseller, and he read voraciously in his father's shop. He was educated at Lichfield Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford, but left in 1731 without taking a degree. He taught briefly at a school in Market Bosworth, and then moved to Birmingham where he turned to writing. In 1735 he married Elizabeth ('Tetty') Porter, a widow 20 years older than himself, and they opened a school at Edial, near Lichfield; one of the pupils was the future actor David Garrick. The school failed, and in 1737, accompanied by the young Garrick, the Johnsons moved to London where he finished writing a tragedy, Irene (not staged for 12 years), and earned a living writing parliamentary reports for The Gentleman's Magazine. In it he published (anonymously) his first poem, London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.

In 1744 he produced a topical and successful Life of his friend Richard Savage. Meanwhile he had been cataloguing the great library of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford (1689-1741), and was able further to indulge his huge appetite for reading. In 1747 he issued a prospectus of a Dictionary of the English Language, which was to take him eight years to complete. During this time he published a long didactic poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), based on another of Juvenal's satires. Garrick fulfilled a boyhood promise by producing his Irene at Drury Lane Theatre (1749), and Johnson himself wrote and edited, practically single-handed, a bi-weekly periodical, The Rambler, which ran for 208 issues (1750-52), full of moral essays written (anonymously) by himself. In 1752 his wife died, plunging him into lasting depression.

His great Dictionary appeared in 1755, which gave rise to a celebrated letter in which Johnson disdained an offer of patronage from Lord Chesterfield. Johnson was awarded an honorary degree at Oxford, but he had to continue literary hack-work to earn a living, contributing reviews for the Literary Magazine, and The Idler series of papers in The Universal Chronicle (1758-60). During this time his mother died, and he wrote his moral fable, Rasselas: The Prince of Abyssinia (1759), in a week to defray the funeral expenses. With the accession of George III in 1760, Johnson was granted a pension of �300 for life, which brought him financial security for the first time. In 1763 he met the young Scot, James Boswell, who would become his biographer, and with whom he would share a delightful tour of the Hebrides in 1773 (A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, 1775).

In 1764 he founded the Literary Club with a circle of friends, including Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith; later members were Boswell, Garrick and Charles James Fox. In 1765 he published his critical edition of Shakespeare's plays (8 vols), with its classic Preface, and then set to work on his monumental Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (10 vols, 1779-81). In that year his friend, the brewer Henry Thrale, died; his widow, Hester Thrale (see Hester Piozzi), who had looked after Johnson for many years, fell in love with an Italian musician, Gabriele Piozzi, and Johnson's wounded fury at their marriage in 1784 provoked a total estrangement. He died in dejection, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Bibliography: Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (1977); D J Greene, Samuel Johnson (1970); James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).