Our good Doctor

From my college years to the present day, one towering intellectual figure who always seems to be standing beside me (and indeed, as so often seems, just over my shoulder), is the good and great Doctor Samuel Johnson. Poet, pamphleteer, essayist, novelist, all around man-of-letters, wit, philanthropist, Tory moralist, apologist for monarchy, friend of the poor (often being so himself), Shakespeare fanatic, foe of slavery, anti-war author, anti-imperialist, lover of cats, wooer of older women… somehow no matter which way you turn in the English world of letters, Johnson is standing well within view with either a solemn pronouncement or a ready quip. To say Dr Johnson has been an ‘inspiration’ on my entire education and body of intellectual work, such as it is, is both obvious and a severe understatement.

Samuel Johnson, born in 1709 in Lichfield in the West Midlands to the keeper of a bookshop named Michael Johnson and his wife Sarah, was sickly and scrofulous as an infant. He received baptism very soon after birth, and his parent sought for him the ‘royal touch’ from Queen Anne, which was supposed to cure scrofula. Johnson kept with him for the rest of his life a ribbon commemorating the event. However, his scrofula was not cured, and the resulting treatments left him scarred, nearly blind in his left eye and deaf in one ear. Johnson early on developed a certain resentment of his subsequent pampering, including several attempts to get away from his governess on his own power in his very early youth.

However, for young Samuel Johnson, being raised in a bookstore had its advantages. He had a good memory, his mother having encouraged him from the age of four to memorise prayers from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Being inherently curious, he read prodigiously, and attained a breadth of knowledge and level of erudition matched by few other young men in England, let alone Lichfield. He attended grammar school, and even studied at Pembroke College in Oxford for a brief time. After his first year of study, however, parents struggled with his upkeep, and other students began to notice his poverty. One of them left a brand-new pair of shoes outside his room in secret – which wounded young Johnson’s dignity (he hated being the object of charity). Thereafter he left Oxford; this academic failure led him into a deep bout of depression – an affliction which would return to him throughout the rest of his life.

He found employment as a tutor in Market Bosworth and later Birmingham. It was at this time he undertook the translations of Jerónimo Lobo’s accounts of his journeys in Abyssinia, which would eventually be published in abridged form as A Voyage to Abyssinia, and which would later inspire him in part to write Rasselas. Johnson accompanied a friend of his from Birmingham, Harry Porter, during an illness which would end his life. Several months later, he began a romantic relationship with his widow Elizabeth, who would later become his wife (over the objections of both the Johnson and the Porter families). Though it was, in Johnson’s words, a ‘love-match’ on both sides, their marriage was not a happy one. She supported him through several ventures, including a failed school in Edial and his famous Dictionary, which brought them very little success in the short run. She began to drink and to decline into ill-health – and the opiate medications she took for her illness robbed her of what strength she had left. Samuel Johnson grieved intensely over the death of his ‘Tetty’ in 1752, and suffered overwhelming guilt over what he considered his own part in her ill-health – a life of poverty and a series of financial failures.

During much of his years of marriage, he worked both as a private tutor and as a ‘hack’ writer for various London publications – putting his pen to book reviews, biographies and other works of literary critique. He also wrote his poems, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes at this point. He also befriended the poet Richard Savage, whose Life he would recount in a touchingly-personal biography. He spent much of this time in debt and in fear of landing in debtor’s prison; perhaps it is for this reason as well that he continued to have a ‘radical’ degree of sympathy for poor and indebted people.

In 1750 Johnson began working on The Rambler. He also befriended the publicist Samuel Richardson (who bailed him out of a small debt) and the painter Joshua Reynolds (the same one so loathed by the later Pre-Raphaelites). Samuel Johnson made a name for himself as something of an anti-war activist when he began publishing essays attacking Britain’s involvement in the Seven Years’ War. He also worked on an edition of the plays of William Shakespeare, the essays of The Idler, and – in 1759 – his only novel, Rasselas.

Johnson’s financial troubles largely continued until he was given a pension – which he took with deep reluctance – from King George III; a year after that, he began a friendship with a young Scotsman named James Boswell, who wrote the first and perhaps the most influential of the biographies of Johnson and later accompanied him on a journey to the Hebrides. He met the Thrales at this period as well – his (in)famous correspondence with Hester Thrale would prove a boon to later biographers.

As Johnson grew older, it seems he grew much more vocal in his political opinions. He opposed an English war with Spain over the Falklands, grew particularly voluble in his opposition to slavery and his support for abolition and slave revolts, and later made known his vocal opposition to American independence in Taxation No Tyranny. He also embarked on an ambitious ten-volume project, The Lives of the Poets, which covered mostly his contemporaries.

His chronic ill-health caught up with him after his return home – he began to suffer particularly from gout, and also suffered a stroke. He lived with Hester Thrale until 1784, when she decided to take up with an Italian musician, Gabriel Piozzi. Largely alone, with his friends engaged elsewhere, he died later that year, on the thirteenth of December.

It is my regret, actually, that I am familiar with such a very small portion of Johnson’s monumental corpus, but – as I intimated above – that which I have read has been incredibly influential on my intellectual development since high school. Johnson’s deep Tory love of order and stability, combined with his keen social conscience – particularly with regard to what would now be considered the ‘third world’ – and equally-profound High Church Anglican piety, assuredly left their impressions on the priorities of my own life. I cannot really consider him a ‘saint’ (despite his being commemorated on the calendar of the Church of England), but he certainly has been a spiritual model. May God indeed have mercy upon the soul of His servant – for His servant he tried to be and was – grant him rest and make his memory to be æternal!