The Life of Samuel Johnson

Summary

The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling. At Pembroke College, Oxford, poverty cuts his studies short; there he reads William Law's Serious Call and begins to think in earnest about religion, and in the vacation of 1729 he falls into the deep melancholy that never fully leaves him. He marries the widow Elizabeth Porter, his Tetty, opens a failed school at Edial, and in 1737 walks to London with his pupil David Garrick to live by writing for Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine. The middle years bring London (1738), The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), the Rambler essays (1750-52), the death of Tetty in 1752, and the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its famous letter rebuking Lord Chesterfield's late patronage. Rasselas follows his mother's death in 1759, and a royal pension of three hundred pounds a year in 1762 frees him from want. In 1763 the twenty-two-year-old Boswell is introduced to him in Thomas Davies's shop in Covent Garden, and from then on the book becomes a record of talk: dinners at the Mitre, the Literary Club founded with Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and others in 1764, life with the Thrales at Streatham, the stone kicked to answer Bishop Berkeley, the remark on patriotism, the dinner Boswell contrives in 1776 to bring Johnson together with John Wilkes, and the household of dependents, among them the practitioner Robert Levett, the blind poet Anna Williams and his servant Francis Barber. Johnson's opinions on London, Scotland, marriage, death, cant and religion are given in his own words, along with his prayers and his fear of judgement. The last chapters record the Lives of the Poets (1779-81), the deaths of friends, a paralytic stroke in June 1783, dropsy, and his final illness, in which he receives the sacrament, tells his servant to attend to the salvation of his soul, and dies on 13 December 1784; he is buried in Westminster Abbey. Boswell published the Life in two quarto volumes in May 1791. The library text is Charles Grosvenor Osgood's one-volume abridgment of 1917, which keeps Boswell's own words but omits most of his notes and commentary, Johnson's legal opinions and most of the letters.

Plot or Argument

• Introduction and preface (Osgood, 1917)

  Osgood explains what his abridgment leaves out and praises Boswell as an artist who gathered material for twenty years, recording talk by memory and a private shorthand, and who keeps himself in the background so that Johnson can speak.

• 1709-1737: Lichfield, Oxford and marriage

  Johnson's birth and parents, the scrofula and Queen Anne's touch, Lichfield school, the short residence at Pembroke College, Law's Serious Call, the melancholy of 1729, marriage to Elizabeth Porter, and the school at Edial.

• 1737-1754: Grub Street and the Rambler

  Johnson comes to London with Garrick, writes for the Gentleman's Magazine, publishes London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, sees his tragedy Irene staged, writes the Rambler, and loses his wife in 1752. The plan of the Dictionary is dedicated to Lord Chesterfield.

• 1755-1762: The Dictionary, Rasselas and the pension

  The Dictionary appears with Johnson's letter to Chesterfield, his Oxford degree and his playful definitions of lexicographer and Grub Street. His mother dies and he writes Rasselas; in 1762 the king grants him a pension.

• 1763-1765: Boswell meets Johnson

  Boswell's first meeting in Davies's shop, the evenings at the Mitre, the walk to Harwich and the stone kicked against Berkeley, the founding of the Literary Club in 1764, the friendship with Henry and Hester Thrale, and the Dublin doctorate of 1765.

• 1766-1775: Talk, travel and controversy

  Conversations on Corsica, General Paoli, Rousseau, death, Goldsmith's plays and Bunyan; the tour of the Hebrides in 1773 (told in Boswell's separate Journal); the political pamphlets of the 1770s; and the 1775 remark on patriotism and the Oxford doctorate in law.

• 1776-1779: Wilkes, Dodd and the Lives

  Boswell arranges the dinner at the Dillys' where Johnson meets John Wilkes; Johnson's sermon written for the condemned clergyman William Dodd; long talk at Ashbourne on London, melancholy and the management of the mind; the beginning of the Lives of the Poets.

• 1780-1783: Losses and the stroke

  The Lives are completed in 1781; Henry Thrale and Robert Levett die; Johnson takes opium reluctantly for his breathing, suffers a paralytic stroke in June 1783 and describes it in a letter to Mrs. Thrale; his dropsy begins that winter.

• 1784: Last year and death

  A brief recovery, a final journey to Lichfield and Ashbourne, the break with Mrs. Thrale over her marriage to Gabriel Piozzi, his last prayer before receiving the sacrament, his death on 13 December, and the funeral in Westminster Abbey attended by members of the Literary Club.

Characters

• Samuel Johnson, subject

  Lexicographer, moralist and talker; devout, melancholy, generous and formidable in argument.

• James Boswell, author and companion

  Young Scot who records Johnson's talk, often provoking it with questions.

• Elizabeth Johnson (Tetty), wife

  Widow of Harry Porter, married to Johnson in 1735; died in 1752.

• David Garrick, former pupil and friend

  Johnson's pupil at Edial who walked with him to London and became the leading actor of the age.

• Hester Thrale (later Piozzi), friend and hostess

  Wife of the brewer Henry Thrale; her Streatham household was a second home to Johnson for many years.

• Sir Joshua Reynolds, friend

  Painter who proposed the Literary Club and painted Johnson.

• Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith, members of the Literary Club

  Statesman and writer among the Club's first members and Johnson's partners in talk.

• Francis Barber, servant

  Jamaican-born servant who joined Johnson's household in 1752 and became his residuary heir.

• Robert Levett and Anna Williams, household dependents

  An unlicensed practitioner to the poor and a blind poet, both given a home by Johnson.

• Lord Chesterfield, would-be patron

  Statesman whose late notice of the Dictionary drew Johnson's celebrated letter.

• John Wilkes, political opponent

  Radical politician whom Boswell contrives to seat beside Johnson at dinner in 1776.

Lessons

• Conversation as a form of truth-telling

  Boswell's method is to set down what Johnson actually said, with the questions that drew it out. The result shows character through talk: Johnson's retorts, his corrections of Boswell's cant, and his readiness to argue either side. Students see that how a person speaks in company can reveal convictions as surely as formal writing.

  • What does the first meeting in Davies's shop in 1763 show about both men?
  • Why does Johnson tell Boswell to clear his mind of cant in 1783, and what is cant?
  • Does Boswell's habit of provoking Johnson make the portrait more or less trustworthy?

• Patronage, independence and honest labour

  The letter to Lord Chesterfield in 1755 refuses help offered only after the Dictionary was finished. Johnson had worked for years in poverty, and he asserts the dignity of a writer who owes his success to labour. Later he accepts a pension from the king, and Boswell records how carefully he satisfied himself that it was a reward for past work and asked nothing of his pen.

  • What image does Johnson use in the letter to describe a patron?
  • Why does the pension of 1762 not contradict the letter, by Johnson's account?
  • When is it right to refuse help that comes too late?

• Faith held under the shadow of melancholy

  Johnson is shown praying, fasting, examining his conscience and dreading judgement, while also suffering from a melancholy he could manage but never cure. His final prayer before the sacrament asks that his whole hope rest on Christ's merits. The book presents a Christian who struggled hard and kept faith rather than one who found faith easy.

  • How did reading Law's Serious Call at Oxford change Johnson?
  • What advice does Johnson give in 1776 for managing distressing thoughts?
  • Why might a man of strong faith still fear death, as Johnson admits he does?

• Friendship kept in repair

  Johnson tells Reynolds that a man who makes no new friends as he ages will soon be left alone. The Literary Club, the Thrales, Garrick, Boswell and the poor dependents in his house show friendship as something tended across differences of rank, politics and temper, including the dinner with Wilkes.

  • Who were the first members of the Literary Club, and what did they do together?
  • Why did Johnson keep a house full of dependents such as Levett and Anna Williams?
  • What does the Wilkes dinner of 1776 suggest about friendship across political lines?

Context

Johnson's career spans the decades in which London booksellers, magazines and subscription replaced aristocratic patronage as the main support of authors. He lived through the Jacobite rising of 1745, the Seven Years' War, the reign of George III and the American war, and wrote on both sides of the political questions of the 1770s as a High Church Tory. The Literary Club gathered painters, actors, statesmen, scholars and writers, and the coffee-houses and taverns of Fleet Street and Covent Garden gave conversation a public importance that Boswell set out to preserve.

Composition

Boswell kept journals from his youth and recorded Johnson's talk from 1763 onward. After Johnson's death in 1784 he published The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), then spent six years assembling letters, anecdotes and journal entries for the Life, assisted by Edmond Malone. Rival accounts by Hester Thrale Piozzi (Anecdotes, 1786) and Sir John Hawkins (1787) appeared first; Boswell disputes both in places. The Life was published in two quarto volumes by Charles Dilly in May 1791, with a second edition in 1793. The library text is the abridgment edited by Charles Grosvenor Osgood of Princeton in 1917.

Reception

The Life sold well and was soon regarded as the greatest biography in English, though some readers objected to Boswell's publishing private talk. Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle both wrote famous essays on it in the 1830s, Macaulay mocking Boswell while praising the book and Carlyle defending Boswell's reverence for greatness. The recovery of Boswell's private papers at Malahide Castle and Fettercairn House in the twentieth century, published by Yale, showed the care of his note-taking and raised his standing as a writer.

Comparisons

• plutarch-lives

  Plutarch's claim that a jest or a small action can reveal character better than battles is the classical warrant for Boswell's attention to table talk, gestures and domestic habits.

• walton-lives

  Izaak Walton's seventeenth-century lives of Hooker, Herbert and Sanderson are earlier English biographies of devout men by an admiring friend; Boswell differs in reporting talk at length and in letting faults appear.

• rousseaus-confessions

  Boswell visited Rousseau in 1764, and Johnson calls Rousseau a bad man in the Life; Rousseau tells his own life from within, while Boswell builds a life from outside through witnesses and recorded speech.

• the-pilgrims-progress

  In 1773 Johnson praises Bunyan's allegory for invention and the approval of mankind, and compares its opening with Dante's; the Christian pilgrimage toward death that Bunyan allegorizes is the concern of Johnson's own last chapters.

• franklin-autobiography-and-poor-richard

  Franklin and Johnson were contemporaries who rose as printers' and booksellers' sons by the pen; Franklin narrates his own self-improvement, while Johnson's moral rules emerge from Boswell's record of his talk.

• the-anatomy-of-melancholy

  In the complete Life Johnson calls Burton's Anatomy the only book that ever took him out of bed earlier than he wished (the passage is omitted from Osgood's abridgment); his own 1776 advice to divert rather than combat distressing thoughts continues Burton's practical counsel.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Osgood's introduction on Boswell's method of memory and shorthand, then every place where Boswell tells you how he recorded a conversation.
• The letter to Lord Chesterfield under 1754 and what it says about patrons and independent labour.
• The first meeting with Boswell in 1763 and how quickly the tone of the book changes once Boswell is present.
• Johnson's prayers, fasts and fears of death, and how they sit beside his wit and his melancholy.
• The last months of 1784: the stroke, the dropsy, the final prayer and the last words to Miss Morris.

Key terms and names

Aetat.

Latin for aged; Boswell heads each year of the Life with Johnson's age, such as Aetat. 54 for 1763.

The Literary Club

The weekly supper club founded in 1764 at the Turk's Head in Soho by Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith and others.

Patron

A wealthy or noble supporter of a writer; Johnson's letter to Chesterfield rejects patronage offered too late.

Cant

In Johnson's sense, phrases repeated without meaning or feeling them, which he tells Boswell to clear from his mind.

King's evil

Scrofula, a tubercular disease of the glands once thought curable by the royal touch; Johnson was touched by Queen Anne.

Dictionary of the English Language

Johnson's dictionary of 1755, compiled with a few assistants, with definitions illustrated by quotations from English authors.

Rasselas

Johnson's 1759 moral tale of an Abyssinian prince searching for happiness, written in the week after his mother's death.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How did Johnson come to London, and how did he support himself in his first years there?
2. Comprehension How did Boswell meet Johnson in 1763, and what went wrong in the first minutes?
3. Comprehension What were Johnson's illnesses, and how did he respond to the stroke of 1783?
4. Interpretation Why does Johnson answer Berkeley by kicking a stone instead of by argument, and is that an answer?
5. Interpretation What does Boswell's handling of the Wilkes dinner in 1776 reveal about Boswell himself?
6. Interpretation How do Johnson's fear of death and his final prayer before the sacrament fit together?
7. Big Question Is a biographer who records a friend's private talk and faults showing loyalty or betraying it?
8. Big Question Can wit and seriousness belong to the same holy life?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 90:12 (Scripture)

  Teach us to number our days: Johnson's year-by-year life, with his birthday resolutions and prayers, is a long attempt to number his days and apply his heart to wisdom.

• Matthew 12:36-37 (Scripture)

  Jesus says every idle word will be accounted for. Johnson's command to clear the mind of cant, and Boswell's record of words spoken at table, both take seriously the moral weight of ordinary speech.

• William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729) (Great Conversation)

  Johnson told Boswell that reading Law at Oxford was the first occasion of his thinking in earnest about religion; Law's insistence on ordering every hour to God shapes Johnson's lifelong self-examination.

• Augustine, Confessions X (Church Fathers)

  Augustine examines his memory, his habits and the temptations of praise before God; Johnson's prayers and meditations quoted in the Life carry the same searching self-accusation.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A man's character is best known through his daily words and habits, not only his published works. Boswell recorded Johnson's talk over twenty years with care and checked it against witnesses. Therefore a life built from that record, faults included, shows the real Johnson more truly than a eulogy could.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. In the 1754 letter to Chesterfield, Johnson sets kindness that came early against notice delayed until he is indifferent, solitary and known; the quoted image of the patron who encumbers a swimmer with help after he reaches ground compresses the same contrast.

Debate: Resolved: that Boswell's Life of Johnson is better history than a biography written from documents alone.

Memory Work

A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.

My dear friend, clear your MIND of cant.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Boswell shows Johnson both as a devout Christian and as a man tormented by melancholy and the fear of death. Using at least three episodes, argue how Boswell holds these together in his portrait.

Comparison with Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans: Plutarch says small things often reveal character more than great deeds. Compare one of Plutarch's lives with Boswell's Life and show how each biographer uses small incidents to reveal a great man.

Medical Lens

Boswell's Life is one of the fullest eighteenth-century records of a single person's mental and bodily illnesses, told by a friend who himself suffered from what he called hypochondria. Johnson's childhood scrofula, the king's evil, damaged his sight and hearing and left scars; on the advice of the Lichfield physician Sir John Floyer his mother took him to be touched by Queen Anne, a practice Boswell already calls superstitious. In 1729 Johnson fell into what Boswell names morbid melancholy and horrible hypochondria, wrote out his case in Latin for his godfather Dr. Swinfen, and was offended when Swinfen showed it to others, an early instance of a patient's grievance over medical confidentiality. Boswell describes Johnson's convulsive starts and gestures and, citing Sydenham, compares them to St. Vitus's dance; some modern clinicians have read them as signs of Tourette syndrome or obsessive-compulsive traits, a retrospective reading that remains interpretive. Johnson's own counsel for constitutional melancholy, to divert distressing thoughts rather than try to think them down, keep a lamp burning and read when wakeful, and treat the management of the mind as an art learned by habit, reads as lay cognitive and behavioural advice in the tradition of Burton. Later chapters record his reluctant use of opium for breathlessness, his precise self-observation during the stroke of June 1783 (aphasia with preserved writing, tested by composing Latin verse), his physicians Heberden and Brocklesby, his dropsy, and a Christian deathbed.

• 1709-1728 (early life)

  Johnson's scrofula, his impaired eye, and the journey to London to be touched by Queen Anne on Sir John Floyer's advice.

  Disability Deformity Physicians Doctors
• 1729 (the Oxford years)

  The first great attack of morbid melancholy, Johnson's long walks to fight it, and the Latin case history he gave Dr. Swinfen.

  Melancholia Depression Hypochondria Physicians Doctors
• 1737-1739 (Pope's note)

  Pope's note on Johnson's convulsive infirmity and Boswell's comparison of it with Sydenham's description of St. Vitus's dance.

  Disability Deformity
• 1769 (Aetat. 60)

  Conversations on the fear of death, Hume's calm, and whether the mind can be fortified against the last hour.

  Death Dying Neurosis Anxiety
• 1776 (Aetat. 67)

  Johnson's advice on constitutional melancholy: divert rather than combat distressing thoughts, keep a lamp lit, read when wakeful.

  Melancholia Depression Philosophy AS Therapy Sleep Insomnia
• 1783 (Aetat. 74), March

  Johnson takes opium for his breathing and argues that it should be given only with reluctance and in necessity.

  Opium Laudanum
• 1783 (Aetat. 74), letter to Mrs. Thrale on the stroke

  His own account of a paralytic stroke that took his speech but not his hand, and his summons of Heberden and Brocklesby.

  Physicians Doctors Aging Senescence
• 1784 (Aetat. 75)

  Dropsy, breathlessness that forces him to sit up all night, and the last days and prayers before his death on 13 December.

  Death Dying Aging Senescence

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Keep a Boswell notebook for one week: record, as exactly as you can, one memorable exchange each day, then compare your notes with a friend's account of the same talk.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation at the Dillys' table in 1776 when Johnson and John Wilkes discover they share a joke at the expense of the Scots.

• Essay

  Johnson calls a lexicographer a harmless drudge. Using the Dictionary chapters and the Chesterfield letter, explain what his view of his own labour was.

• Fiction

  Tell the morning of 16 May 1763 from the point of view of Thomas Davies, the bookseller who introduced the nervous young Scot to Johnson.

Further Reading

• The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., James Boswell

  Boswell's 1785 account of the 1773 journey, which Osgood treats as part of the Life.

• A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Samuel Johnson

  Johnson's own account of the same tour (1775).

• Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson

• Samuel Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate

• Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, James Boswell, ed. Frederick A. Pottle

  The private journal of the months before and after the first meeting.