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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 1769 (Aetat. 60)

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

• 1776 (Aetat. 67)

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

• 1783 (Aetat. 74), March

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

• 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.

• 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.