"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford".
Introduction:
Born: September 18, 1709
Litchfield, Staffordshire, England
Died: December 13, 1784
London, England.
Samuel Johnson, born on 18th September 1709 in Litchfield, Staffordshire. Often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer.
His early years were difficult - his parents were beset by financial problems - but from the books in his father's shop he found comfort and instruction, preparing him for his role as the century's greatest man of letters.
Samuel Johnson published "Johnson’s: A Dictionary of the English Language" in 1755 after 9 years of work.
Samuel Johnson – poet, biographer, lexicographer and essayist – has been described as ‘arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history’ (the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
Early life and Johnson’s introduction :
Johnson, the son of Sarah and Michael Johnson, grew up in Lichfield. His father was a provincial bookseller prominent enough to have served as sheriff of the town in 1709, the year of Samuel’s birth, but whose circumstances were increasingly straitened as his son grew up. Samuel was a frail baby, plagued by disease. He contracted scrofula (a tubercular infection of the lymph glands) from his wet nurse, which left him almost blind in one eye and nearsighted in the other, deaf in one ear, and scarred on his face and neck from the disease itself and from an operation for it. He also was infected with smallpox. These early and traumatic illnesses presaged the continuing physical discomfort and ill health that would mark his entire life.
Education :
His education began at the age of three, and was provided by his mother, who had him memorise and recite passages from the Book of Common Prayer. When Samuel turned four, he was sent to a nearby school, and, at the age of six he was sent to a retired shoemaker to continue his education. A year later Johnson went to Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin. During this time, Johnson started to exhibit the tics that would influence how people viewed him in his later years, and which formed the basis for a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome. He excelled at his studies and was promoted to the upper school at the age of nine. During this time, he befriended Edmund Hector, nephew of his "man-midwife" George Hector, and John Taylor, with whom he remained in contact for the rest of his life.
Early Life:
He was educated at Lichfield Grammar School before going to Pembroke College, Oxford. However, due to a lack of funds, he left after a year – never completing his degree. After Oxford, he worked as a teacher in Market Bosworth and Birmingham. In 1735, he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow 20 years older than him. Together they opened a school at Edial near Lichfield, but it later closed due to a lack of money. The Johnson’s then left for London, where he began spending more time working as a writer.
He made a living writing for the Gentleman’s Magazine – a report on Parliament. He also wrote a tragedy, Irene, and some attempts at poetry.
In 1746 Johnson was approached by a group of publishers, including the celebrated William Strahan, about compiling a dictionary of the English language. This enormous, hugely ambitious work would take Johnson almost a decade to complete, and would be one of his most important legacies.
Writting style :
The Gentleman’s Magazine and early publications of Samuel Johnson
In 1738 Johnson began his long association with The Gentleman’s Magazine, often considered the first modern magazine. He soon contributed poetry and then prose, including panegyrics on Edward Cave, the magazine’s proprietor, and another contributor, the learned Elizabeth Carter. Johnson intended to translate the Venetian Paolo Sarpi’s The History of the Council of Trent but was forestalled by the coincidence of another Johnson at work on the same project. However, his biography of Sarpi, designed as a preface to that work, appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, as did a number of his early biographies of European scholars, physicians, and British admirals.
LONDON, JOURNALISM, AND BIOGRAPHY
In 1737 Johnson traveled with David Garrick (a former pupil who was to become the most famous actor of his time) to London, where Johnson was to spend the rest of his life. He found employment as a journalist with the printer Edward Cave, the founder of The Gentleman's Magazine, and later commented, "No one but a blockhead wrote except for money." Johnson almost certainly influenced the journal's development as an authoritative source of information. He contributed book reviews on several subjects and wrote reports of parliamentary debates (a forbidden practice) under the title of Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia, which was a blend of both fact and Johnson's own views presented in his own words. After writing satirical pamphlets that were critical of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Johnson went into hiding in Lambeth under a false name because his arrest had been ordered.
Johnson secured literary success with London, a satirically exuberant poem on the excesses and corruption of London life. Between 1738 and 1744 he also wrote short biographies of historical and naval figures. He helped to catalogue the Harleian library, a collection of books by the first earl of Oxford, writing an influential preface on cataloguing as essential in helping scholarly investigation. Johnson collated The Harleian Miscellany, a series of pamphlets on the political controversies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, and wrote a preface to his collation. In 1744 he wrote an extended biography, A Life of Richard Savage, a passionately written defense of his friend, a struggling poet who had died in poverty in 1743.
Last Years :
Johnson's last great literary enterprise, a work in 10 volumes, was completed in his seventy-second year; it is the Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, better known as the Lives of the Poets. It is a series of biographical and critical studies of 52 English poets, the earliest being Abraham Cowley; it is a magisterial revaluation of the course of English poetry from the early 17th century until his own time by a man whose taste had been formed by the poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope and who was thus in varying degrees out of sympathy with the metaphysicals and John Milton, as he was with the more "advanced" writers of his own time. Even when he deals with writers whom he does not much like, Johnson shows his genius for precise definition and for laying down fairly the terms of a critical argument.
Encyclopedia of World Biography:
Johnson’s written work was immense and varied. He completed a critical edition of the works of William Shakespeare and created biographies and critical appraisals of 52 English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for his Lives of the Poets. He also wrote literary criticism and was a prolific essayist, for two years being the almost sole contributor to The Rambler, as well as writing for The Idler and The Adventurer.
Today, according to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Johnson is the second most-quoted Englishman. A topical reference guide to his quotations can be found here. He most famously said
"when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life"
1st Dictionary of English Lesson:
Samuel Johnson published "Johnson’s: A Dictionary of the English Language" in 1755 after 9 years of work.
The Dictionary of Samuel Johnson
A Dictionary of the English Language was published in two volumes in 1755, six years later than planned but remarkably quickly for so extensive an undertaking. The degree of master of arts, conferred on him by the University of Oxford for his Rambler essays and the Dictionary, was proudly noted on the title page. Johnson henceforth would be known in familiar 18th-century style as “Dictionary Johnson” or “The Rambler.” There had been earlier English dictionaries, but none on the scale of Johnson’s. In addition to giving etymologies, not the strong point of Johnson and his contemporaries, and definitions, in which he excelled, Johnson illustrated usage with quotations drawn almost entirely from writing from the Elizabethan period to his own time, though few living authors were quoted (the novelists Samuel Richardson and Charlotte Lennox, Garrick, Reynolds, and Johnson himself among them). His preface boldly asserts that the “chief glory of every people arises from its authors,” and his book (the phrase he always used for it) was his own claim to be ranked among them. He was pleased that what took the French Academy 40 years to perform for their language was accomplished by one Englishman in 9 years. It may have been his desire to fix the language by his work, yet he realized that languages do not follow prescription but are continually changing. Johnson did not work systematically from a word list but marked up the books he read for copying. Thus it is no surprise that some earlier dictionaries contain more words and that Johnson’s has striking omissions (“literary” for one). Yet his definitions were a great improvement over those of his predecessors, and his illustrations from writers since the Elizabethan Age form an anthology and established a canon. Because he insisted not only on correct usage but also on morality and piety, the illustrations of words often come from sermons and conduct books as well as from a range of literature. The skeptical philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the writer Bernard de Mandeville, who praised the public benefits of brothels, were excluded on moral grounds, and in the Plan for the Dictionary Johnson explains that the inclusion of a writer could be taken as an invitation to read his work.
Johnson’s work is considered the "first great English dictionary” and it is commonly pointed out as the first English dictionary in history. Jack Lynch, an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers and the editor of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language (New York: Walker & Company, 2004) and A Guide to Samuel Johnson, discusses the matter on the article "Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence".
Two main characteristics of Johnson's work contributed to that fact. Johnson's dictionary was the first one to make an effort to standardize the spelling of the words, illustrating the meanings by literary quotation of authors like Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. In addition, Johnson added notes on a word's usage rather than being simply descriptive, like Cawdrey.
But perhaps the main reason for Johnson's everlasting fame is the fact that, while everybody was busy trying to enlist exclusively the "hard words", Johnson opened his pages to words people actually used. And that created a new trend in lexicography and defined the future of dictionaries.
“Johnson’s real labor in the Dictionary was not including words like obumbrate but words like cat and hat and mat.”, writes Lynch. John Kersey's A New English Dictionary, from 1702, and Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary, from 1721, were the first dictionaries to include common words (and were also the first ones to be written by professional lexicographers). But Johnson was the first author to do so in a systematic way, applying the same careful standards of definition to these words as to the so-called 'hard words'.
“After Johnson, English lexicography became increasingly concerned with the entire language in all its complexity. Johnson’s prodigious labor meant his was to become the first standard dictionary — the first to be authoritative, the first to settle arguments. No earlier English lexicographer achieved a comparable position in British culture. "
writes Lynch.
The Dictionary of English Language might not have been the first English dictionary ever, but Samuel Johnson became the pop-star of lexicography for bringing the dictionaries closer to the reality of language use. And that is why he gets the highest “top of mind” when it comes to the history of dictionaries.
Conclusion :
Johnson died on December 13, 1784, in his house in London, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Words count : 2083
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