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English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer
- Samuel Johnson, English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer who was one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters. He is well remembered for his aphorisms, but his criticism is perhaps his most significant form of writing.
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Samuel Johnson (18 September [ O.S. 7 September] 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer.
- Early Years
- Early Writing Career
- Innovations in Biography
- A Dictionary of The English Language
- The Rambler, The Universal Chronicle, and The Idler
- Later Works
- Personal Life
- Death
- Legacy
- Sources
Johnson was born in 1704 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. His father owned a bookshop and the Johnsons initially enjoyed a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Johnson’s mother was 40 years of age when he was born, at the time considered an incredibly advanced age for pregnancy. Johnson was born underweight and appeared quite weak, and the fami...
Johnson began work on his only play, Irene, in 1726. He would work on the play for the next two decades, finally seeing it performed in 1749. Johnson described the play as his "greatest failure" despite the fact that the production was profitable. Later critical assessment agreed with Johnson’s opinion that Irene is competent but not particularly b...
At a time when biography chiefly dealt with famous figures from the distant past, observed with appropriate seriousness and poetic distance, Johnson believed biographies should be written by people who knew their subjects, who had, in fact, shared meals and other activities with them. Life of Mr. Richard Savagewas in that sense the first true biogr...
At this point in history, there existed no codified dictionary of the English language regarded as satisfactory, and Johnson was approached in 1746 and offered a contract to create such a reference. He spent the next eight years working on what would become the most widely-used dictionary for the next century and a half, eventually supplanted by th...
Johnson wrote his poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes"while working on the dictionary. The poem, published in 1749, is again based on a work by Juvenal. The poem did not sell well, but its reputation rose in the years after Johnson’s death, and is now regarded as one of his best works of original verse. Johnson began publishing a series of essays unde...
In his later life, still plagued by chronic poverty, Johnson worked on a literary magazine and published The Plays of William Shakespearein 1765 after working on it for 20 years. Johnson believed that many early editions of Shakespeare’s plays had been poorly edited and noted that different editions of the plays often had glaring discrepancies in v...
Johnson lived with a close friend named Harry Porter for a time in the early 1730s; when Porter passed away after an illness in 1734, he left behind his widow, Elizabeth, known as "Tetty." The woman was older (she was 46 and Johnson 25) and relatively wealthy; they married in 1735. That year Johnson opened his own school using Tetty’s money, but th...
Johnson suffered from gout, and in 1783 he had a stroke. When he had somewhat recovered, he traveled to London for the express purpose of dying there, but later left for Islington to stay with a friend. On December 13, 1784 he was visited by a teacher named Francesco Sastres, who reported Johnson’s last words as "Iam moriturus," Latin for "I am abo...
Johnson’s own poetry and other works of original writing were well-regarded but would have slid into relative obscurity if not for his contributions to literary criticism and the language itself. His works describing what constituted "good" writing remain incredibly influential. His work on biographies rejected the traditional view that a biography...
Adams, Michael, et al. “What Samuel Johnson Really Did.” National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2009/septemberoctober/feature/what-samuel-johnson-really-did.Martin, Peter. “Escaping Samuel Johnson.” The Paris Review, 30 May 2019, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/30/escaping-samuel-johnson/.George H. Smith Facebook. “Samuel Johnson: Hack Writer Extraordinaire.” Libertarianism.org, https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/samuel-johnson-hack-writer-extraordinaire.- Jeffrey Somers
Sep 19, 2024 · Samuel Johnson (born September 18, 1709, Lichfield, Staffordshire, England—died December 13, 1784, London) was an English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters.
- Robert Folkenflik
Samuel Johnson, known as Dr. Johnson, (born Sept. 18, 1709, Lichfield, Staffordshire, Eng.—died Dec. 13, 1784, London), English man of letters, one of the outstanding figures of 18th-century England. The son of a poor bookseller, he briefly attended the University of Oxford.
Samuel Johnson, c.1750 © Johnson was an English writer and critic, and one of the most famous literary figures of the 18th century. His best-known work is his 'Dictionary of the...
May 13, 2021 · Samuel Johnson was a famous 18th-century poet, lexicographer, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critique and biographer. He is noted for publishing a dictionary back in 1755, for which he was given an honorary doctorate by Dublin University in 1765. He would also be later known as Dr. Johnson because of the degree.
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) by James Boswell is a biography of English writer Samuel Johnson. The work was from the beginning a critical and popular success, and represents a landmark in the development of the modern genre of biography.
