7 September 1709 A.D. Samuel Johnson Born: A literate man with a vast vocabulary, BCP doctrine, BCP worship & BCP piety: famous quotes & prayers
7
September 1709 A.D. Samuel Johnson Born: A
literate man with a vast vocabulary, BCP doctrine, BCP worship & BCP piety: famous quotes & prayers
Keifer, James E. “Samuel Johnson, Writer.” Biographical
Sketches. N.d. http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/20.html. Accessed 20 May 2014.
Next only to
William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson is
perhaps the most quoted of English writers. The latter part of the eighteenth
century is often (in English-speaking countries, of course) called, simply, the
Age of Johnson.
Johnson was
born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, in 1709. His mother did not have
enough milk for him, and so he was put out to nurse. From his nurse he
contracted a tubercular infection called scrofula, which inflamed the lymph
glands and spread to the optic and auditory nerves, leaving him deaf in the
left ear, almost blind in the left eye, and dim of vision in the right eye. It
also left scar tissue which disfigured his face, as did a later childhood bout
with small-pox.
Young
Johnson responded to his disabilities by a fierce determination to be
independent and to accept help and pity from no one. When he was three or four
years old, a household servant regularly took him to school and walked him home
again. One day the servant was not there in time, and Johnson started for home
by himself. Coming to an open ditch across the street, he got down on all fours
to peer at it before attempting to cross. His teacher had followed to watch
him, and now approached to help. He spied her, and angrily pushed her away.
Throughout his life, he feared that ill health would tempt him to
self-indulgence and self-pity, and bent over backwards to resist the
temptation.
He had an
uncle who was a local boxing champion, and who taught him to fight, so that
years later he walked without fear in the worst sections of London. Once four
robbers attacked him, and he held his own until the watch arrived and arrested
them.
Sports where
he had to see a ball were out of the question. He turned instead to swimming,
leaping, and climbing (and, in season, to sliding on frozen lakes and ponds).
In his seventies, revisiting his native Lichfield, he looked for a rail that he
used to jump over as a boy, and having found it, he laid aside his hat and wig,
and his coat, and leaped over it twice, a feat that left him, as he said,
"in a transport of joy".
In middle
age, not having swum for years, he went swimming with a friend who warned him
of a section of river that was dangerous, where someone had recently drowned.
Johnson promptly swam to that section. On another occasion, he was told that a
gun was old and dangerous to fire. He promptly loaded it and fired it at a
wall.
When he was
eight years old, he stopped going to church, and abandoned his religion. A few
years later, however, he began to think that it was wrong of him to do so
without investigating the matter, and the pangs of guilt he had over not having
read theology before rejecting it brought him to the conclusion that there must
be a Moral Law (else what is guilt about?) and hence a Lawgiver.
As a youth,
he developed a fondness for disputation, and often, as he admits, chose the
wrong side of the debate because it would be more challenging.
In October,
1728, having just turned nineteen, Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford.
His mother had inherited a lump sum which was enough to pay for a year at
Oxford, and he had a prospect of further aid. But the prospect fell through,
and after one year Johnson was forced to drop out of Oxford.
While at
Oxford, Johnson read Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, With an
Enquiry Into the Origin of Moral Virtue. Mandeville argues (among many
other things) that what are commonly called virtues are disguised vices. This
made a deep impression on Johnson, and made him watchful for corruption in his
own motives.
A more
fundamental influence was that of William Law's book Serious Call
To a Devout and Holy Life. Johnson reports that he "began to read it
expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to
laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first
occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of
rational inquiry."
As his first
year at Oxford was ending, his money was running out. He had only one pair of
shoes, and his toes showed through the ends. A gentleman, seeing this, placed a
new pair of shoes outside Johnson's door at night, and Johnson, finding them in
the morning, threw them away in a fit of shame and wounded pride.
In December,
1729, with his fees well in arrears, Johnson was forced to leave Oxford. He
wrote a short poem, The Young Author, dealing with the dreams of
greatness of someone just starting to write, and the almost certain destruction
of those dreams. The moral is: "Do not let yourself hope for much, and you
will be the less disappointed."
Out of
Oxford, with no hope of the academic career for which his native talents suited
him, Johnson sank for two years into a deep depression, a despair and inability
to act, wherein, as he later told a friend, he could stare at the town clock
and not be able to tell what time it was. He feared that he was falling into
insanity, and considered suicide. He developed convulsive tics, jerks, and
twitches, that remained with him for the remainder of his life, and often
caused observers who did not know him to think him an idiot.
In his
depressed state, Johnson met the Porters. Mr. Porter was a prosperous merchant.
He and his family valued Johnson's company and conversation, and were not put
off by his appearance and mannerisms. Mrs. Porter said to her daughter, after
first meeting Johnson, "That is the most sensible man I ever met."
From the Porters, Johnson gained renewed self-confidence, and largely emerged
from his depressed state. After the death of Henry Porter, his wife Elizabeth
("Tetty", as Johnson came to call her) encouraged Johnson into a
closer friendship, and in 1735 they were married. She was 20 years older than
he, and brought to the marriage a dowry of over 600 pounds. In those days the
interest alone on such a sum would have been almost enough for the couple to
live on. There is every indication that it was a love match on both sides. On
Tetty's side, the love was reinfoced by the perception of future greatness. On
Johnson's side, the love was reinforced by gratitude toward the woman whose
approval and acceptance had given him back his sanity and self-respect.
The
newly-married Johnson undertook to open a private school, Edial Hall. One of
his first students was David Garrick, who became a lifelong friend and was
later known as the foremost actor of his day. The school closed a little over a
year later, having failed to attract enough pupils. Johnson had invested most
of his wife's dowry in it, hoping to multiply her capital. Instead, he lost
nearly all of it, leaving them desperately poor. Johnson and Garrick determined
to seek their fortune in London. When they arrived, Johnson had twopence
halfpenny in his pocket, and Garrick three halfpence. Johnson began to do small
writing jobs for Edward Cave, publisher of The Gentleman's Magazine, the
first example of a magazine in the modern sense. Looking for a way to earn a
little extra money, he noted that the latest fashion in literature was Pope's
imitations of the satires of Horace. Johnson determined to write an imitation
of the satires of Juvenal. The result was a poem called London. An extract
follows:
Here malice, rapine, accident conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
and here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
here falling houses thunder on your head,
and here a female atheist talks you dead....
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed,
Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
and here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
here falling houses thunder on your head,
and here a female atheist talks you dead....
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed,
Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.
Johnson sold
the poem for ten guineas. It was an immediate success, praised by Pope and
others. Within a year it was in its fourth edition.
A word here
about English money. A guinea is twenty-one shillings, while a pound is twenty
shillings; a shilling is twelve pence. In 1945, a pound was worth four Us
dollars. It is now worth less than two dollars, but in Johnson's day was worth
far more. He tells us that it is possible to live in London for 30 pounds a
year and be respectable. One needs ten pounds a year for clothes and laundry.
For eighteen pence a week, one can live in a garret. For three pence a day, one
can sit several hours in a coffee-house, have breakfast (bread and milk) for a
penny, dinner for sixpence, and do without supper. Johnson did not quite take
his own advice, for he spent eightpence on his dinner: sixpence for meat, a
penny for bread, and a penny for the waiter. He tells us that the tip paid off
in that the waiter often managed a better cut of meat for him than for his
friends who drank wine but did not tip.
Tetty had
joined her husband, but was dismayed at the prospect of life in a garret in
central London. Her husband got her rooms nearer the edge of town, where she
could be happier, but these cost more than he could well afford, and he lived
in central London near his work, in very frugal circumstances, sometimes
walking the streets all night when he had no money for lodging.
In the next
few years, he wrote articles on demand for the Gentleman's Magazine and
other publications. As his biographer Bate puts it, there are "short
biographies of men noted in medicine, science, literature, naval exploration,
and warfare; poems in both Latin and English; monthly articles... on...
political and other current events abroad... and other writings that show his
knowledge not only of literature, politics, religion, and ethics, but also
agriculture, trade, and practical business; philology, classical scholarship,
aesthetics, and metaphysics; medicine and chemistry; travel, exploration, and
even Chinese architecture."
Johnson's
interests extended to science and technology as well as to literature. When
Richard Arkwright invented (or improved) the automatic spinning machine that
was to revolutionize the textile industry, he found that Johnson was the only
one of his acquaintances that understood the principle at once, without
explanation.
In April of
1738, Parliament forbade reporting of Parliamentary debates. The Gentleman's
Magazine got around this by printing supposedly fictitious reports of
debates in the Parliament of Lilliput, with the names of the Lilliputian
speakers being thinly disguised versions of the names of English politicians.
Johnson became the chief writer of these speeches. Knowing only the measure
that was being debated, and who had spoken on each side, he considered what
arguments the speaker was likely to use, and wrote a suitable speech for him.
For years, these were assumed by the public to be the speeches that had
actually been given in Parliament. No member of Parliament ever complained that
he had been misrepresented, presumably because when he read the speeches
attributed to him, he thought, "I wish I had said that!" Years later,
some of Johnson's work appeared in books about Pitt (Walpole, Chesterfield) as
examples of that politician's "Greatest Speeches."
Before 1748,
Johnson published practically nothing under his own name. He wrote extensively
-- the Parliamentary Debates, the poem London, numerous articles, a few
sermons and other speeches for which the speakers took the credit, and the
like. But none of this could be expected to give him a reputation as a writer
or scholar, either in his own day or in the eyes of posterity. He made one last
effort to obtain permission to practice law even though he had not a degree. It
was refused. He began work on a Dictionary of the English Language.
The Italians
had a national dictionary, published in 1612, which it had taken their academy
20 years to prepare. The French followed with their dictionary which it took an
Academy of forty scholars 55 years (1639-1694) to prepare, and another 18
(1700-1718) to revise. It was agreed that England needed a first-rate
dictionary, and Johnson undertook the job. In June 1746 he signed an agreement
with a group of publishers. They would pay him 1575 pounds (all expenses to
come out of this). With six copyists to help him, he read through numerous books
by "standard authors" and marked their use of various words. His
copyists then copied out the sentences onto slips of paper, underlining the
word being illustrated, marked the slip with a large letter for the initial of
the word, and filed it. Johnson then wrote definitions for over 40,000 words,
with different shades of meaning, illustrating the meanings with about 114,000
quotations that he had gathered. His work has served as the basis for all
English dictionaries since. A comparison of their definitions with his shows
obvious borrowing, simply because his definitions are good. Some of them show
the "impish" side of Johnson's nature, and these are naturally the
ones that are popularly remembered and quoted. ("Patron: One who
countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with
insolence, and is repaid with flattery.") But these amount to fewer than
one definition in a thousand. The New English Dictionary (now the Oxford
English Dictionary), on which literally thousands of scholars collaborated
(not all of them full-time), took seventy years to complete. Johnson, in one
room with mostly borrowed books and six copyists, completed his task in nine
years. The Dictionary was published in 1755. Oxford University rewarded him
with a Master of Arts degree, which came in time for him to include it on the
title page of the Dictionary. Many doors had previously been closed to him by
the absence of a college degree. That problem was now behind him.
Tetty, his
wife, had meanwhile deteriorated. She had complained of various illnesses, some
of them organic (and Johnson spent much of his income on her doctors' fees) and
some of them psychological in origin. She seldom left her bed, and had taken to
solitary drinking and extensive use of opium. (Laudanum, or opium dissolved in
alcohol, was a widely used medicine at the time. Even today, it is commoner in
England than in the United States. When I was touring in England a few years
ago, and suffering from digestive disorders, I went to the apothecary and asked
for a mixture of kaolin (fuller's earth) and pectin. He gave me a mixture of
the above plus paregoric, which is a diluted laudanum. No prescription
necessary. I carried the bottle in my pack and got as far as U S Customs with
it before realizing my mistake.) In 1751, Tetty grew worse, and he found
lodging for her in the country, in the hope that this would be therapeutic. In
March of 1752 she died, and his grief was overwhelming. His diary records the
following prayer soon after.
Almighty and most merciful Father, who lovest those whom thou
Punishest, and turnest away thine anger from the penitent, look down with pity
upon my sorrows, and grant that the affliction which it has pleased thee to
bring upon me, may awaken my conscience, enforce my resolutions of a better
life, and impress upon me such conviction of thy power and goodness, that I may
place in thee my only felicity, and endeavor to please thee in all my thoughts,
words, and actions. Grant, O Lord, that I may not languish in fruitless and unavailing
sorrow, but that I may consider from whose hand all good and evil is received,
and may remember that I am punished for my sins, and hope for comfort only by
repentance. Grant, O merciful God, that by the assistance of thy Holy Spirit I
may repent, and be comforted, obtain that peace which the world cannot give,
pass the residue of my life in humble resignation and cheerful obedience; and
when it shall please thee to call me from this mortal state, resign myself into
thy hands with faith and confidence, and finally obtain mercy and everlasting
happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
In January
1759 his mother died at the age of 89, and the following Easter his diary
records the following prayer:
Almighty and most merciful
Father, look down with pity upon
My sins. I am a sinner, good Lord, but let not my sins burden
Me for ever. Give me the Grace to break the chain of evil custom. Enable me to
shake off idleness and sloth; to will and to do what thou hast commanded, grant
me to be chaste in thoughts, words, and actions; to love and frequent thy
worship, to study and understand thy word; to be diligent in my calling, that I
may support myself and relieve others.
Forgive me, O Lord, whatever my
Mother has suffered by my
Fault, whatever I have done amiss, and whatever duty I have
Neglected. Let me not sink into useless dejection; but so sanctify my
affliction, O Lord, that I may be converted and healed; and that, by the help
of thy Holy Spirit, I may obtain everlasting life through Jesus Christ our
Lord.
And O Lord, so far as it may be
lawful, I commend unto thy
Fatherly goodness my father, brother, wife, and mother,
Beseeching thee to make them happy for Jesus Christ's sake.
Amen.
Beseeching thee to make them happy for Jesus Christ's sake.
Amen.
In the fall
of 1748, while working on the Dictionary, he wrote a 368-line poem, The
Vanity of Human Wishes, which he sold for fifteen guineas. It is the first
work that he published under his own name. Its theme is the complete inability
of this world to offer lasting satisfaction and peace, and the consequent necessity
of seeking the heart's desire elsewhere. He continued writing as a moralist,
but in the form of prose essays. From March of 1750 to March of 1752, for two
years, he published every Tuesday and Saturday a periodical he called the
Rambler, each issue consisting of an essay by himself, 208 essays in all (four
essays and parts of three others are by other writers). Some topics are:
2: The
necessity and danger of looking into futurity.
4: The
modern form of romances preferable to the ancient.
8: The thoughts to be brought
under regulation.
13: The invalidity of all excuses for betraying
secrets.
28: The various arts of self-delusion.
64: The requisites to true friendship.
76: The arts by which bad men are reconciled to themselves.
79: A suspicious man justly suspected.
90: The pauses in English poetry adjusted.
134: Idleness an anxious and miserable state.
156: The laws of writing not always indisputable.
159: The nature and remedies of bashfulness.
183: The influence of envy and interest compared.
207: The folly of continuing too long upon the stage.
28: The various arts of self-delusion.
64: The requisites to true friendship.
76: The arts by which bad men are reconciled to themselves.
79: A suspicious man justly suspected.
90: The pauses in English poetry adjusted.
134: Idleness an anxious and miserable state.
156: The laws of writing not always indisputable.
159: The nature and remedies of bashfulness.
183: The influence of envy and interest compared.
207: The folly of continuing too long upon the stage.
Some short
extracts from the essays are:
We are more
pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.
The natural
flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to
hope.
Men more
frequently require to be reminded than informed.
The safe and
general antidote against sorrow is employment.
Merit rather
enforces respect than attracts fondness.
Many need no
other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.
The vanity
of being known to be entrusted with a secret is generally one of the chief
motives to disclose it.
Among other
pleasing errors of young minds is the opinion of their own importance. He that
has not yet remarked, how little attention his contemporaries can spare from
themselves, conceives all eyes turned upon himself, and imagines everyone that
approaches him to be an enemy or a follower, an admirer or a spy.
The cure for
the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.
Whatever is
proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.
Ease, a
neutral state between pain and pleasure...if it is not rising into pleasure
will be falling towards pain.
Almost every
man has some real or imaginary connection with a celebrated character.
Discord
generally operates in little things; it is inflamed...by contrariety of taste
oftener than principles.
So willing
is every man to flatter himself, that the difference between approving laws,
and obeying them, is frequently forgotten; he that acknowledges the obligations
of morality and pleases his vanity with enforcing them to others, concludes
himself zealous in the cause of virtue.
We have less
reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in
opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves.
All censure
of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can
spare. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the reproach of
falsehood.
Such is our
desire of abstraction from ourselves, that very few are satisfied with the
quantity of stupefaction which the needs of the body force upon the mind.
Alexander himself added intemperance to sleep, and solaced with the fumes of
wine the sovereignty of the world. And almost every man has some art, by which
he steals his thought away from his present state.
I would
injure no man, and should provoke no resentment. I would relieve every
distress, and should enjoy the benedictions of gratitude. I would choose my
friends among the wise and my wife among the virtuous, and therefore should be
in no danger from treachery or unkindness. My children should by my care be
learned and pious, and would repay to my age what their childhood had received.
The admirer
of Johnson, wishing to show what a great writer he was, is tempted to quote him
at length. But he may remember what Johnson said about someone who tries to
show what a Shakespeare play is like by quoting
a few good lines: that he "will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who,
when he offered his house for sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a
specimen."
The essays
in the Rambler, although many of them are explicitly moralistic, are almost
never explicitly Christian, or even religious. Yet there is no doubt that
Johnson intended them to serve a Christian purpose. Before writing them, he
offered the following prayer:
Almighty God... without whose grace all wisdom is folly,
grant, I beseech Thee, that in this my undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be
withheld from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the Salvation both of
myself and others.
Why, then,
did he not write openly about Christ in the Rambler, or for that matter in the
Vanity? For the Vanity, a short answer is that he wrote his poem as an
"imitation" of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal, and that he is
constrained thereby to follow the form of that Satire. More generally, we may
say that he considers his work to be, not the preaching of the Gospel, but the
preparing of men for hearing the Gospel preached by another. A man who has been
persuaded that without Divine Help he cannot be virtuous, and that without
virtue he cannot be truly happy, is ready to hear the offer of Divine Help when
it is preached. The Law, says the Apostle Paul, is a pedagogue to bring us to Christ. Johnson thought of
himself in these writings as such a pedagogue.
Why did he
choose the role of pedagogue rather than evangelist? One reason is an
overwhelming dread of having others examine his character and actions to see
whether he practiced what he preached. He knew that a minister of the Gospel
who preaches, "Blessed are the poor," and lives like a millionaire,
or one who preaches chastity and is discovered in adultery, brings the Faith
into contempt, and he was dreadfully afraid of bringing the Faith into
contempt. He was innocent of adultery and of living luxuriously, but he could
not write moral advice without being reminded of his own shortcomings. What
some critics have called "one of the finest short discussions in English
of idleness and procrastination" (Rambler, Number 134) was written by
Johnson in great haste while the printer's boy waited to snatch up the copy and
speed it to the press. He would therefore write Christian sermons, but only if
he could do so anonymously.
Johnson
wrote a series of sermons for his friend John Taylor. One of them deals with
trust in God. Trust in God is en essential part of the Christian life. But
suppose that a man does not feel trust. Ought he to try to deceive himself into
thinking that he does feel it? Ought he to try to manufacture feelings of trust
by sheer will-power? Johnson's answer is that he ought to behave as if he did
trust God, and that means obeying God. He who obeys will find sooner or later
that he does trust.
"This constant and devout practice is both the effect,
and Cause, of confidence in God. Trust in God is to be obtained only by
repentance, obedience, and supplication, not by nourishing in our hearts a
confused idea of the goodness of God, or a firm persuasion that we are in a
state of grace."
A problem
for Johnson was that, although he had no trouble seeing that his attitude
toward God ought to be one of trust and dependency, his constant struggle since
infancy with his physical disabilities had instilled in him a strong habit of
self-reliance and rejection of help from others. Habit and theory were thus at
constant war.
He also
found it difficult to participate in public worship, especially when it
involved sermons, since he often knew more about the sermon subject than the
preacher, and had to resist the impulse to contradict him. Public prayer was
less of a difficulty, and private prayer still less. The followin is taken from
his diary. (It should perhaps be explained that "scruples" is
sometimes used to refer to a state of mind in which one feels incapacitating
guilt over matters that it is not in one's power to alter. Being free of scruples
in this sense does not mean being a scoundrel.)
O Lord, who wouldst that all men should be saved, and who
Knowest that without thy grace we can do nothing acceptable to thee, have mercy
upon me. Enable me to break the chain of my sins, to reject sensuality in word
and thought, and to overcome and suppress vain scruples; and to use such
diligence in lawful employment as may enable me to support myself and do good
to others. O Lord, forgive me the time lost in idleness; pardon the sins which
I have committed, and grant that I may redeem the time misspent, and be
reconciled to thee by true repentance, that I may live and die in peace, and be
received to everlasting happiness. Take not from me, O Lord, thy Holy Spirit,
but let me have support and comfort for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.
Meanwhile,
he wrote Essays for the Rambler about human motives, about self-deception, the
"treachery of the human heart," the ways in which we evade the
knowledge of what we ought to do, and about some specific duties that we need
to be reminded of.
In 1756,
after finishing the Dictionary, he was asked to supervise a new periodical, the
Literary Magazine. In the first year, he wrote reviews of Sir Isaac
Newton's proofs of God, Francis Home's Experiments On Bleaching, Jonas
Hanway on tea, Hoadley and Wilson's Observations On a Series of Electrical
Experiments, of works on beekeeping, distilling sea water, Ben Jonson, the
court of the Emperor Augustus, dealings with the Mohawk Indians, and the
national debt. The magazine did not last, partly because the publishers were
not willing to allow Johnson to say what he thought about the government's
policy of imperial and commercial extension of power.
When Johnson
in politics is called a Tory, as contrasted with a Whig, later associations
with these terms may be misleading. The Whigs were the party of laissez-faire
economics, the party of the great landowners and the merchants, while the
Tories were the party of the small landholders and the country parsons. Johnson
distrusted the drive to become wealthy, and he detested slavery. He wrote that
the wars of the English and the French over their possessions in the New World
were the quarrels of two robbers over the booty they had taken from a victim,
and that the French were in general to be favored, because they tended to treat
the Indians better than did the English. Commenting on the American cry of
"Taxation without representation is tyranny!" and "Give me
liberty or give me death!" he asked, "How is it that we hear the
loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" At a party, his
toast was, "Here's to the next insurrection of negroes in the West
Indies." His chronicler, Boswell, was horrified.
In the
spring of 1759 he wrote a short novel, The History of Rasselas,
Prince of Abyssinia. It is the story of a prince who has led a sheltered
life, and who goes out to explore the world and learn the meaning of life and
the secret of happiness. It has been compared with Voltaire's Candide, which
was published almost simultaneously. It has been translated into at least 14
other languages, and continues to be read with pleasure (and, presumably,
profit) by many. It sums up his career as a moralistic writer.
When
visiting Oxford just before turning fifty, he spent some time with a
thirty-year-old acquaintance, a fellow of All Souls, and in the course of the
evening challenged him to climb over the wall with him into All Souls College.
The challenge was declined.
In 1762,
Johnson received a message that his friend Oliver Goldsmith was in trouble. At
Goldsmith's home, he found that Goldsmith had been arrested on complaint of his
landlady for failure to pay his rent. Johnson calmed him, and asked him about
his financial prospects. Goldsmith had a novel, The Vicar of Wakefield,
ready for the press. Johnson read a bit of it, and then went out and persuaded
a publisher to buy it for sixty pounds. This helped Goldsmith, but left the
publisher uneasy, since he feared that the book would not sell. Johnson then
went back to Goldsmith, who had a poem, The Traveller. Johnson helped him
revise it for publication, and rewrote part of it himself. The poem, when
published, was a success, and established a market for the novel. Only then did
the publisher venture to print the Vicar, which turned out to be a sensational
best-seller.
In July of
1762 the Prime Minister awarded Johnson a pension for life of 300 pounds a
year. This was potentially awkward. Johnson's Dictionary had given the
definition, "Pension: An allowance made to anyone without an equivalent.
In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for
treason to his country." Johnson consulted a friend, the painter Sir
Joshua Reynolds, who assured him that there was no impropriety in his taking
the money, since he was not about to do the Prime Minister or his party any
favors in return, and no one supposed that he was. The money was a reward for
his honorable service to his country in producing the Dictionary, not a bribe
for future questionable acts. So Johnson took the pension, which gave him a
financial security he had never had before.
When Johnson
was at a country house in the summer of 1762, a young lady said that she could
outrun anyone there. Johnson accepted the challenge, they raced on the lawn,
and Johnson won, to his unconcealed delight.
On Monday 16
May 1763, Johnson met James Boswell for the first time, at the bookshop of one
Tom Davies, friend to them both. Boswell was an admirer of Johnson's writing
and had long desired the meeting. Ten years later, Boswell decided to write a
life of Johnson, a "life in Scenes," one that would feature
eyewitness accounts (mostly by Boswell) of conversations with Johnson and
events in the life of Johnson. The book naturally concentrates on years during
which Boswell knew Johnson, and in reporting his conversation, concentrates on
short, memorable, pithy sayings -- "punch lines." In that sense, it
gives a one-sided view of Johnson. However, it shows that one side superbly,
with the result that Boswell's Life of Johnson has been recognized ever
since as The outstanding English biography. Two short typical extracts follow,
which will help to convey the flavor of the work.
[Johnson is speaking of a young man who has impulsively
joined
The Royal Navy, and come to regret it.]
"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get
himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail,
with the chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more
room, better food, and commonly better company."
The Royal Navy, and come to regret it.]
"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get
himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail,
with the chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more
room, better food, and commonly better company."
Finding him still persevering in his abstinence from wine, I
Ventured to speak to him of it. Johnson. "Sir, I have no objection to a
man's drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to
excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it on account
of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for
himself, according to the effects which he experiences. One of the fathers
tells us, he found fasting made him so peevish that he did not practice
it."
Though he often enlarged upon the evil of intoxication, he
Was by no means harsh and unforgiving to those who indulged in occasional
excess in wine. One of his friends, I well remember, came to sup at a tavern
with him and some other gentlemen, and too plainly discovered that he had drunk
too much at dinner. When one who loved mischief, thinking to provoke a severe
censure, asked Johnson, a few days afterwards, "Well, Sir, what did your
friend say to you, as an apology for being in such a situation?" Johnson
answered, "Sir, he said all that a man Should say: he said he was sorry
for it."
Johnson expressed his disapprobation of ornamental
Architecture, such as magnificent columns supporting a portico, or expensive
pilasters supporting merely their own capitals, "because it consumes labor
disproportionate to its utility."
In 1764
Johnson visited his friend Bennet Langton at the Langton home in Lincolnshire.
Johnson and the Langtons walked to the top of a steep hill, and Johnson decided
that he would like to roll down it. He said that he had not had a roll for a
long time. Emptying his pockets, he lay down and rolled all the way to the
bottom.
At Easter of 1764 he wrote in
his diary:
Almighty and most merciful Father, who hast created and
Preserved me, have pity on my weakness and corruption. Let me not be created to
misery, nor preserved only to multiply sin. Deliver me from habitual
wickedness, and idleness, enable me to purify my thoughts, to use the faculties
which thou hast given me with honest diligence, and to regulate my life by thy
holy word.
Grant me, O Lord, good purposes and steady resolution, That I
may repent my sins, and amend my life. Deliver me from the distreses of vain
terror and enable me by thy Grace to will and to do what may please thee, that
when I shall be called away from this present state I may obtain everlasting
happiness through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
In 1756,
just after the completion of the Dictionary, Johnson was encouraged to
undertake a new edition of the works of Shakespeare, with (a) explanatory
notes, (b) an analysis and commentary on each play, and (c) an attempt at
establishing a standard text by comparing the variations in early copies of the
plays and determining wherever possible the correct original reading. Johnson
agreed to produce the work in eighteen months. Presumably he hoped that a very
short deadline would stave off writer's block. It didn't. The work took nine
years, and was published in 1765. It contains some bad judgements about Shakespeare. (David Garrick had
rewritten King Lear with a happy ending, and this was the only
production of the play that most Londoners had seen. Johnson approved.) It also
contains some very good judgements. Above all, there is the Preface, an overall
discussion of Shakespeare and his work. A
quotation follows:
The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden
accurately Formed and diligently planted, varied with shades and scented with
flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a
forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air,
interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to
myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind
with endless diversity.
In 1764,
with the Shakespeare almost completed,
Johnson began to fall again into a depression, an inner paralysis that made it
difficult for him to accomplish anything. He was tormented by renewed fears
that he had inherited from his father a tendency to madness. It is a credit to
his character that he was able to press on and finish the work.
In 1766,
Henry Thrale and his wife Hester, friends of Johnson, visited him and found him
most agitated, with his depression in an acute form. They resolved to bring him
to their country home, where they thoroughly pampered him, and in effect made
him one of the family. Their treatment of him brought him out of his depression
and may have saved his sanity.
Mrs Thrale
wrote of him, He loved the poor as I never yet saw anyone else do, with an
earnest desire to make them happy. What signifies, says someone, giving
halfpence to common beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And
why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? It
is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure,
reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance." ... and so he nursed whole
nests of people in his house, where the lame, the blind, the sick, and the
sorrowful found a sure retreat from all the evils whence his little income
could secure them.
And just as
he would give all the silver in his pocket to the poor who watched him as he
left the house, so, on returning late at night, he for years had been putting
pennies into the hands of children lying asleep on thresholds so that they
could buy breakfast in the morning.
In 1777 a
group of booksellers decided to publish a series of volumes of recent (since
1660) English poets. They asked Johnson to write a biographical sketch of each
poet (a list of 47 names, later expanded to 52) for inclusion in the volumes.
He agreed to do so for 200 guineas. They were envisioning perhaps two or three
pages on each poet. He gave them about 370,000 words in all, simply because,
once he got started, he enjoyed the work, and thought it worth while. The
project took four years, being completed in 1781.
Noting that Gray's Elegy was widely admired and loved by the
General public, Johnson writes: "I rejoice to concur with the common
reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary
prejudices... must be finally decided all claims to poetical honours."
On 17 June
1783, Johnson found on awaking that he was suffering a stroke. He could not
rise from bed. He tried to speak, and found that, although he could think the
words, he could not say them. He reports: "I was alarmed, and prayed God,
that however he might afflict my body, he would spare my understanding. This
prayer, that I might try the integrity of my faculties, I made in Latin verse.
The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good." He
managed to summon help, and as time passed he slowly recovered the power of
speech. But now various ailments were converging upon him: circulatory
problems; bronchitis and emphysema; congestive heart failure; and progressive
rheumatoid arthritis.
He accepted
invitations to travel and to visit a few friends, and kept active into November
1784, but finally was unable to leave his bed. His doctors prescribed opium for
his pain, but (perhaps influenced by having observed its effects on Tetty), he
distrusted the drug, and would take only one-sixth the amount prescribed.
Finally, he asked his doctor whether he was likely to live out the month, and
on being told that he was not, he refused all further opium and other
pain-killers, saying that he desired to meet his Maker with an unclouded mind.
He died quietly on the evening of Monday 13 December 1784. His friend William
Gerard Hamilton, member of Parliament, said: "He has made a chasm which
not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill
up.--Johnson is dead.--Let us go to the next best:--There is nobody;--no man
can be said to put you in mind of Johnson."
Suggestions
For Reading
Samuel
Johnson, Selected Writings, ed. Patrick Cruttwell, Penguin Classics, ISBN 0-14-043033-4, $11p
Samuel
Johnson, Selected Essays From the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, ed. W
J Bate, Yale U Press, ISBN 0-300-00016-2 $16p
The
Quotable Johnson, a Topical Compilation, ed. Stephen C Dankert, Ignatius Press, ISBN
0-89870-415-5,
James
Boswell, Life of Johnson
New American Library (NAL) 0-452-00752-6 $4p
Penguin 0-14-043116-0 $7p
Oxford U Press 0-19-281537-7 $16p
(I suspect that the NAL may be an abridgement, but I haven't seen
Any of
these. On the other hand, some beginners may prefer an Abridgement. Penguin
should be complete. Oxford either has copious notes or is overpriced.)
Maurice J Quinlan, Samuel
Johnson, a Layman's Religion, U Wisconsin Press, 1963, 0-299-03030-X $20h
W Jackson Bate, Samuel
Johnson, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, ISBN 0-15-179260-7, $20h.
Most of the above bio is taken from Bate. He also wrote The Achievement of
Samuel Johnson, 1955.
The Encyclopedia
Britannica has a nine-page article on Johnson.
PRAYER (traditional language):
Grant
unto us, O God, that in all time of our testing we may Know thy presence and
obey thy will; that, following the example of thy servant Samuel Johnson, we
may with integrity and courage accomplish what thou givest us to do, and endure
what thou givest us to bear; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and
reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Almighty
God, who hast blessed thy Church with the singular Learning and holiness of thy
servant Samuel Johnson: mercifully grant that, following his example, we may
love knowledge and seek the truth; that in accordance with our several
vocations we may be diligent and tireless in scholarship and research, that we
may face our physical disabilities and afflictions with courage, that we may
make use of the abilities and gifts which thou dost give us, that we may be
loving and generous in our dealings with the poor and afflicted of this world,
and may at our life's end yield up our spirits to thee in confidence, trusting
in the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who liveth and reigneth with
thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
PRAYER (contemporary language):
Grant, O
God, that in all time of our testing we may know your Presence and obey your
will; that, following the example of your servant Samuel Johnson, we may with
integrity and courage accomplish what you give us to do, and endure what you
give us to bear; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Almighty
God, who have blessed your Church with the singular Learning and holiness of
your servant Samuel Johnson: mercifully grant that, following his example, we
may love knowledge and seek the truth; that in accordance with our several
vocations we may be diligent and tireless in scholarship and research, that we
may face our physical disabilities and afflictions with courage, that we may
make use of the abilities and gifts which you give us, that we may be loving
and generous in our dealings with the poor and afflicted of this world, and may
at our life's end yield up our spirits to you in confidence, trusting in the
merits of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you in the
unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
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