Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson is a 1974 biography of the eighteenth-century English man of letters by British poet, novelist, and Oxford academic John Wain. Drawing his material almost entirely from existing sources, including James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Wain offers not new information but a new perspective on the great English writer. Wain was inspired to write his biography by his affection for the figure of Johnson—he calls him "as benevolent as any man who ever lived"—as well as a sense of the two men’s similarities. As Wain notes in his Introduction to the book, he, like Johnson, became a literary champion of English conservatism despite relatively humble beginnings. Both men were born in the same area, attended the same university, and spent most of their lives as poorly remunerated jobbing writers. Wain sees his biography of Johnson as an opportunity to promote a vision of the literary life that he shares with his subject.

Johnson was born in 1709, to Sarah and Michael Johnson. Sarah was forty, and it was a difficult birth. As a child, he was diagnosed with scrofula and underwent an operation which left him with disfiguring scars on his face. His “ugliness” would cause him great suffering throughout his life.

His exceptional intelligence became clear at a young age, and his parents enjoyed showing off his latest accomplishments. His mother began educating him at home when he was just three years old, and he was sent to school at the age of four. By the age of seven, he was at Lichfield Grammar School. This pressurized education seems to have taken its toll. Johnson’s relations with his mother remained strained until her death (in adulthood he would be disgusted by his parents’ habit of showing him off). At Grammar School, Johnson began to exhibit a range of tics, which affected people’s impression of him, especially at first meeting. These tics may have been a symptom of Tourette’s syndrome.



Throughout Johnson’s childhood, his family struggled in poverty. When he was eighteen, his mother’s cousin died and left the family enough money to send Johnson to Oxford, where he matriculated in 1728. The inheritance did not cover his full term at university, and despite the offer of money from a friend, Johnson did not graduate—a fact that would cause him considerable difficulty. After university, Johnson supported himself by teaching, but without a degree, he could not rise through the professional ranks and acquire a permanent position. Instead, he scraped along from job to job. He made some early forays into writing, publishing poems and translations anonymously.

Johnson’s friend Harry Porter contracted a terminal illness, and Johnson spent a great deal of time at his side. When Porter died, a relationship began between his widow, “Tetty” (short for Elizabeth) and Johnson. They married despite the opposition of her family, and for a time, Tetty was able to support Johnson financially.

Johnson began to feel guilty about depending on Tetty—with whom his relations were strained in any case—and he moved out to live with the poet Richard Savage. For two years, the men lived in virtual destitution, sleeping in taverns and night-cellars or simply wandering through the night. Savage was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison, where he died, and a year later Johnson published a moving biography of his late friend.



Johnson’s next project was the Dictionary, the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language. It took him many years of scholarship and hard work, during which Tetty developed a drinking problem and then a terminal illness. Its publication brought him widespread renown and launched his career as a writer and public figure. He began writing for the Rambler and Idler magazines and produced a succession of varied books, including plays, poetry, novels, criticism, and an annotated edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

Johnson was badly affected by Tetty’s death, feeling guilty at his neglect of her. Throughout his life, Johnson, an ardent Christian, feared judgment and hell: “Among the deeply rooted fears that preyed on Johnson’s mind when his thoughts turned to his religion, one of the most persistent was that he would not be able render sufficient account of the gifts he had been born with.”

Having received a royal pension for his work on the Dictionary, Johnson took a holiday to the Hebrides, in the company of his new friend James Boswell: “We know very little, in detail, about these six weeks, but they must have been one of the few spells of unclouded happiness in Johnson’s life. To be free at last from the years of drudgery; to feel his freedom had been fairly earned, that it came from fame he had merited and a character he had kept unspotted; to ramble in one of the most delectable regions of the country that was beautiful as no part of the earth is beautiful now; and to have beside him a loving an unalterable friend—life does not often make up such a bouquet.”



Wain is critical in his assessment of Boswell: “Boswell’s thirst for self-observation was matched by his need to measure himself against others. He was, in that sense, a natural parasite, living from one intense relationship to the next and always drawing a great deal of energy from the host. His doglike hero-worship and his equally doglike sexual promiscuity were opposite sides of the same coin. Whether he was coupling his mind with that of some man of unquestioned achievement, or coupling his body with that of some attractive girl, he felt a relief from the intolerable burden of the unmitigated self, and in this sense his whole life was one long act of copulation.”

Throughout his narrative, Wain takes opportunities to comment on Johnson’s tender-heartedness, his sincere faith, and his kindness to his friends. It is with a sense of personal sadness that Wain narrates Johnson’s decline. The writer was struck hard by a succession of friends’ deaths. His own death came after a short illness in 1784.

Kirkus Reviews praised the biography, declaring that Wain’s “enthusiasm is affecting and [his] work is every bit the measure of the man.”