The Johnson Society (Lichfield)

Tonight I am going to explain a little of the research project in which I am involved at Birmingham University. But in order to explain what I am doing I will begin by reminding you of some perhaps familiar material on Johnson’s Dictionary itself.

Until recently, Johnson’s Dictionary was his most famous book, but also his least explored. It is not difficult to see why. It is, as every schoolboy (and Blackadder and Baldrick) could tell you, a very big book. The statistics still astonish us: the 43,000 headwords in the first edition, augmented in the fourth revised edition, and the 113,000 quotations, with a further 3,000 in the fourth. The books will always tell you that some of Johnson’s dictionary predecessors contain more headwords but it is Johnson’s illustrative quotations, to which we shall constantly return this evening, which astonish us, and which have understandably deterred scholars who wished to make a full-scale examination of the book. (Yale University Press is putting out an edition of ‘all’ Johnson’s works, but it doesn’t contain the Dictionary.)

But in the last fifty years scholars have begun seriously to examine this big book. The process began in the 1950s but was hampered by the fact that scholars were refused permission to consult important manuscript material (at that period in the hands of a private collector.) In the late 1960s there was an important study of the marked books by Eugene Thomas (the thirteen surviving volumes in which Johnson marked the quotations he needed for the first and fourth editions). (One of the earliest papers I ever heard given at a Society AGM was Eugene Thomas explaining his research on the Dictionary)¹. This research also revived interest in the assistance that the amanuenses gave Johnson in the preparation of the Dictionary. Thomas was I think the first Johnsonian to use technology to assist scholarship when it tried to come to terms with the vast acreage of the book. More recently my colleague Dr Anne MacDermott (who gave the Johnson Lecture in this Guildhall some years ago) produced her CD ROM edition of the Dictionary (of whom more later), and an American scholar, Allen Reddick, in his major study, The making of Johnson’s Dictionary, which first appeared in 1990, was allowed for the first time to examine the extensive tranche of manuscript materials known as the Sneyd-Gimbel sheets (again more later). Thus only recently have we begun to get close for the first time to Johnson’s working methods on the Dictionary and to gain some notion of the continuing research and thinking that Johnson did on the Dictionary throughout his life. It is on the foundations of these earlier scholars that the Johnson Dictionary project is building.

There are two reasons why Johnson’s Dictionary became in the later part of the twentieth century a subject for study and research, one philosophical, the other practical. With the former, the areas for critical study have widened out from what we might call imaginative literature (the poetry, drama, and novels of the traditional A level, degree level study) to include what, in simple librarian terms, would be called ‘non-fiction’. Works of historical research, philosophy, histories of literature, legal, medical studies, to mention a few of the more sophisticated categories. The practical reason for the new interest is that it is now so much easier to study a book like Johnson’s Dictionary - electronics come to the aid of literary research. The Dictionary itself is available on CD-ROM, certain texts (some of which are used by Johnson in the Dictionary) are available on the Net, there are massive databases which speed up the search for quotations in verse and drama.

The story of how Johnson wrote the Dictionary, as a result of the research of the scholars whose work I’ve just mentioned is certainly clearer, though there are still murky areas. But before looking more closely at Johnson’s working methods let me quickly sketch in the state of English dictionaries when in the mid-1740s a consortium of booksellers was looking for a suitable man to edit an English Dictionary.

The story of English lexicography is of course a major topic in itself. As I used to tell visitors to the Birthplace Museum for twenty-six years, Johnson’s Dictionary is not the first English dictionary. Several historical traditions feed into the story of the English dictionaries: the earliest, the glossaries attached to manuscripts explaining unusual words in the text, the later bilingual dictionaries, interpreting the vocabulary from one language in the words of another, the technical dictionaries explaining terms of art in subjects such as medicine, the law, church law, agriculture, painting. In the early seventeenth-century we have the books that are traditionally seen as the first English dictionaries as we understand the term. Most of these are the famous ‘hard word’ dictionaries, with which writers have had a lot of fun, as they seem to contain vocabulary that no-one has ever used. (Current research suggests that at least some of these peculiar words do in fact turn up in earlier glossaries or technical dictionaries). The story of dictionaries in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reveals a pile of increasingly long dictionaries, alongside more and more technical works in areas such as floristry, building, horsemanship, navigation, the military arts, for an increasingly literate population eager to better itself.

The relationship of Johnson’s Dictionary to these earlier works is not easy to assess. If you look at a copy of the Dictionary you’ll recognize some of these features: some of the entries have an encyclopaedic quality in areas like the definitions of flowers, scientific processes, and there are (especially in the earlier letters) hard words, taken from earlier dictionaries without any supporting definitions. Some scholars will emphasise the similarities between Johnson’s Dictionary and earlier books, others will proudly display the original features that Johnson introduces, the extensive use of quotations, the precise distinctions of meaning. Even here though there is some dispute: Johnson was the first writer of an English Dictionary to provide illustrative quotations, but some earlier dictionaries, notably law dictionaries, make use of examples (legal precedents) to explain words, and the practice was common in French dictionaries. But with the breadth and subtlety of distinction of meaning Johnson does seem to be original. Because we are talking about the extent of Johnson’s skill in this area, it is difficult to provide you with examples – you’ll just have to take my word for it that Johnson lists 83 meanings for PUT, 85 for FALL (as verb or noun), 94 for SET, and 134 for TAKE. But out of the hundreds of thousands of examples I’ve just given you two at random, the word LICENSE, and THOUGHT (the latter one of those big, slippery philosophical words which Johnson seems to have loved grappling with.) With this kind of depth and subtlety Johnson established a new benchmark in lexicography to which later dictionaries, including the OED, have aspired.

Writing a dictionary is an essentially practical business, so before I turn to my main area this evening – the books and quotations Johnson uses in the Dictionary – I’ll brief sketch out the where and how of the book. Sometime around 1747/48 Johnson and his wife moved into the house in Gough Square, just north of Fleet Street, where he was to do the majority of work on the Dictionary. Before moving into this substantial house he and Elizabeth had lived in what were often (presumably)) less salubrious rooms around Holborn, the Strand, Fleet Street, and indeed for the first couple of years of Dictionary work J seems to have worked in these sort of conditions. But by the late 1740s he either felt financially able to move into a large house or (perhaps) it was obvious that the project required more space. He had signed a contract with his booksellers in 1746 to produce an English Dictionary in three years. In actual fact it took him the best part of ten years. Some of the delays were because he had simply underestimated the amount of work, there were other literary tasks that Johnson undertook alongside the Dictionary work, and there were practical problems involved in the compiling of the book.

For several years Johnson seems to have used a method for compiling the Dictionary which involved the use of paper notebooks into which he and his amanuenses tried to push more and more material. As anyone who has ever tried to work in this way will tell you this method was awkward and inflexible for himself and for his printers. (Material missed out earlier had to be inserted between the lines of earlier material and copy for the printer became increasingly illegible). Somewhere around 1750 Johnson was obliged to change direction radically to a more fluid system involving slips of paper, rather like modern filing cards. There also seem to have been numerous disputes between author and publishers over the speed at which Johnson was working, his method of preparing copy for the printer, and, inevitably, money. But amongst all the troubles and problems which beset Johnson and his amanuenses in the Gough Square attic the basic philosophy remained the same: Johnson’s Dictionary, from its outset right through its major revision for the fourth edition and the later tinkerings made right up to his death, was to be based on a reading of the written literature (in the broadest sense) from the mid-sixteenth century (the time of Ascham, Tusser, Sidney, and Spenser) to the middle of the eighteenth century. The books in which Johnson looked for his illustrative quotations are the core of his research and the heart of the Dictionary. I would like to speak about them, and their part in the Birmingham University Dictionary Project for the rest of my talk this evening.

Johnson’s Dictionary takes the written word, as it exists in the books of the previous two hundred years, as his basis for work. He got hold of the books he wanted (from his own collection, some borrowed from friends, some ‘loaned’ from publishers, he may have even occasionally bought a book especially for his research) and went through them methodically looking for interesting usages. He then marked off the quotation with pencil, underlined the headword to be defined, wrote the initial letter in the margin and handed the book to one of the amanuenses to be written up on a slip of paper. (There are, as I mentioned, about thirteen of these marked books which survive – one of them, a volume of Robert South’s sermons, is, almost by chance, in the Cathedral library here). These slips were pasted up on sheets for the printer with Johnson writing in (or dictating) definitions, etymologies, and other comments. This is a rough outline of a process which probably took several years to refine. I am sure there were modifications and alterations throughout the whole ten-year research and writing period. But again I emphasise: the work centred around his books.

The progress of Johnson’s reading life is well known: some of the most familiar incidents in his early life revolve around his love of books. Several incidents took place in the house on Breadmarket Street, Frightening himself when reading Hamlet in the family kitchen, being bored on Sundays by being required to read the pious tract, The Whole Duty of Man, being overwhelmingly moved by the conclusion of King Lear, surprising his mother by learning the day’s collect from the Book of Common Prayer whilst walking up the stairs. At Oxford, finding William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life so convincing that he returns to a life of piety. Later at Edial Hall, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy gets him out of bed earlier than he intended, he studies Knolles’s History of the Turks as a source for a Turkish play which would help him to break into London literary life. We know too that his father’s bookshop stocked copies of once well-known books like Norris’s Miscellanies, Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth and that probably early in his life Johnson owned copies of Sir Thomas Browne’s Vulgar Errors, the antiquarian William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain, Jeremy Collier’s Essays, and John Locke’s Essay on Education. Whilst staying with a cousin, Cornelius Ford at Pedmore in Worcestershire, he was certainly encouraged to read (if he hadn’t already done so), the works of some of Ford’s literary friends, big names like Pope, Garth, Addison, Congreve, Edmund Smith, Prior, and we know that a few months later Johnson took with him to Oxford many of these authors, as well as other contemporary writers. (Perhaps Ford had given him some of his own volumes of contemporary literature.) What is significant about these writers - and we are dealing with just the handful that surface from the patchy accounts of his youth - is that all of them are cited in the Dictionary. That is to say many of the books to which Johnson naturally turned for his source material when researching for the Dictionary were those which had been a part of his life, in some cases, since he had encountered them in his father’s bookshop. Indeed if we look down the league table of the most quoted authors - Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, Addison, Bacon, Authorised Version of the Bible, Pope - many of them had been familiar to him for many years. And the case of Shakespeare, we know that, prior to the Dictionary, Johnson had begun work on an edition of Shakespeare’s plays (he’d certainly worked on Macbeth and possibly other plays too), an edition aborted when the publisher was faced with copyright problems. There were many other authors of course to which Johnson now came for the first time; he told Boswell that he had not read any of Bacon’s works until he started work on the Dictionary. But through personal reading habits much of Johnson’s reading for the Dictionary was laid out for him when he signed the contract with the consortium of booksellers in June 1746. It may be significant that although the edition of Shakespeare used by Johnson for the Dictionary survives – it’s in the National Library at Aberystwyth - most of the other major works have disappeared (we do not have the marked copies of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison); perhaps Johnson picked up his own well-thumbed editions of these popular writers acquired many years earlier in his father’s shop, volumes which had survived transportation between Lichfield, Oxford, many London digs, but which did not survive the rigours of life in the Gough Square attic.

It is also worth pointing out that at least some of Johnson’s old literary friends - The Whole Duty of Man, Robert Nelson’s Companion for Festivals and Feasts of the Church of England - books which Johnson had known since childhood and which were perhaps associated with the narrow piety of his mother - reappear not in the first edition of the Dictionary but in the fourth revised edition on which he was working thirty years later in his early sixties. And William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (a book for ever associated with his undergraduate days) creeps into the first edition with a couple of citations, but it’s quoted two hundred times in the fourth. The use of particular authors for more or less the first time in the revised Dictionary has become a source of controversy amongst Johnson scholars (how should we regard the High Church, non-juring theological writers whom Johnson now includes in the revised Dictionary? Do they represent a newly-inspired belief in conservatism? An alternative view might be that some of them are re-emerged authors from Johnson’s youth.

Now clearly Johnson read for the Dictionary in a different spirit to how he read poetry with cousin Ford in Worcestershire. Certainly he went through William Law’s famous book with a different intention to the occasion at Oxford when Law proved an ‘overmatch’ for him. He was for one thing reading for the Dictionary very quickly. I shall give you some more figures in a moment, but Johnson read a lot of authors and a lot of books. Nine years may seem a long time for work on the book, but as I mentioned earlier, several years were, at least partially, wasted in an inefficient method of transcribing material for the printer, he was obliged to engage in administrative battles with the publishers, see that the amanuenses were selected and properly paid, there were other writing projects, including the Rambler essays written alongside Dictionary work, as well as making provision "for the day that was passing over me", as he memorably expresses it in the Preface.² As I have begun the editing process on the Dictionary it has not been lost upon me that many of the editor’s problems echo those of the author. I can appreciate the defensive spirit in which Johnson talks about the cavalier way in which he has sometimes been obliged to treat quotations. Speed reading John Donne, juggling concordances and texts, reading other great verse by racing down the rhyming words on a page, as I have sometimes done, I appreciate that I am not perhaps treating great literature with the high seriousness I was taught at College by disciples of F.R. Leavis.

We know that Johnson too took short cuts. Some excitement was created in the Johnson world a few years ago when it was pointed out that for his quotations from Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa Johnson had used a collection of aphorisms which was appended to a later edition of the book. Other short cuts are discovered from time to time. Chaucer is quoted fourteen times in the first edition of the Dictionary and two of the quotations (under QUAINT and WELKIN) can be found in footnotes to John Gay’s Shepherd’s Week, a poem written in 1714 in a deliberately rustic ‘old-fashioned’ style. This use of a secondary source often occurs when there is only a single quotation from an author. Thus under REED (as in advice) there are a few lines from Thomas Sternhold’s metrical version of the first psalm. The same lines occur in a footnote to Pope’s Dunciad, which is presumably where Johnson came across them. These secondary sources represent an interesting part of Johnson’s methodology, but they still only represent a tiny proportion of the 116,000 quotations in the first and fourth editions. There are not as far as I am aware any short cuts for the works of Shakespeare, Dryden, Addison, and Bacon, which together represent just over a third of all the quotations in both editions. Johnson read through these writers quickly but methodically. Also extensively. In the case of some other heavily quoted writers such as Sir Thomas Browne Johnson restricts himself to a few, sometimes only one book. Occasionally just a few pages of one book. But for instance in the case of Shakespeare, there are quotations from all the plays (though not the non-dramatic poetry), and within Bacon’s works Johnson ranges widely amongst the more familiar Essays and the life of Henry VII, but also in the less well-known scientific and political tracts.

But though these major authors make up the bulk of Johnson’s reading, one is still drawn back to the intriguing authors who only have one or two quotes. Why for instance under LEAD does he quote from a speech printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine given by Thomas Herring, Archbishop of York, during preparations to repel the Jacobite Rising:

Yorkshire takes the lead of the other counties,

reads the quotation. Is there perhaps an in-joke here that we are missing?

Johnson explains in the Preface to the Dictionary that he had originally intended to include no contemporary writers but had been forced to modify his position "when some performance of uncommon excellence excited my veneration, when my memory supplied me from late books with an example that was wanting, or when my heart, in the tenderness of friendship, solicited admission for a favourite name."³ These words I suspect have led some critics and general readers to underestimate the number of contemporary writers who appear in the first edition of the Dictionary. My estimate is that there are about fifty-five who were alive when Johnson began work. Several of these are the compilers of reference books (Philip Miller, for instance, the author of the widely used Florist’s Dictionary lived on until 1771), several of them are only quoted once or twice, but taken together they make a considerable group. And two of them, the polymath Isaac Watts and the poet James Thomson (both of whom died in 1748, a couple of years after work began) are amongst the more widely quoted authors in the Dictionary. Writers mentioned for the sake of friendship would presumably have included the handful of female authors in the Dictionary, Elizabeth Carter, Hester Mulso, (fellow contributors to Johnson’s Rambler essays), and especially, Charlotte Lennox, whose novel, The Female Quixote, and her important work of Shakespearean scholarship, Shakespear Illustrated, appeared during the composition of the Dictionary. The novelist Samuel Richardson - the second most quoted contemporary writer - appears because of his friendship with Johnson but also as a tribute to what was a favourite contemporary book, Clarissa. As an example of inclusion purely for friendship there are a couple of lines from a poem of Henry Harvey Aston’s, an old Lichfield friend. When Johnson came to revise the book he further loosened up his restrictions about quoting contemporaries. In the fourth edition we have one quotation from Amelia, Johnson’s favourite Fielding novel, Thomas Gray (Elegy in a County Churchyard), and friends such as Goldsmith, (his poem, The Traveller), Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the playwright, Arthur Murphy. And remember too that of all his contemporaries, the most quoted of all is Samuel Johnson, though when looking for material to cut in the revised edition, he selflessly puts himself forward as one of the chief sacrifices.

I now turn to the work of the Johnson Dictionary Project at Birmingham University. The first stage of this is already complete with the publication of the CD-ROM of the Dictionary. This contains a transcription of the first and fourth editions and facsimile reproductions of the same. That is it. Thus if you want to know how many quotations from Hamlet are in the Dictionary, you type in ‘Hamlet’ in the right box, and it will let you know how many times the word ‘Hamlet’ appears as a book title. But, as anyone who has looked at the Dictionary will know, there are many (probably a majority of quotations in the Dictionary) which will not say, ‘Shakespeare, Hamlet’ - they may not even say ‘Shakespeare’, but some variant such as ‘Shakes.’, ‘Shak.’, or even once or twice ‘S’. (Plus several ingenious abbreviations of ‘Hamlet’.) Thus the reader who wishes to look at Johnson’s use of that particular play has to trawl through the text looking at all the unascribed Shakespeare quotations, as well as thinking up every possible abbreviation of his name and that of the play. I chose the example of the most famous play of the most famous author. There are many other writers whose identity is still not certain and there are many authors who wrote many books - some of them very long books. A major task for the editor of the Dictionary is to identify authors, works, and give precise references in a modern edition, where such a thing exists.

To get down to brass tacks: how do you find the source of a quotation when Johnson gives you no assistance? By and large, he does tell you the author (assuming that the name is recognizable), though we do have a little group of quotations to which (for some reason) the author’s name has been omitted. Poetry and drama are easier than prose. For major poets there have been for many years' concordances which list all the lines which contain a particular word. For more minor poets and dramatists there are two marvellous databases on the Web which one can search for particular words. (These are especially useful for the quotations which are mistakenly ascribed in the Dictionary – if Johnson ascribes a particular quotation to, say, Dryden, and it isn’t, it’s difficult to see how you could track it down (unless you happened to recognize it) without some sort of massive database which will search more or less the whole of poetic literature for you.)) But some poetry does not even warrant an appearance on an extensive database. There is always a problem for instance if Johnson quotes a bit of verse by someone who is not usually regarded as a poet. On these occasions we do it the hard way – as we say in the Project: I read through the works of a writer looking for the relevant quotation. These problems are exacerbated in prose works. There are, it is true, works on-line which can be electronically searched: Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding is one, Bacon’s Essays are another. But for the mass of prose writers there is really only one way, and that is to read, and re-read, and read again through their works. And that is how I spend a major part of my time on the Project.

As a step on the way to a complete edition and as a useful reference tool in itself a bibliography is in progress listing all the authors and works quoted by Johnson in the Dictionary. At present this contains about 511 authors (including some anonymous figures) and over two thousand works (the latter is rather fluid depending on what you call a separate work). The former figure will probably not change very much; the number of individual works will increase as, for instance, all the individual sermons of the many seventeenth and eighteenth century divines in the Dictionary are identified. Some of these two thousand individual works are short lyric poems; some of them are monumental books like Hooker’s Of Ecclesiastical Polity. Following on from this major process of discovering the books and authors, the Dictionary project will then seek out the particular editions that Johnson used. This is a very difficult task but an important one. We know that Johnson maintained a creative control over his book, in the selection of materials, but also in his editing, cutting down of his quotations. When we know what edition Johnson used we can assess the changes he made to the text. In the Preface Johnson explains that he originally intended his quotations to be longer:

I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other

end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from

philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable

facts; from chemists complete processes; from divines striking

exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions. Such is design,

while it is yet at a distance from execution.

But reality rears its head (in the shape of a few letters from the publishers) and he realises that this scheme would make a vast, unwieldy book. Johnson was obliged to

reduce my transcripts very often to clusters of words in which

scarcely any meaning is retained: thus to the weariness of copying,

I was condemned to add the vexation of expunging . . . . The

examples, thus mutilated, are no longer to be considered as

conveying the sentiments or doctrine of their authors; the word

for the sake of which they are inserted, with all its appendant

clauses, has been carefully preserved; but it may sometimes happen,

by hasty detruncation, that the general tendency of the sentence may

be changed: the divine may desert his tenets, or the philosopher his

system.⁴

Johnson may be exaggerating the extent of his editing; there don’t seem to be many quotations in the Dictionary that give the opposite meaning to how they stand in the original text. But there is a problem. The editor has to make a judgment as to how far Johnson has truncated his illustrative quotations: should he look further and find those words in that form in some other edition of the work? These may seem the problems of an editor, remote from anyone interested in Samuel Johnson’s mind or art, but what Johnson was trying to do with his quotations (assuming he was trying to do anything) is of the greatest importance for an understanding of his intellectual landscape.

In the first instance the edition will be prepared electronically, it will be accessible on the Web. Once I’ve found the source of a quotation I write it into a facsimile edition of the first edition, later I enter the information onto a Dictionary database. (In addition I keep lists of headwords for most of the individual authors.) There are many advantages to an on-line edition; you can present your work to the world in a continuous state of revision, augmentation, you can present a lot of complex material in a reader- friendly fashion. If you wanted to present as much complex material in book form you would have to use different typographical forms, print sizes, odd symbols, and footnotes. On the electronic page you can simply click between this material to different pages, or have them on the screen at the same time.

As well as the two major editions of the Dictionary there is important manuscript material that will be accessible from the electronic edition. These are the Sneyd-Gimbel sheets (named after earlier owners of the material), the slips of paper taken from the manuscript of the early, false start on the Dictionary in the mid 1740s but reused in the revision of the early 1770s. There are also the manuscript pages bound into a copy in the British Library which represent a later stage of the revision for the fourth edition, and the annotations in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s copy of the fourth edition in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, which form an even later, largely unpublished, set of revisions in the late 1770s. Johnsonian scholars at Zurich are editing these manuscript materials and eventually it will be possible to access them in the electronically presented edition. Thus you will end up with pages of the first or fourth editions of the Dictionary, all the quotation sources presented for all the headwords, with a link which will take you, if you wish to go there, to any manuscript notes or later revisions which Johnson made to those entries.

Having said all this, I still hanker after some kind of hard copy edition in book form. Perhaps it will be possible to produce, say, the Bibliography in a printed form, with another edition alongside it on the Web that can be revised as needed.

One of the problems in editing a ‘non-fiction’ work is that there is a temptation to write an alternative version of the book. I know that when the Yale University Press editors edit the Lives of the Poets, they have to resist the temptation to write their biographies of Dryden, Prior, or whoever in their footnotes and appendices. It is possible to conceive of doing something similar when editing the Dictionary: putting Johnson right on his etymologies, pointing out an earlier usage of a word, helpfully filling in the gaps, giving him the benefit of modern linguistic research. But I am not a lexicographer and have no wish to write an English Dictionary. This edition will be an explication of the book that Samuel Johnson began in the mid-1740s, revised in the early 1770s, and continued to look at throughout his life. If it starts to help us understand the making of what the New York Times described as ‘the book of the millennium’ it will be time well spent.

This paper was delivered at the AGM of the Johnson Society at Guildhall, Lichfield, on Wednesday, 21 March 2001; earlier versions were presented to the Johnson Society of London on 11 March 2000 and the Warrington Literary and Philosophical Society on 5 March 2001.

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Graham Nicholls
This is the first of the Winter Lecture Series 2003/2004 . It is a transcript of the spoken words  without asides and brief explanatory comments. Similarly there are no notes or references. We are grateful to Dr Nicholls for allowing us to include this version on the site.

The four lectures on this short course have been divided into what I hope are logical segments of J’s life – his early years, the Dictionary years, the Shakespeare years, the years of celebrity. The first and last are as much taken up with biographical material as literary matters (especially the first one), and the central two are centred around the two long-term projects which dominated the most creative period of his life. Like most categorisation this has led to some simplification. Obviously in the second and third periods J wrote other important material in addition to the Dictionary and the Shakespeare, it is arguable that J was a famous man earlier than the early 1760s from at least the publication of the Dictionary in 1755, in the the last period J did not merely bask in his status as one of the most famous men in Great Britain, some very important work was also undertaken. There are also other ways of dividing up his life – a popular way is into the thirds which his seventy-five years helpfully suggests: the first third (like our Lecture One), the early (or Midland) years, the second third (our Lectures Two and Three), years of struggle (concluding with the financial security of the pension award in 1762,) the years of celebrity, the Boswell or Thrale years could be another title, (our Lecture Four) from the early 1760s until his death in 1784. Both schemes are characterized by a pattern of youthful development and education followed by a quarter century at the literary coal face, followed by approximately the same period when J enjoys his status as the dominant literary figure of his age. More fundamentally we should bear in mind that these are the sorts of patterns we put on a life from a considerable distance – J, though he no doubt had a sense of his own abilities and genius, for instance was not to know that his early years of struggle would lead to intellectual and (to some extent) worldly success.

Whichever way you divide the material the whole process begins in this smallish, cathedral market town of (in the early 18^th century) about three thousand inhabitants. By 1709 when J was born above his father’s bookshop the city had physically recovered from the traumas of the Civil War which had racked it sixty years earlier. Some of the city’s finest buildings date from the second half of the seventeenth century and early years of the 18^th: the Bishop’s Palace (built as a sort of penance by a Bishop of Lichfield adjudged not to be pulling his weight by his Archbishop), the beautiful Deanery (which replaced the earlier building in which another dominating literary influence of the 18^th century, Joseph Addison, had lived when young), the Headmaster’s House in S. John Street, the Georgian version of S. Mary’s (the church which precedes the present Victorian one), and the large commercial and residential premises opposite we know now as the Birthplace. There would be another important period of renovation later in the 18^th century but in 1709 Lichfield must have looked like a city that had found itself again after being the centre of bloody struggles when Englishman fought Englishman in the home of the only English cathedral to be damaged by warfare (until Coventry in 1940).

It is likely that Lichfield was not simply the hotbed of Toryism which its critics (and defenders) in the country sometimes like to imagine. Judged by its parliamentary returns the city seems to have divided into roughly the same proportions between Whig and Tory as the country as a whole. But its reputation as a bastion of loyalty against rebellious forces may have played its part in nurturing the natural conservatism of SJ’s personality.

In addition to being a part of his city’s history J was also born into the contemporary fabric of its political life. His father, Michael Johnson, was sheriff of the city in the year of his first son’s birth, he later became Senior Bailiff (what we would now call the Mayor). Though M later fell onto hard times he seems to have retained the respect of his fellow citizens as a man who had played his part in the civic life of his city. The story of MJ is (at least in its earlier part) a traditionally edifying story of hard work and endeavour. He had been born just over the county border at Great Cubley in Derbyshire; it has been suggested that the Johnsons were an old Lichfield family and that they had fled the city for the quieter countryside during the upheavals of the mid 17^th century, but there is no evidence for this. Certainly by 1664 the Johnsons were in Lichfield, living in the Tamworth Street area, a family of four children, Michael himself, two brothers, and a sister. They were poor, there is no doubt of that, and after the death of M’s father (SJ’s paternal grandfather) in 1672, his widow was in receipt of charity from the Smith Charity and Conduit Lands Trust. Presumably her boys had shown some bookish interests because they were all apprenticed to be booksellers in London. On becoming an independent man Michael returned to Lichfield and opened up a bookshop (we don’t know where) and began his rise through the commercial and local civic world. If he had followed the traditional pattern of a successful small businessman in the community he would be expected to marry, but M seems to have been in no hurry to do so. One of his fellow tradesman however, a saddler called John Harrison had married Phoebe Ford, the daughter of a well-to-do north Warwickshire landowner, and she had a sister Sarah. Michael and Sarah married in 1706, by the standards of the time a middle-aged couple, M in his mid-50s, S in her late thirties.

It may not be too cynical to regard the marriage as a last chance for both participants, but M determined to do the right thing. He purchased a property on the corner of Sadler Street (now Market Street) and Women’s Cheaping (now Breadmarket Street), pulled it down and put up the large, unpretentious house we all know. In view of his age and that of his wife he may have been over-enthusiastic in estimating the number of rooms he would need for his family, but presumably the size of the building reflects his feeling that life was good, he was rising in the world, and the Fords higher social standing would do him no harm either.

The size of the Johnson home has always been something of a problem for visiting Johnsonians, taken with the idea of SJ, a Dickensian poor boy, one step away from the poorhouse. The simplest response to this is to change one’s attitude, the physical evidence is in front of you. Clearly M either possessed or was able to borrow sufficient funds to build a house the size of the Birthplace. In view of the fact that his financial affairs began to nosedive within a few years, it may also be that he had overstretched himself in building the family home. If this was the case he didn’t learn from his error for within a few months of his marriage he also made a huge purchase of 2600 books, the library of the Earl of Derby, another major outlay from which he struggled to recover. We know that throughout his marriage to Sarah there were unsettled financial problems arising out of their marriage settlement. But when early in 1709 his wife announced that she was pregnant, M must have put aside these intrusive problems and rejoiced all the more when at four o’clock in the afternoon of 18 September 1709 she gave birth to a son. But here too there were dark clouds. At the time of Samuel’s birth Sarah, a slightly built woman, was almost forty, and if you know anything of 18^th century obstetrics the implications were as terrifying as one could imagine. Obstetrics and midwifery were arguably the least developed and most dangerous areas of medical practice in the eighteenth century: the medical establishment refusing to follow the growing European practice of giving medical training to midwives. Women controlled the profession, which is why Johnson thought it worthy of comment in his truncated autobiography to record that he was brought into the world by George Hector, a male midwife ‘of great reputation’. Looking back in his middle age, S could write that his mother ‘had a difficult and dangerous labour. . . . I was born almost dead, and could not cry for some time. When [the midwife] had me in his arms, he said, "Here’s a brave boy."’ A remark presumably provoked by that difficult labour, though whether in congratulation or relief it’s impossible to say. J was to grow up a large, sturdily built figure, but some of his physical ailments may have arisen from the birth complications. The people who saw him in his first minutes would no doubt have been amazed to learn that the bedraggled baby – he was christened in the bedroom by a hastily summoned Vicar of S. Mary’s - would live for another seventy-five years: certainly an aunt who saw him remarked, with her plain Midlands directness, that she wouldn’t have bothered to pick a baby in that condition out of the gutter. It is however worth pointing out that this sort of remark could presumably be applied to most children born under the conditions of early eighteenth-century obstetrics, and Sickly Child Not Expected to Live is after all one of the archetypes of biography. Despite Johnson’s later ill health his bodily frame was large and he grew up into a tall, strong adult.

He would be christened Samuel, probably after a member of the all-important Ford family, one of his godparents was the Town Clerk, another mark of M’s standing in the community, and within two years Sarah would go through the whole thing again with her second son, Nathaniel. Michael however was blinded by paternal love; the following day was the Sheriff’s Ride and he was asked whom he would invite to the traditional feast. ‘All the town now,’ he exclaimed, and he kept to his word, feasting the townsfolk more lavishly perhaps than a prudent examination of his financial affairs would have suggested.

The baby Samuel was put out to wet nurse at Anne Marklew’s in George Lane, and the slowly recovering Sarah Johnson anxious for her first child would invent excuses to drop in and see how he was progressing. Her anxiety may have had some basis: whilst in George Lane S developed some sort of eye infection and he returned from the Marklews with a tubercular infection of the lymph glands in the neck, the famous scrofula or ‘king’s evil’. At a slightly later date his neck was operated on at least two occasions and he retained the scars of the operation throughout his life (they are visible on his death mask). His poor hearing and sight problems similarly never got ever better. Scrofula was the reason for his first trip out of the Midlands as a baby: a journey to London to be ‘touched’ by Queen Anne. This extraordinary ceremony – a medieval survival into an age which would pride itself on its rationality – had been reintroduced by the Queen and her advisors to emphasise the fact that she was a legitimate Stuart monarch who had the inherited gift of curing this particular illness by her mere touch. J maintained that he had a dim memory of the ceremony itself and of the lodgings they stayed at in London. The fact that Sarah made the return journey to Lichfield by the homely wagon rather than the more expensive stage-coach suggests that she may had an inkling of the growing monetary difficulties that the Johnsons faced.

The earliest education of Samuel and of Nathaniel was carried out by their mother. At one might expect, much of the reading material was religious in character; on one occasion Samuel managed to remember a short prayer read to him by Sarah before she had climbed up two flights of stairs. Sarah in fact had put herself in charge of her boys’ religious education. In view of his later concerns with his personal salvation many people have drawn attention to the famous anecdote which described how, when in bed one morning with his mother, she told Samuel of ‘two places to which the inhabitants of this world were received after death; one a fine place filled with happiness, called heaven; the other, a sad place, called hell.’ And to impress the message on her young son she told him to go and repeat it to a family servant. When recounting the story J comments, ‘That this account much affected my imagination. I do not remember," almost defying later biographers eager for psychological explanations of his later religious difficulties.

His first formal education was at Anne Oliver’s Dame School just around the corner from the Market Square in Dam Street. The little school also doubled as a confectioner’s, something of a heavenly combination for little boys surely. In the early years of people who later become famous the surviving few incidents anticipate their later personality traits. One of the most famous of the childhood incidents relates to the Anne Oliver period. J, you will remember, had poor eyesight and because of this (or perhaps as a lingering memory of her earliest concerns for her son) a servant was sent the short distance to collect him from school. One day the servant was late and the six (or seven) year old Samuel started to crawl home along Dam Street on his hands and knees, to avoid tripping over the channels in the road. Anne Oliver, feeling some responsibility for the child but appreciating already his sturdy pride, followed him at a safe distance. But J realising he was being watched in this humiliating posture, jumped up, ran back and began to punch and kick his embarrassed teacher. In later life J’s independence becomes a central plank in his intellectual makeup and personality. (Anne Oliver bore him no animosity incidentally: when setting off to Oxford several years later she presented him with a gift of her gingerbread, declaring he was the best pupil she had ever had.)

His education however had not yet reached that stage. Before university there was secondary education, which began in 1717 at the age of seven and a half at Lichfield Grammar School (opposite S. John’s Hospital, on site of present District Council Chamber). For a relatively modest establishment LGS had a distinguished list of old boys; at one time, it was said, seven famous judges in the Westminster Courts had been educated at the school. It is worth bearing in mind when we read about grammar school education that the grammar in question is Latin grammar, the study of that subject being virtually the only subject studied in schools. This always seems one of those jaw-dropping facts about the past that brings us up short and makes us realise how distant we are from the period we are thinking about. The logic would presumably be that in order to create all rounded men (and it is men of course) and future leaders, clerics, doctors, lawyers you had to understand what would have been regarded as the finest civilisation the world had ever seen. It was fortunate that J enjoyed the study of Latin and was very good at it.

On first entering the school his teacher was Humphrey Hawkins, a kindly man who had been an under-teacher at the school for about thirty years. The J story reaches its most Dickensian at this point I think. Hawkins seems to have been a badly used, poorly paid individual, continually writing to the school’s Trustees for extra money, doing extra teaching in vacations, other jobs on the side (doing S. Mary’s accounts for instance), whilst his wife took in washing to make ends meet. It is sobering to bear in mind that this harassed, gentle figure was also responsible for inspiring (or perhaps developing in) young Samuel a love for the literature of Greece and Rome. Just to add a finishing touch to the Dickensian story, after two years with Hawkins, J moved into the upper school where he came under the control of a totally different figure, the headmaster of the school, William Hunter. Because of Boswell and other biographers, Hunter has come down to us as an authoritarian sadist, the traditional teacherly ogre. On a positive side one should perhaps note that Hunter was a good scholar who seems to have been genuinely interested in his students, an interest which continued after they had left his school. He was a cultivated man and a fine musician. But, as has often been remarked, school teachers should be careful when they humiliate a pupil – they may have the writer in their class who will blacken their reputation for eternity. ‘Hunter [said Johnson] was not severe, sir. A master ought to be severe. Sir, he was cruel.’ The criticism comes all the more powerfully from a man who broadly speaking supported the role of corporal punishment in the educational system.

J’s more considered response to Hunter was that he made no distinction between a boy being negligent and being ignorant. He beat them indiscriminately. Did J ever suffer in this way? Probably not, and or if he did it was not for academic negligence, rather for ‘larking around’. One of J’s schoolfriends recalled that if J was punished ‘it was for talking and diverting other boys from their business’. At school J was certainly aware of his own abilities as a scholar but seems to have shared that peculiarly English trait of hiding one’s intelligence:

Throughout his life J had a tendency to idleness (one of his essay series in called the Idler); however hard he tried J could not overcome this difficulty; at the height of his professional career he would sometimes write an essay with the publisher’s boy standing at the door waiting for copy to carry to the printer.

This personality trait was also apparent in his leisure activities. With his friends he would wander round the fields and streets of Lichfield, lounging about, talking or buying Anne Oliver’s cakes. With his poor eyesight he was excluded from many physical games, but he was growing into a tall, strong young man (he was a physically intimidating figure in his maturity – six foot tall with a bear-like physique) and J loved jumping and climbing. Three years before his death he found a stile in Levetts Fields that he used to vault over and found with delight that he could still leap over it. His two closest school-friends were John Taylor and Edmund Hector. Though these names will not figure very often in these talks, in his later years they again became important figures in his life, as J began to return to the Midlands and repaired his friendships with Taylor (in Ashbourne) and Hector (in Birmingham).

But we do not merely learn from schools or even from our friendships. J, remember, was growing up in a house which was at once a home and a bookshop. If we accept the usual line that books in a house are one of the best starts in a child’s education, what shall we make of a home which contained thousands of books on a vast array of subjects? As bookshops and booksellers played and will play a central role in J’s life, let us consider what bookselling involved in the 18^th century.

Today a bookseller is just another retailer, a shop where one can buy books, newspapers, and probably stationery. Some of these functions would have been recognised by Michael Johnson: he sold books and items of stationery, some of them the same as today (notepaper, pens, pencils, sheets of paper) some not so (penknives and paperknives, quills, parchment, sandpots for blotting ink). In addition, MJ’s shop did a sideline in patent medicines, the advertisements for which claimed to cure many, if not all, of the pains that flesh is heir to. As well as what we might regard as ‘proper’ books M also sold cheap and cheerful items like almanacs and account books. A major part of the seventeen/eighteenth-century bookseller’s time was taken up by book-binding, a major part of his portfolio of skills. Books would usually return from the printer unbound, and for some customers this format (perhaps in an informal paper cover) would be sufficient. For others more elaborate bindings would be required, perhaps emblazoned with the family coat of arms. This was an area in which his sons would become competent; it was a practical skill on which booksellers’ apprentices (Michael himself, his own later) would spend much of their time. Acquiring hides for leather and parchment was a time-consuming area of activity and M would travel about the country assessing the quality and source for skins and hides.

Another major area of work for the bookseller was publishing, which in Johnson’s time was combined with the retailing side. A local vicar, let us say, would approach MJ with a view to publishing his sermons. M might agree, pay the vicar for his manuscript (almost certainly the last payment the writer would receive for his work), MJ would send the manuscript to his usual printer and when they returned, sell them and bind them as required. So as well as practical abilities the more delicate skills of negotiating and fiscal management would be required by the bookseller. Perhaps some of M’s financial problems arose from his lack of ability in this area – only later in his life did his son manage to understand his financial situation. M published about a dozen books that we know of, most of them sermons, but also medical and other works by an important local doctor, Sir John Floyer.

The most important question is what sort of books did M have in his shop, books which his son could consult or read. Remember that the novel, as we would understand it, did not develop for another half a century. (It can be difficult to imagine a world, or at least a bookshop, without novels). The major categories of book were probably theology, books of political and church controversy, reprints of classical authors, historical memoirs, translations, collections of pamphlets. What we might immediately think of as the ‘books’ of the late 17^th/early 18^th centuries (Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Addison, Swift) would probably be less in evidence, though I am sure S could find them when he wanted them. In fact J never lost his tendency to dip into books throughout his life; at times he pretended shock and disbelief when someone told him they’d read a book all the way through. The only books, he maintained, which anyone wished longer were Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and Pilgrim’s Progress; presumably books he read as a child. The most famous of the incidents associated with his early reading was when, reading the ghost scene from Hamlet in the basement kitchen, he was so frightened that he rushed up into the Market Square to see real flesh and blood people around him. Probably at the same time he was so distressed by the harrowing end of King Lear that he said he was unable to read it again until he obliged to do so when he came to edit the play half a century later. This extraordinary sensitivity to literature (an illuminating contrast to the thick-skinned, dogmatic blustering J of popular view) was honed in the amazingly wide programme of random reading begun in his father's bookshop.

Furthermore many of the books to which Johnson was to turn for his source material when researching for the Dictionary were those which had been a part of his life since he had encountered them in his father’s bookshop. We know that Michael stocked copies of once well-known books like Norris’s Miscellanies, Burnet’s Sacred History of the Earth and that probably early in his life Johnson owned copies (quite possibly borrowed from the shop) of Sir Thomas Browne’s Vulgar Errors, the antiquarian William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain, Jeremy Collier’s Essays, and John Locke’s Essay on Education. I shall be returning to this subject next month when I come to discuss J’s research whilst writing the Dictionary.

J was certainly in need of the comforts and distraction which reading and study brought him. His family life does not seem to have been particularly happy. 'My father and mother,' J wrote,’had not much happiness from each other. They seldom conversed, for my father could not bear to talk of his affairs; and my mother, being unacquainted with books, cared not to talk of anything else.' One’s picture of the Johnson marriage is indeed of a dull relationship untroubled by extreme unhappiness or ecstasy. As we sometimes say, ‘they got along’. M was frequently away, buying books, parchments, running auctions, searching for hides, meeting his wealthier customers. Furthermore Lichfield was not his only outlet: he had shops – perhaps in some cases market stalls – elsewhere in the area, at Ashby, Burton, and, most famously, at Uttoxeter. When he was at home Michael never seems to have cooled in the overwhelming love and admiration he felt for his first son when he was born, embarrassing him with his excessive praise for any small achievement. We can imagine Sarah when Michael was away, and not engaged in her domestic duties, brooding on her troubles. Sometimes these would flair up: a continuous source of tension was the social divide between the Johnsons and the Fords. Unappreciative of her husband’s hard struggles in his youth, Sarah was more aware that her own social standing and the wealth of her family came in the traditional form of land whilst M was in trade. It might have been acceptable if he had been very successful in business, but there were always those niggling financial uncertainties.

As J grew into adolescence there were two relationships which, of the greatest importance for his intellectual development, took him into a more sophisticated world than the worthy but narrow provincial one he had hitherto occupied. One of the defining features of Lichfield is of course that it is a cathedral city with (in J’s day) a large body of clergy and lay officials. They probably made up a major part of M’s customers. The most important member was Gilbert Walmsley, who lived in the Bishop’s Palace in the corner of the Close. As an aside it is another astonishing feature of 18^th century life to realise that Walmsley’s considerable income was made up of salaries for jobs he didn’t do. The sinecure system (by which posts with good salaries were handed out as payment for favours or to help out relations or illegitimate offspring, the work itself being done, if at all, by underpaid clerks or clerics) seems to have been accepted by just about everybody at the time without criticism. Walmsley’s title was register of the ecclesiastical court of Lichfield. I’ve never found out quite what that involved because I suspect Walmsley didn’t either. In addition he received a yearly stipend for supervising a national lottery. Walmsley’s saving grace was that he used his considerable wealth and leisure profitably by bringing out the talent of local youngsters. In his youth Walmsley had led a raffish life around London, a man dedicated to the newly-installed Hanoverian dynasty, and the Whig government which supported it. (Which was what brought him his offices of profit in Lichfield.) Throughout his life J always paid the greatest respect to his Lichfield mentor and the influence Walmsley had had on him.

I knew him very early; he was one of the first friends that literature

procured me, and I hope that at least my gratitude made me worthy

Apart from the bobble tribute from these remarks you will observe that J was already developing his Tory beliefs; characteristically in the cut and thrust of conversation at Walmsley’s dinnertable. There were other boys present in the Bishop’s Palace, another schoolfriend of Johnson called Robert James, later to be a doctor of some fame in London, and the son of a local recruiting officer, a boy called David Garrick. The lives and careers of these men (especially Garrick) would weave themselves into J’s early professional career when he moved to London.

The other important figure was Cornelius Ford, a cousin of J's mother, who came into his life when Ford arrived to try and sort out the tangled financial problems of Sarah's marriage. J was about sixteen when they met; Ford, a man in his early thirties. Ford shared something of the qualities of Gilbert Walmsley, both men bringing with them something of the flavour and excitement of cosmopolitan life. If anything Ford had led a life even closer to the centre of literary action than Walmsley, knowing personally the leading writers of his day, men like Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison. Ford told J stories of these men, some of which he recalled sixty years later when he came to write their biographies in the Lives of the Poets. J came to see that great works of literature, many of which he had already become acquainted with in his father’s shop, had been written by fallible human beings, perhaps sometimes far from being admirable people, but capable of writing works of the greatest sensitivity, intelligence and humanity. Ford also taught him practical lessons about the world of literature: how to get the heart out of a book, the importance of knowing the basics, the broad outlines, of a wide range of subjects. The discussions between J and Ford continued when the younger man went down to spend time with his cousin at his house at Pedmore near Stourbridge. The time was spent so profitably and enjoyably that when the time came for J to return to his education at L Grammar School, Hunter decided that he was not prepared to allow Johnson to re-enter the school. Fortunately the name of Ford carried considerable weight in Stourbridge, and Cornelius was able to arrange for his cousin to complete his secondary education with a six month spell at the Grammar School there. By now J was nearing the end of his education and it is possible that he undertook some junior teaching at Stourbridge Grammar School. Certainly the headmaster seems to have realised there was little else he could teach him and allowed him a certain amount of freedom. The importance of this was that it was from his time at Stourbridge that J’s earliest surviving poetry dates.

The period from the end of his education at Stourbridge in 1726 to his marriage in 1735 is characterized by frustration and inactivity. With the exception of the time at Oxford it was dominated by attempts to find work, followed by depressing returns to the shop on the Market Square. By now his father’s affairs were in deep decline. In 1725 Michael was in trouble for non-payment of taxes and the fact that he had never complied with his wife’s dowry arrangements seemed incapable of settlement. It must have been an increasingly depressive household for S, especially as his own life seemed to be going nowhere.

In early 1728 there was a break in the gloom. The Ford family had finally proved its worth and Sarah was in receipt of a small bequest of £40 from a rich cousin. By the terms of the will Sarah was only allowed to have the money for her ‘own separate use’ (the Ford family en masse seemed unwilling to bail out Michael) and Sarah decided to spend the money on sending her intelligent son to Oxford University. The money would be insufficient to keep him there very long, but there was a vague understanding that other influential relations or friends already at Oxford would ‘see him right.’ Perhaps for this reason Pembroke College (where some of these friends and relations were students) was chosen and in October 1728 Michael J accompanied his son to Oxford to see him installed in the rooms over the gatehouse of the college. M had not lost his old ways; when he went with his son the first evening to meet his tutor, M regaled the man with tales of his son’s amazing knowledge and scholarship. We can imagine the cool reception this sort of talk would provoke in an Oxford don, further embarrassing S, until a chance remark made by him (an allusion to an obscure writer well outside the usual reading range of an undergraduate) made the tutor think that for once this might not just be the usual bragging of a pushy parent.

Despite this good start, matters did not continue on this promising level. J does not seem to have put himself out in his early days at Oxford; there were occasions when he cut lectures and when he was gently asked for an explanation by his tutor he explained that he had been sliding on the ice in Christchurch Meadows. Fortunately even by the easy-going standards of 18^th century Oxford J’s tutor seems to have been remarkably tolerant of J’s ‘relaxed’ attitude to his studies. As at Lichfield Grammar School J seems outwardly to have adopted a cool negligent attitude to his work. Contemporaries remembered him lounging around the College gates, disdainful of authority, joining in the unruly student pranks of undergraduates. When Boswell quoted to him the opinion of a contemporary don that J at Oxford had been ‘a gay and frolicsome fellow, and passed there the happiest part of his life’, Johnson replied in words that might almost be a motto for this part of his life: ‘Ah, sir, I was rude and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority.’ This wish to excel, to both hit out and impress the world, born out of his deep unhappiness and poverty, remained with him for at least the first part of his professional career. His mood was lightened somewhat by the arrival after a few months of his old schoolfriend, John Taylor, at Christ Church across the road. He began to make vast plans for reading and study and applied himself conscientiously to the study of Greek. But he was beginning to fall into the deep depressions that characterised so much of his later life. His financial problems did not help, none of the vague prospects for assistance laid out by his mother had come to anything. When a kindly fellow student noticed the poor state of his shoes he left a new pair outside J’s door; when Johnson saw them he threw them away in disgust. Unreasonable, but part of him was appalled by the fact that J, with all the talents which he knew he possessed, had fallen to a state where he had to be in receipt of handouts from his, no doubt benevolent, but surely less talented, neighbours.

After thirteen months residence at Pembroke College, the Christmas vacation gave him an opportunity to return home. He left his extensive library with Taylor and found a pair of boots from somewhere. The two men walked together to Banbury where Taylor left him to carry on to the gloomy house back in Lichfield. It is difficult to overestimate the unhappiness that J felt at this point in life: he had been unable to make a mark in the one area of life where he knew he had something to offer. The fact that he had left Oxford without a degree was something which even Boswell was unable to probe.

Back in Lichfield he discovered his father was now in receipt of charity from the Conduit Lands Trust, the charity which had set him up as a bookseller and of which in happier days he had been a warden. J, with no job, no degree, no prospects of work, would certainly have been expected to help out in the shop. It may have been at this time that M, now a sick ageing man, asked his son to go over to Uttoxeter and help him run the bookstall there. S refused; we don’t know why, depression perhaps, late adolescent sulks, a refusal to take on what he saw as an undignified job, a combination of all these. M went to Uttoxeter himself, and, if the incident did take place at this time, the fact that he died within a few months of J’s refusal, would have been another factor in J’s tremendous feelings of guilt that this act of disobedience prompted in him.

In December, 1731, Michael died and was buried in S. Michael’s church. Samuel was now head of the family, he was obliged to find work whilst his mother and brother continued to run the shop. This is the period when J applies for teaching posts; Gilbert Walmsley did his best to help but it is difficult to see why anyone should employ this strange degree-less young man, and there is a proud list of Midland towns which turned down SJ for a job: Brewood, Ashbourne, Stourbridge, Solihull. There is a sad letter from a governor at Solihull School which gives us a vivid physical impression of J at this time as well as a pitiful summary of why he was unemployable: the governors 'all agree that he is an excellent scholar . . . but he has the character of being a very haughty, ill-natur'd gent, and that he has such a way of distorting his face (which though he can't help) the gents think it may affect some young lads, for which two reasons he is not approved on.' J had already developed the amazing facial tics and bizarre gesticulations which were to sadden his friends and amuse his enemies.

It might be opportune here to anticipate slightly and discuss the

vexed area of these convulsions and facial tics. These bodily movements are sometimes linked with Johnson’s compulsive behaviour patterns, though it is by no means clear that they all have a common source: it is at least possible that the tics had a physiological basis, the compulsive behaviour a mental one. The latter could certainly be spectacular, especially when seen against a background of genteel Georgian manners. A contemporary noted ‘his extraordinary gestures or antics with his hands and feet before he would venture to pass through any doorway’. And then there were the obsessive rituals so often associated with walking, touching the roadside posts, going back to one if he had missed it out. The entry rituals when going into houses are even more bizarre, twisting about on doorsteps, making exaggerated strides to get across the threshold.

Johnson’s physical oddity, his facial movements, the talking to

himself, his nervous bodily twitchings, made him an unforgettable

sight. Until recently there has been a tendency (perhaps understandable) to lump together the body movements and the facial grimaces with the post-counting and the entry rituals and indeed sometimes with Johnson’s depressions and his whole neurological makeup. One recent fashionable theory categorizes him as a ticquer with Gilles de La Tourette syndrome (TS). I am no medical expert: the most one can say perhaps is that on occasions and according to some observers Johnson displayed behaviour which may seem to suggest TS. In assessing the whole picture one also has to take into account that some at least of Johnson’s vocalizing consisted of prayers (rather than the obscenities often associated with TS) and that he seemed able on occasions to control the jerkings of the torso and stamping of feet, for example when he was in church, sitting for his portrait, or whilst having an audience with King George III. When a child with all the boldness of youth asked him why he was behaving in such an odd fashion he explained, ‘From bad habit. Do you, my dear, take care to guard against bad habits.’

These ‘bad habits’ seem to have begun at this period (or at least we have the earliest references to them) when he was about twenty, following the short stay at Pembroke College, Oxford. ‘My health has been from my twentieth year,’ he wrote in his seventies,’ such as has seldom afforded me a single day of ease’. Other biographical causes for a sudden deterioration in Johnson’s health at this time could include domestic problems associated with his father’s financial difficulties in his last years and Johnson’s desultory attempts to find work.

Perhaps it was almost in despair that he did take a post: as usher (undermaster) at Market Bosworth Grammar School in Leicestershire. The post was poorly paid but the real problem was the patron of the job, Sir Wolstan Dixie, one of the most notoriously boorish landowners in the Midlands. Dixie was one of those ogres about whom people enjoy swapping anecdotes; entertaining to be sure, less so when you were directly under his control. As well as bullying his employees he made greater demands on J by ordering him to act as a sort of unofficial chaplain at his house. Market Bosworth was perhaps the nadir of J’s early life; he found a means of escape when he received eleven guineas, the very modest amount left him by his father, but enough he felt to throw up Sir Wolstan’s job. He later compared leaving his post at Market Bosworth to coming out of prison.

But his position was hardly any more hopeful. His periods of depression were still deep and he would frequently walk to and from Birmingham to see his schoolfriend, Edmund Hector. In the first place his visits to the town had a social and medical reason (walking helped him to shake off his melancholy), but within a few months he was to meet a woman in Birmingham who would make a major change in his way of life.

Even before he met Elizabeth Porter Birmingham had made a significant development in his life. Hector’s landlord was Thomas Warren, a bookseller, who published the Birmingham Journal. Anxious to supply the readers with some original material in addition to stories and articles lifted from the London magazines, Warren asked his lodger’s strange friend with some literary pretensions if he would contribute something to the newspaper. J obliged. Unfortunately these first efforts of Johnson’s journalism (a genre in which he was to excel later) have not survived. Another venture has. At Oxford, as part of his strenuous study programme, J had perused with interest an account by a Portuguese Jesuit missionary of his activities in Abyssinia. (Or perhaps it was leisure reading). J suggested to Warren that a translation would be worth making – it had been translated out of Portuguese into French - and Warren agreed to pay five guineas for what would be his first published book. Typically J was in no hurry to complete the undertaking despite Hector’s encouragement. In desperation Hector eventually told J that the printer and his family were suffering because of J’s delays. This provoked the generous-minded J into action, though even now most of the book was dictated to Hector whilst J lay in bed.

Hector’s major contribution to J’s life however came about when he took him around his circle of Birmingham friends, including the family of a neighbouring shopkeeper, Harry Porter. J may have known Harry Porter, his wife Elizabeth, and their three children when he was a young man, visiting relations in Birmingham. Lucy Porter, the eldest child, described many years later, the first reaction on meeting (or remeeting) J at this time:

He was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones

But this extraordinary figure seems to have made an impression on one of the party. After he left, Elizabeth Porter exclaimed, ‘This is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life’.

It will not surprise you to learn that there has been much speculation about the relationship between J and Elizabeth, and indeed of J’s sexual life as a whole. At the time of this meeting J was twenty-five, Elizabeth forty-six. There seems little doubt that J was a virgin. His unprepossessing appearance, we might suggest, made him reluctant to declare his feelings to a woman, and with his tremendous pride to risk humiliation by rejection. We know that he had romantic feelings for several women he had met in Lichfield and the region, including Hector’s own sister. He had written love poetry to them, without success (assuming that was what he was trying to achieve). But Elizabeth Porter was not the last person who quickly came to appreciate the attractive personality within the rugged exterior. In later life several women would admit to J’s charms as a man. J was clever, he could very funny, he was (to put it mildly) an entertaining companion, he was, as his contemporaries might have put it, a manly man, and once he realised that he was not going to be rejected, he was a lusty wooer. Elizabeth Porter was an experienced woman with three grown up children; she appreciated J’s qualities as a man, and as, potentially, a very great man.

For most people Elizabeth (or Tetty as J called her) is a ridiculous figure. Most of the descriptions of her date from the later years of their marriage from people some of whom, one suspects, had hardly met her. Garrick’s description is the most notorious:

This is not only Tetty towards the end of her life, but it is a woman seen by a consummate man of the theatre like an absurd figure from one of his own farces. Even here however to our less robust age we might detect signs of a more pathetic human being. That painting that Tetty indulged in, those sad attempts to dress and behave in a manner far too young for her, are perhaps efforts to hold the attention of a husband twenty-one years her junior.

But this is the sad finale of the Johnson marriage. In Birmingham in after the sudden death of Harry Porter in 1734 the two principal participants regarded matters in a totally different light. ‘Sir,’ said J later, ‘it was love marriage on both sides.’ And just to underline the point, ‘unless a woman has amorous heat, she is a dull companion.’ More peripheral players in the story were less enthusiastic. Neither of Elizabeth’s two boys would have anything to do with their stepfather, the Porter and Johnson families were decidedly cool. Samuel and Tetty stood their ground however, but possibly to keep out of the way of hostile comments, the marriage took place in Derby, at S. Werburgh’s church. (In the little Queen Anne chapel which I believe still survives).

Where the couple lived immediately afterwards is not known; they may have stayed with Sarah in the Breadmarket Street house though I suspect Sarah was not over welcoming to this odd middle-aged woman who had married her eldest son. Within a few months the ever-helpful Gilbert Walmsley had come up with a scheme which would give the Johnsons a home and a potential source of income for them. Walmsley pointed out to the couple an oddly designed house at the hamlet of Edial, just outside Lichfield on the Burntwood road. If no school would take J as a teacher, perhaps he should set up in business for himself. The size of the building made it ideal for a school with plenty of rooms for boarders. That just left the problem of pupils. Again Walmsley bestirred himself, but the best he could come up were his old protégée, David Garrick (now at seventeen somewhat old for secondary education) and his brother, George. There may have been a few more pupils, but Edial Hall was probably one of the least successful schools in educational history. Johnson was temperamentally unsuited to be a schoolteacher and the fact that the Johnsons were in the honeymoon stage of their marriage was not lost on a group of adolescent boys and can have done little to inculcate a spirit of calm academic study. The boys spied on the couple in their bedroom, and what Garrick claimed to have seen there became the basis on one of his most famous party pieces after both men became famous. The charade was of course adapted to the company before whom Garrick was performing. The most decorous version had Tetty languishing in bed, earnestly requesting the attentions of her young husband, who was lost in thought by the bedside writing. (There were other post-watershed versions of the act.) Though one presumes J was not aware that he (and his wife) were being publicly ridiculed by the great actor, it may well be that the circumstances of their relationship as teacher and pupil at this time of J’s life contributed to the tensions in their later relations.

In one respect Garrick’s charade was correct. Johnson was writing. Probably encouraged by Elizabeth J set about writing a play on a Turkish theme. Playwriting was the traditional way into a literary career and even if it never got performed, it would at least take J’s mind off the collapse of his schoolteaching hopes. For by the end of 1736 the Edial Hall School venture was probably over: George Garrick had left, other pupils had drifted away, and David Garrick was travelling up to Rochester finally to finish off his schooling. He was to travel via London and it may have been Walmsley again who suggested that J accompany him. He could take his play (soon to be called Irene) with him, call at a few theatres to see if there was a chance of a production, and sound out any other possible openings for a professional writer. So on 2 March 1737 the two men set out for London. It was a momentous journey for both of them, it would change their lives, and lead to great consequences for literature and the theatre. But for J at least that success was not to come easily and that process of struggle we shall look at next month. When I shall also look at the latest research into the composition of J’s most famous book, his Dictionary of the English Language.

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