Samuel Johnson | Early Works and A Dictionary of the English Language

Hello and welcome to the Discourse. Samuel Johnson was an English author, poet, playwright, biographer, critic, and lexicographer whose work A Dictionary of the English Language was published on 15 April 1755. Samuel Johnson was born on 18^th September 1709. He was a weak child as an infant and suffered scrofula that disfigured his face. At the age of seven, he attended Lichfield Grammar School where he learned English grammar and excelled in Latin language. At the same time, he got ill with Tourette Syndrome and started exhibiting tics. Despite his illnesses, he continued to excel in his studies and got admission to higher school. At the age of 19, Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford. During his college days, he translated Alexander Pope’s poem Messiah in Latin and it became his first published work in December 1728. Johnson couldn’t complete his college degree because of a lack of funds and was forced to leave Pembroke College without a degree. His father died in December 1731 when Johnson was 22 years old. Since he didn’t have a degree he found it hard to get a job. Eventually, he started working as an undermaster in a school. In 1732, Samuel Johnson started contributing to The Birmingham Journal whose publisher Thomas Warren helped him in publishing the translation of Jerónimo Lobo's account of the Abyssinians. During the same time, Johnson married Elizabeth Tette, a widow 20 years older. His wife helped him in opening his own school in 1735 but the venture was unsuccessful and cost Tetty a substantial portion of her fortune. In 1737, Johnson finished his first playwright titled Irene but couldn’t find a patron and hence the play was not performed until 1749. Samuel Johnson loved his wife but he felt guilty about living almost entirely on Tette's money,

The Gentleman’s Magazine:

He came to London in 1737 and started working for The Gentleman’s Magazine which became his first regular work. The Gentleman’s Magazine was a weekly periodical that was founded by Edward Cave in 1731. The full title of the periodical was The Gentleman's Magazine: or, Trader's monthly intelligencer. It was a weekly periodical but Cave used the term Magazine for the first time for his journal. Magazine means storehouse and Cave used it to denote his journal as the compact store of all the news and commentary on any topic the educated public might be interested in. Johnson joined The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737 and soon became the major contributor. It was a period when Parliamentary reporting was banned. Yet, Johnson regularly contributed parliamentary reports as "Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia". Though they reflected the positions of the participants, the words of the debates were mostly Johnson's own. He coined the term Columbia for America which first appeared in a 1738 weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament in The Gentleman’s Magazine.

Despite finding regular work as a reporter for The Gentleman’s Magazine, Samuel Johnson could not earn enough. Thus he decided to leave Tetty as he didn’t wish to continue being a financial burden for her. During this time, he became a close friend of Richard Savage and together, they started working at the Grub Street of London as writers who anonymously supplied publishers with on-demand material. In 1739, Samuel Johnson anonymously published his poem titled London which was his first major work. The poem contains 263 lines in which Johnson imitated Juvenal's Third Satire, expressed by the character of Thales as he decides to leave London for Wales. Johnson was an admirer of Alexander Pope and he was following the trend of imitating Augustan poets headed by Alexander Pope. However, even Alexander Pope didn’t know about the author of the poem. In this poem, Johnson portrayed London as a place of crime, corruption, and poverty.

Richard Savage was a close friend of Alexander Pope too. Savage died in the debtor’s prison due to the failure of the liver. After his death, Samuel Johnson published a biography titled Life of Savage in 1744 whose full title was An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers. It was the first major full biography written and published by Samuel Johnson. The biography was later included in Johnson’s major work Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets which was first published in 1779. In this work, Johnson published short biographies of 5 English poets including Abraham Cowley, John Milton, John Dryden, John Gay, Thomas Tickell, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and others.

Samuel Johnson still hadn’t received a degree from Oxford and when he asked Swift to favor him in getting a degree from the University of Dublin, Swift declined to help him. While Samuel Johnson succeeded in attaining an honorary degree from Pembroke College, Oxford, he harbored certain prejudices against Jonathan Swift which is evident from his account of Jonathan Swift in The Lives of The Poets.

By 1744, Jonathan Swift had made a place for himself as a distinguished Grub Street author. In 1746, Jonathan Swift got a proposal for writing an authoritative dictionary of the English language. Jonathan Swift claimed that he will complete the dictionary within three years. However, it took eight years for him to complete the dictionary. Yet, it was a great achievement because, during the same time, the Académie Française had 40 scholars spending 40 years completing their French dictionary. William Strahan and Associates were the printers of the dictionary that was completed and published in April 1755. Johnson alone wrote and produced this dictionary only with the clerical assistance of a few people he employed. However, as he continued to work for the dictionary at his own home, it deteriorated his relationship with his wife Tetty who got terminally ill during the same time. The original print of the dictionary contained 42,773 entries. Johnson illustrated the meanings of the words in the dictionary by literary quotation, of which there were approximately 114,000. The authors most frequently cited include William Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Dryden. Many of the quotations from Johnson’s dictionary are still used by various editions of the Webster's Dictionary and the New English Dictionary. Johnson’s dictionary was the most commonly used and imitated for the 150 years between its first publication and the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928.

American literary critic Walter Jackson Bate claimed that Johnson’s Dictionary was not just a simple dictionary but it is more than a reference book; it is a work of literature. According to him, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who labored under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time".

So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!