Samuel Johnson

After the death of his close friend Harry Porter, he met Porter’s wife Elizabeth, named Tetty by her relatives. At that time, Tetty was 45 years old and had three children. On 9th July, 1735 Johnson married Tetty, but her family couldn’t accept the marriage owing to the wide age gap, as Johnson was only 25 years.

In 1752, after a long terminal illness, Tetty passed away. Samuel grieved her death and felt guilty for having used her savings for his literary work.

In 1783, Johnson suffered a stroke and later had a gout surgery which improved his condition. He travelled to London in 1784 and on 13th December he died in coma. He was buried at the Westminster Abbey.

Samuel Johnson was born on 18th September 1709 at Lichfield, Staffordshire in England. He was born at home with the aid of a man-midwife and a reputed surgeon. Though he wasn’t a healthy baby, he gradually picked up health.

Samuel’s parents, Sarah and Michael had a stable financial status, yet the couple weren’t well off.

Misfortune struck their family when Samuel acquired scrofula commonly termed as the ‘King’s Evil’ when he was a young boy. A surgery had to be performed which left irrevocable scars on his face and body in 1712. In a couple of years, his parents had another child and they named him Nathaniel.

His mother was his first teacher; she would make him memorise verses from the ‘Book of Common Prayer’ at the age of three. At seven, he attended ‘Lichfield Grammar School’.

It was during this time that he gradually began suffering with tics. However, he was so intelligent that his parents took great pride in boasting about his achievements.

With time his Tourette syndrome got worse. Around the same time his father developed an inflammatory fever that claimed his life in 1731. Soon after, Samuel Johnson became an undermaster at the ‘Market Bosworth’ School.

He found happiness in teaching even though it was mundane at times. After leaving his job as a teacher at ‘Market Bosworth’ he wrote ‘A Voyage to Abyssinia’. In 1735, he began working at a local school in Staffordshire.

In 1735 he opened his own school ‘Edial Hall School’, which was a private academy. However, he could gather only three students and had to shut it down.

In order to get his career rolling, he began writing his most appreciated work, the tragedy ‘Irene’. In 1737, he moved to London and in October began writing for ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’.

The following year, he published his first poem ‘London’ anonymously. For several years Samuel endured hardships along with his friend Richard Savage. On Richard’s death in 1744, he wrote a moving biography of him named ‘Life of Mr. Richard Savage’, which became widely popular.

He was approached by publishers in 1746 to create a dictionary of the English Language, which would pay him 1,500 guineas. He claimed that he would finish it within three years. However, the data was so large that it took him almost eight years to compile the contents.

His dictionary became one of the most widely used references before ‘The Oxford Dictionary’, and thus earned him much credit and was published in 1755.

Along with the dictionary he worked on several essays, poems and sermons. And what followed was sheer brilliance in the form of a collection of essays titled ‘The Rambler’. He also wrote the famous poem ‘The Vanity of human Wishes’.

In 1756 he began working on ‘The Literary Magazine’ and wrote prefaces for authors such as Charlotte Lennox and William Payne. The same year, he also began working on ‘Proposals for Printing, by Subscription, the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare’ which occupied him for many years.

Three years later, he initiated work on a philosophical short novel called ‘Rasselas’. The book was later translated to five languages –Dutch, French, Russian, German and Italian.