Samuel Johnson was more than a quotable grouch who wrote the dictionary

Enlightened and courteous: Samuel Johnson as painted by Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Henry Hitchings7 June 2018

Is there a writer more associated with London than Samuel Johnson? Dickens perhaps — and you could make a case for Samuel Pepys or Virginia Woolf.

But the polymathic figure usually known as Dr Johnson (the doctorate was honorary) sat at the heart of London’s cultural life 250 years ago, at a time of innovation and expansion. This was a city hazardous and chaotic even as it reaped the rewards of Britain’s colonial ventures. No one embodied its almost monstrous vitality better than Johnson.

Today he is not well understood, remembered more for what he said — or for what his eager biographer James Boswell represented him as saying — than for anything he wrote. His most celebrated aphorisms have ossified into cliché: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”, “It is commonly observed that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather”, and that favourite journalistic standby “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”.

Besides giving the impression that Johnson was inclined to focus on male experience, these statements support a narrow view of him as a pedant addicted to passing thunderous judgements on humdrum matters. It is no coincidence that many people’s notion of his character derives from Blackadder, where he comes across as a finicky grump and loses his temper on realising that he’s left the word “sausage” out of his recently completed magnum opus, the first English dictionary.

The reality is different. That famous dictionary of English wasn’t the first, and it did include “sausage”. He was capable of being much more pithy and incisive: “All distant power is bad”, “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment”, “All intellectual improvement arises from leisure”.

More to the point, instead of merely being a quotable grouch, Johnson was an enlightened thinker who could express himself forcefully yet engaged with issues in a supple, empathetic style. A fierce opponent of slavery, he was also a champion of women’s education at a time when it was largely overlooked and a keen supporter of women writers (among them the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft).

But for modern audiences his most striking quality is the capacity to convert suffering into wisdom. Plagued by depression and possibly what we now call Tourette’s syndrome, he was adept at navigating the dark places of the soul. His most grim experiences would make him a trenchant social commentator as well as a perceptive, humane analyst of family life and marriage, friendship, the imagination, ambition and the dangers of obsession.

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Living in London, then the largest city in Europe, Johnson could access every kind of stimulus and also a flourishing marketplace for ideas. He had the particular fervour of the adoptive Londoner. He first made the journey down from his native Staffordshire as a two-year-old, to be touched by Queen Anne as a cure for the scrofula he’d contracted as a baby. Yet he only moved to the capital in his late twenties, arriving in 1737 with David Garrick, who had been his student at a tiny school he had briefly run.

He hoped to take the London stage by storm with his play Irene, about a Greek woman being aggressively wooed by a Turkish despot. Yet it was Garrick who, after a brief spell in the wine trade, revolutionised the theatre with new ideas about performance, lighting, scenery and publicity. Thanks to Garrick the impresario, Irene was eventually produced at Drury Lane. But that was in 1749, and by then Johnson had found his niche, or in fact several niches, in literary London.

The reading public was expanding fast, and its appetite for all kinds of printed material was a gift for any commercially savvy author. At first Johnson was drawn inevitably to Grub Street, a seedy location near Moorfields that was synonymous with jobbing authors.

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Although convinced that the purpose of writing was “to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it”, he was a literary opportunist, happy to adopt a range of guises, as a satirist, poet, political pamphleteer and parliamentary reporter, and later as an editor of Shakespeare, travel writer, legal expert, public moralist, historian and critic.

His experiences as a literary gun for hire shaped the belief that writers must drive a hard bargain and shouldn’t give their work away. Today, when writing is routinely called “content” and is aggregated on websites that enrich people who’ve never penned anything longer than their signature, that’s a principle worth setting in stone.

A surprising amount of Johnson’s comment on the entrepreneurial world of 18th-century letters is applicable to the digital age. The mass production of news seemed to threaten the stability of truth, and Johnson noticed how much trust readers were willing to invest in unproven sources: “We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us.”

Equally, his observations about the malaise produced by consumer culture are still pertinent, especially in the realm of social media. “Almost all absurdity of conduct,” he notices, “arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble”, and we “estimate the advantages which are in the possession of others above their real value”. Obsessively comparing our lives with others, “we persuade ourselves to set a value upon things which are of no use”, simply because we have agreed to value them, and the result is envy, “a stubborn weed of the mind” which affords people nothing but the “satisfaction of poisoning the banquet which they cannot taste”.

For many 18th-century Londoners the pressures of fashion and commerce were overwhelming, and in Johnson’s eyes this made the city a “school for studying life”. In any case his precarious finances obliged him, like a member of Generation Rent, to investigate its variety. He lived at more than 20 addresses here, and while he urged his friends to explore Wapping, which was dominated by sailors and boat-builders, and rented lodgings for his sickly wife Elizabeth in Hampstead (then a hilltop spa community), he preferred to be close to its teeming centre. When he marvelled at the swarming energy on and around the Strand, insisting that “the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross”, he was cherishing its diversity.

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When the money from the Dictionary enabled him to rent a property in Gough Square off Fleet Street, his charitable instincts meant that the house soon became a menagerie of unfortunates. His readiness to accommodate out-of-luck authors, drunks, paupers and decayed prostitutes put him in touch with the city’s less palatable truths.

Conscious of the tendency to punish the penniless for crimes they committed only because they were desperate, he reflected that “Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding, yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer.” Here he is very remote from the crusty Johnson of legend, speaking instead with a crusader’s ardour and the gritty realism that is the mark of an authentic Londoner.

The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life by Henry Hitchings (Macmillan, £16.99) is published on June 14

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