Samuel Johnson

The Struggle

Jeffrey Meyers

• Publisher: Southbank Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781904915508
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Jeffrey Meyers tells the extraordinary story of Samuel Johnson one of the most illustrious figures of English literary tradition. Johnson was famous as a poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, critic, editor, lexicographer, conversationalist and larger than life personality. After nine years of work Johnson's, 'A dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1755. He overcame great adversity to achieve success. 'The Struggle' is a masterful portrait of a brilliant and tormented figure.

One

Lichfield Lad, 1709-1728

I

Samuel Johnson took inordinate pride in his birthplace. In a satiric jab at the nearby industrial center that would soon eclipse his native town, he defiantly said, “we are a city of philosophers: we work with our heads, and make the boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands.” Lichfield, in the English Midlands, 120 miles northwest of London, was a cathedral town, a military garrison and a major market. When Johnson first brought James Boswell there, he indulged in two of his favorite pastimes, Scot-bashing and Boswell-bashing, and exclaimed, “I turned him loose at Lichfield, my native city, that he might see for once real civility: for you know he lives among savages in Scotland, and among rakes in London.”

Johnson could also be quite critical of Lichfield, and emphasized its benighted state in a letter to his intimate friend Hester Thrale. Referring to Fanny Burney’s acclaimed novel, he wrote that “the name of Evelina had never been heard at Lichfield, till I brought it. I am afraid my dear Townsmen will be mentioned in future days as the last part of this nation that was civilised.” He insisted that the inhabitants of Lichfield were “the most sober, decent people in England,” but also (using “decent” in a quite different sense) remembered that “all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of.”1

Lichfield, meaning “field of the dead,” was named for martyred Christians, and produced some martyrs of its own. The last man to be condemned for heresy in England was burned in the marketplace in 1612. The essayist Joseph Addison, whose father had been dean of the fourteenth-century, red sandstone, twin-spired cathedral, had attended the same Grammar School as Johnson. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the town had a population of about 4,000. London then had 675,000; but the next largest cities—Bristol, Norwich and Liverpool—all had fewer than 30,000.

Located in the valley of the Trent, Lichfield manufactured cloth, leather and coaches. It held annual fairs, with high-stakes cock-fighting and savage bear-baiting, and inns packed with drunken revelers. There was no street lighting until the late 1730s, and at night people walked warily through the dark streets. The historian John Brewer provides a lively description of the place:

Lichfield was a typical English cathedral town, its genteel social life centred on the families of clerics and ecclesiasts in the cathedral close…. They fraternized with Lichfield’s lawyers, doctors, traders and prosperous merchants, and with the squirearchy whose houses were not far from the city. In the early eighteenth century Lichfield was the social and cultural centre of the west Midlands; even as it was eclipsed by the growing industrial city of Birmingham, it remained a lively town, with a theatre (first opened in 1736), several booksellers and printers, a cathedral lending library of 3,000 literary, philosophical, scientific and religious books, an annual music festival on St. Cecilia’s Day, and a busy social calendar tied to the Lichfield races. In the winter there were private subscription balls and large public dinners…. The most important cultural figure was [the physician, botanist and author] Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the more famous Charles.

Johnson’s struggling shopkeeping family stood outside this elite circle of clergymen, attorneys and squires.

Johnson was a close contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, whom he once met, and of Frederick the Great of Prussia, whose biography he wrote. Johnson’s long life extended from the High Tory reign of Queen Anne through the loss of the American colonies and the Gordon Riots under King George III. In 1709, the year he was born, the young Alexander Pope published his Pastorals, Addison and Steele brought out the first issue of the Tatler (a precursor of Johnson’s Rambler) and Parliament enacted the first copyright law, from which Johnson would later benefit. In the battle of Poltava in the Ukraine that year, Peter the Great defeated Charles XII of Sweden, whom Johnson in a famous passage would use to exemplify the vanity of human wishes.

In his autobiographical writings, Johnson retrospectively emphasized his humble origins to show how hard he had to struggle in his youth. He said, in a characteristically balanced sentence, that a cousin who became a curate was the only relative “who ever rose in fortune above penury or in character above neglect.” Though he was respectful of rank and zealous to maintain the social hierarchy, his own family was undistinguished, and he hardly knew who his grandfather was. His grandparents, in fact, had died before he was born, but a small family legacy enabled his elderly parents to complete their house, expand their business and get a boost in life.

His father, Michael Johnson, the son of a small farmer, was born in Cubley, Derbyshire, in 1657. He grew up in Lichfield and attended the excellent Grammar School. From the age of sixteen to twenty-four he was apprenticed to a London bookseller in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and in 1681 he returned home to start his own business. Even taller and stronger than his son, Michael liked riding around the countryside with books in his saddlebags or his cart, selling them to bibliophiles who lived in rural areas. He set up a stall in distant towns on market days, and traveled as far as Scotland and Ireland. He himself published and sold a dozen medical tracts or sermons by local clergymen. A Lichfield dignitary praised the scholarly Michael, who “worked with his head,” by stating that “he propagates learning all over this diocese, and advanceth knowledge to its just height; all the Clergy here are his Pupils, and suck all they have from him.”2 In a similar fashion, Samuel Johnson would later ghostwrite sermons for clergymen and propagate knowledge throughout the country.

In 1706, when the forty-nine-year-old Michael married the thirty-seven-year-old Sarah Ford, who came from a superior family with wealthy connections, he built a house in the market square of Lichfield. The ten rooms, with attic and cellar, housed his family as well as the shop where he sold and bound books. According to one of his advertisements, Michael sold “shop-books, pocket-books, ‘fine French prints, for staircases and large chimney pieces,’ maps, large and small … as well as general literature, while ‘to please the ladies’ are added a ‘store of fine pictures and paper hangings.’”

In 1709 he completed his house and started a tanning and parchment factory on the outskirts of town. A popular figure, he was elected Sheriff, or Mayor, of Lichfield. He continued to rise in civic affairs, and became a magistrate and member of the town council in 1712, and senior bailiff in 1725. With a fine intellect, considerable energy and solid knowledge of books, Michael soon became well known throughout the Midlands. But as his civic career prospered, his business gradually lost momentum. He was weak on finance, failed to develop or even sustain his trade and got no help from his wife, who did not share his love of books. When he grew older and could no longer travel, his business sharply declined. He was fined for creating a muckheap and indicted for tanning without having served an apprenticeship. He was unable to repair his tannery, which had fallen down from neglect, but he continued—with pointless yet pathetic compulsion, though anyone could enter from the rear—to lock the front door every night. His parchment business finished him off. No wonder that Sarah adopted “a constant attitude of querulous complaint” while Michael radiated “a general sensation of gloomy wretchedness.”3 Sam’s boyhood and youth were marked by his father’s slow descent.

Recalling the late, unhappy marriage of his ill-matched parents and of St. Paul’s adage that “It is better to marry than to burn,” Johnson asserted that “a man of sense and education should meet a suitable companion in a wife…. He did not approve of late marriages…. [But] even ill assorted marriages were preferable to cheerless celibacy.” Sarah thought she’d married beneath her, and criticized her husband’s business failures, but did nothing to encourage his success. As Johnson wrote of this depressing, discontented household:

My father and mother 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. Had my mother been more literate, they had been better companions. She might have sometimes introduced her unwelcome topick with more success, if she could have diversified her conversation. Of business she had no distinct conception; and therefore her discourse was composed only of complaint, fear, and suspicion.

When things went badly, as they usually did, Sarah reminded Michael that she came from a superior family, that she was used to better treatment and that she would insist on entertaining her friends with expensive cups of tea.

Johnson, who paradoxically combined a scrupulous attention to veracity with a tendency to wild exaggeration, once claimed, while disparaging his own family, that one of his uncles had been hanged. Neither the zealous researcher A.L. Reade nor anyone else has ever found evidence of this hanging. If it had taken place, it would surely have influenced Johnson’s vehement opposition to capital punishment for minor crimes.

The one strong branch in the family tree was his Uncle Andrew Johnson. This powerful fellow, while managing a ring for boxers and wrestlers in Smithfield, London, for a whole year, was never thrown or conquered. In those days boxing “matches were fought with bare knuckles and very few rules. Contestants could do anything they liked to each other as long as it was above the belt.”4 They could seize their opponent by the throat, throw him to the ground and use tactics more often employed in wrestling. Andrew taught Sam how to attack and defend himself in boxing, and Sam later justified this violent sport which accustomed men to painful blows and to the sight of their own blood. It was a great thing for the son of a scholarly, mild-mannered, hen-pecked father to have an uncle who was a famous fighter.

II

Johnson, born on September 18, 1709 when the forty-year-old Sarah was well past the usual time for bearing a first child, came close to dying at birth. The surgeon, uncle of Sam’s future classmate and lifelong friend Edmund Hector, was surprised that the frail infant had actually drawn breath and survived the ordeal. Soon afterwards, Sam suffered his first serious illness. “My mother,” he wrote, “had a very difficult and dangerous labour, and was assisted by George Hector, a man-midwife of great reputation. I was born almost dead, and could not cry for some time. When he had me in his arms, he said, ‘Here is a brave boy.’ In a few weeks an inflammation was discovered on my buttock, which was at first, I think, taken for a burn; but soon appeared to be a natural disorder. It swelled, broke, and healed.” Michael, proud to have a son and heir, magnanimously invited the whole town to celebrate with him.

Since genteel women did not suckle their own children, Sam was immediately handed over to a wet nurse, the wife of the local bricklayer. Her milk infected Sam (as well as her own son) with scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph nodes in the neck. The guilt-stricken Sarah believed that his disease was inherited from her family. She faithfully visited her first-born son and took a different route every day so her solicitude would not appear ridiculous. Sam was brought home at ten weeks, “a poor, diseased infant, almost blind.” His Aunt Jane Ford, suggesting that many parents would have abandoned the hopelessly sick child, later told him, “she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street.” His namesake, godfather and family doctor, Samuel Swinfen, remarked that “he never knew any child reared with so much difficulty.”5

Johnson suffered all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, he was “unfinished, sent before [his] time / Into this breathing world scarce half made up.” The tuberculosis affected both his optic and auditory nerves, impairing the vision in his right eye, blinding the left, and making him deaf in the left ear. A twentieth-century doctor has diagnosed “severe trauma and anoxia [lack of oxygen] at childbirth; early infections with bovine tuberculosis, invading the cervical [neck] glands and possibly the eye; loss of function of left ear, possibly due to birth trauma or smallpox [which also scarred him as a child].” These horrific diseases gave Johnson the sense that life was precarious, that he must struggle tenaciously in order to survive.

Sam was lucky to survive not only the diseases, but also the rigors of eighteenth-century medicine. To “cure” his blindness, an incision—without anesthesia and kept open with horsehair threads—was made in his left arm muscle to stimulate the discharge of noxious “humors” and withdraw the disease from the body. Fortunately, little Sam, his hand in a tempting custard, was unaware that the cut was being made. This incision became a repulsive oozing sore, deliberately kept open for six long years. But the assiduous doctors were not yet finished. They also surgically incised the child’s neck glands, source of the scrofula, for drainage. The operation went badly, and his face was permanently disfigured by welt-like scars that ran down the left side of his face from ear to jaw. These scars were still visible, seventy-five years later, on his death mask.

The psychiatrist Bernard Meyer vividly recreated the probable effects of this traumatic scene by emphasizing “the raw and brutal assault that surgery may signify to a helpless, terrified, screaming, and struggling child.” In his life of the great Dutch physician Herman Bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Struggle
• 1: Lichfield Lad, 1709-1728
• 2: Vile Melancholy, 1728-1730
• 3: Preposterous Union, 1730-1736
• 4: Benevolent Giant, 1737
• 5: Grub Street, 1737
• 6: London Observed, 1737-1739
• 7: Politics and Passion, 1739-1744
• 8: Doom of Man, 1745-1749
• 9: Greatest Genius, 1750-1752
• 10: Intellectual Entertainments, 1752-1754
• 11: Sluggish Resolution, 1755-1758
• 12: Dangerous Imagination, 1759-1762
• 13: Society of the Afflicted, 1762-1763
• 14: Contagion of Desire, 1763-l764
• 15: Bandying Civilities, 1765-1772
• 16: Domestick Pleasures, 1765-1772
• 17: Mind Diseased, 1765-1772
• 18: Savage Clans, 1772-1777
• 19: Enchain the Heart, 1778-1781
• 20: Lacerated Friendship, 1781-1783
• 21: The Night Cometh, 1783-1784
• Epilogue: Johnson’s Influence
• Bibliography
• Books by Jeffrey Meyers
• Copyright