Discuss the life and works of Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Ans.

LIFE AND WORKS

Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was born at Lichfield in 1709. He was the son of a small bookseller, a poor man, but intelligent and fond of literature. From his childhood Johnson had to struggle hard against physical deformity and disease. He prepared himself for the university, partly in the schools, But largely by omnivorous reading in his father’s shop, and when he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1728. he had read more classical writers than most of the graduates of the university. Before finishing his course he had to leave the university on account of his poverty, and at once began his long struggle as a hack-writer to earn his living.

At the age of twenty-five he married a woman old enough to be his mother, and with her dowry of $800 they started a private school together. which was a dismal failure. Then without money or influential friends he left his home and his wife in Lichfield and came to London, accompanied by David Garrick, afterwards the famous actor, who had been one of his pupils. Here. led by old associations, Johnson made himself known to the booksellers, and now and then earned a penny by writing prefaces, reviews, and translation. He wrote steadily for the booksellers and the gentleman’s Magazine, and after sometimes he became known in London and received enough work to earn a be living.

The work which occasioned this small success were his poem Lon don and life of the Poet Savage. After some time he was asked by the booksellers of London to write A Dictionary of the English Language. It was an enormous work, taking nearly eight years of his life, and long before he had finished it he had eaten up the money which he received for his labour.. In the leisure intervals of this work he wrote The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and other poems, and finished his classical tragedy, Irene.

Led by the great success of the Spectator, Johnson started two journals. The Rambler (1750-52), and the Idler ((1758-60). Later on, the Rambler essays were published in book form and ran rapidly through ten editions, but the financial returns were small, and moreover Johnson spent a large part of his earnings in charity. When his mother died in 1759, Johnson, although one of the best known men in London, had no money, and hurriedly finished Rasselas, his only romance, in order, it is said, to pay for his mother’s burial. He died in his fleet street house during the night of 13 December, 1784, and was buried among England’s hundred poets in Westminster Abbey.