Content. Introduction. Chapter. I. Samuel Johnson and his biography

1.2. Maturity and recognition of Samuel Johnson.

In 1749 Johnson published The Vanity of Human Wishes, his most impressive poem as well as the first work published with his name. It is a panoramic survey of the futility of human pursuit of greatness and happiness. Like London, the poem is an imitation of one of Juvenal’s satires, but it emphasizes the moral over the social and political themes of Juvenal. Some of the definitions Johnson later entered under “vanity” in his Dictionary suggest the range of meaning of his title, including “emptiness,” “uncertainty,” “fruitless desire, fruitless endeavour,” “empty pleasure; vain pursuit; idle show; unsubstantial enjoyment; petty object of pride,” and “arrogance.” He portrays historical figures, mainly from England and continental Europe (Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Charles XII of Sweden, the Persian king Xerxes I), alternating them with human types (the traveler, the rich man, the beauty, the scholar), often in juxtaposition with their opposites, to show that all are subject to the same disappointment of their desires. The Vanity of Human Wishes is imbued with the Old Testament message of Ecclesiastes that “all is vanity” and replaces Juvenal’s Stoic virtues with the Christian virtue of “patience.” The poem surpasses any of Johnson’s other poems in its richness of imagery and powerful conciseness.

The theatre

Johnson’s connections to the theatre in these years included writing several prologues, one for Garrick’s farce Lethe in 1740 and one for the opening of the Drury Lane Theatre. Garrick, now its manager, returned the favours. Early in 1749 Johnson’s play Irene was at last performed. Thanks to Garrick’s production, which included expensive costumes, an excellent cast (including Garrick himself), and highly popular afterpieces for the last three performances, the tragedy ran a respectable nine nights. The audience objected to seeing the apostate Greek Christian Irene strangled by Sultan Mahomet—an innovation of Garrick’s—and the murder was performed offstage thereafter. Irene is Johnson’s least-appealing major work, and he is reported to have said when hearing someone read it aloud, “I thought it had been better.”
With The Rambler (1750–52), a twice-weekly periodical, Johnson entered upon the most successful decade of his career. He wrote over 200 numbers, and stories abound of his finishing an essay while the printer’s boy waited at the door; in his last essay he confessed to “the anxious employment of a periodical writer.” The essays cover a wide range of subjects. A large number of them appropriately stress daily realities; others are devoted to literature, including criticism and the theme of authorship (particularly the early ones, driven by the writer’s consciousness of his own undertaking) and to literary forms, such as the novel and biography, that had not received much examination. Whatever their topic, Johnson intended his essays to “inculcate wisdom or piety” in conformity with Christianity. In tone these essays are far more serious than those of his most important predecessor, Joseph Addison, published in The Spectator (1711–12; 1714). Johnson himself ranked them highly among his achievements, commenting “My other works are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.” Although The Rambler may have sold only 500 copies an issue on its first appearance—in his last number he claimed he had “never been much a favourite of the public”—it was widely reprinted in provincial newspapers and sold well in later editions.
Johnson’s Rambler series also was admired by his wife Elizabeth, who praised its author by saying, “I thought very well of you before this; but I did not imagine you could have written any thing equal to this.” She died on March 17, 1752, just three days after the publication of its last number. In her later years “Tetty” frequently lived away from him in Hampstead. Signs of marital tensions may be glimpsed in surviving letters and in Johnson’s prayers, which were published after his death. He wrote a sermon for her funeral that praises her submissive piety—her “exact and regular” devotions—as well as her charitable disposition. A diary entry suggests that a year after Elizabeth’s death Johnson was seeking a new wife “without any derogation from dear Tetty’s memory.” The one he most probably had in mind was the pious Hill Boothby, to whom he wrote with some frequency in the years immediately following this resolve. Three dozen of her letters to him, rarely quoted by biographers, are in print. The relationship, however, came to an end with her death in 1756. During the course of one year starting in March 1753, Johnson contributed 29 essays to his friend John Hawkesworth’s periodical The Adventurer, written in imitation of The Rambler. Johnson purposely (and ineffectively) lightened his style in order to hide his authorship. He wanted his essays unrecognized, for he had given them to Dr. Richard Bathurst, the friend whom he said he loved more than any other, to sell as his own, but he confessed his part to the persistent Hill Boothby. A Dictionary of the English Language was published in two volumes in 1755, six years later than planned but remarkably quickly for so extensive an undertaking. The degree of master of arts, conferred on him by the University of Oxford for his Rambler essays and the Dictionary, was proudly noted on the title page. Johnson henceforth would be known in familiar 18th-century style as “Dictionary Johnson” or “The Rambler.” There had been earlier English dictionaries, but none on the scale of Johnson’s. In addition to giving etymologies, not the strong point of Johnson and his contemporaries, and definitions, in which he excelled, Johnson illustrated usage with quotations drawn almost entirely from writing from the Elizabethan period to his own time, though few living authors were quoted (the novelists Samuel Richardson and Charlotte Lennox, Garrick, Reynolds, and Johnson himself among them). His preface boldly asserts that the “chief glory of every people arises from its authors,” and his book (the phrase he always used for it) was his own claim to be ranked among them. He was pleased that what took the French Academy 40 years to perform for their language was accomplished by one Englishman in 9 years. It may have been his desire to fix the language by his work, yet he realized that languages do not follow prescription but are continually changing. Johnson did not work systematically from a word list but marked up the books he read for copying. Thus it is no surprise that some earlier dictionaries contain more words and that Johnson’s has striking omissions (“literary” for one). Yet his definitions were a great improvement over those of his predecessors, and his illustrations from writers since the Elizabethan Age form an anthology and established a canon. Because he insisted not only on correct usage but also on morality and piety, the illustrations of words often come from sermons and conduct books as well as from a range of literature. The skeptical philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the writer Bernard de Mandeville, who praised the public benefits of brothels, were excluded on moral grounds, and in the Plan for the Dictionary Johnson explains that the inclusion of a writer could be taken as an invitation to read his work.Johnson had been persuaded to address his Plan to the earl of Chesterfield as his patron, but his appeal had been met with years of neglect. Johnson’s defensive pride was awakened when the nobleman, learning of the impending publication of the Dictionary, praised it in two essays in The World, a weekly paper of entertainment. His letter to Chesterfield is often taken as sounding “the death-knell of patronage,” which it did not. But it did assert the dignity of the author.The Dictionary defines “patron” as “one who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” In its choice of authors and of illustrative selections, the Dictionary is a personal work. These give the whole the aspect of both an encyclopaedia and a conduct book. Even though Johnson defined “lexicographer” as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge,” the drudgery of the Dictionary fell into the decade of Johnson’s most important writing and must be seen in part as enabling it. The payment for the Dictionary amounted to relatively little after deductions were made for his six amanuenses and his own expenses. He left his house in Gough Square (now the most famous of Johnson museums ) for smaller lodgings in 1759, ending the major decade of his literary activity famous and poor.