Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson compiled the dictionary that fixed written English for a century and became, through Boswell, the most completely recorded conversationalist in the language. He was a bookseller's son from Lichfield, scarred by scrofula and nearly blind in one eye, who left Oxford after a year because the money ran out and spent two decades in poverty as a hack writer in London. His poem London, published in 1738, is an explicit imitation of Juvenal's third satire with the complaints transposed - the noise, the rents, the dishonesty, the contempt for the poor - and it made his name. The Dictionary of the English Language took him nine years with six assistants, against the forty years and forty academicians the French had used, and its 114,000 illustrative quotations were its real innovation: he showed words in use rather than asserting what they meant. Some definitions are jokes, including lexicographer as a harmless drudge. He also produced an edition of Shakespeare, the Lives of the Poets, and a periodical, the Rambler, written almost entirely by himself. He suffered all his life from what would now be called depression and probably Tourette's, and he was terrified of death and of madness. James Boswell met him in 1763 and spent twenty years writing down what he said, producing a biography that changed the form. The Dictionary was not the first English dictionary and was decisively the most influential, standing as the standard until the Oxford English Dictionary began appearing 150 years later. He was given a government pension in 1762 after decades of poverty, which embarrassed him because he had defined a pension as pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country. He kept the definition in later editions. He freed his servant Francis Barber, a formerly enslaved Jamaican, and left him most of his estate, and he argued against slavery in print when few of his circle did.

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