Dr Samuel Johnson was one of the greatest men of letters in the history of England. He dominated the literary scene in London from 1764 until his death twenty years later, for some years presiding as chairman of a literary fellowship called The Club. Members included the most brilliant figures of the day, such as the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, the actor David Garrick, writers Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon, and others.
Johnson himself produced a wide variety of writing: classical-style poetry such as his famous Vanity of Human Wishes, prose romance, a literary journal called The Rambler, a series of biographies called the Lives of the Poets and a host of other works. In 1755 he published, in two huge volumes, the first standard dictionary of the English language, which was unrivalled for a hundred years and gained him the name ‘The Great Lexicographer’. Some 116,000 quotations are included, testifying to Johnson’s almost unbelievable knowledge. He is best known to posterity, however, through the records of his brilliant conversation in The Life of Samuel Johnson and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by his younger companion and biographer, James Boswell.
Samuel Johnson gave the superficial impression of an egotist who had to have the last word in every conversation. He was undoubtedly one of the most peculiar of all great English writers—and one of the most beloved by succeeding generations. As one critic puts it, ‘His massive common sense, his real tenderness of heart, his generosity, his sincere piety, his transparent honesty, endear his memory’. Lord Macaulay wrote in 1856: ‘Our intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and his temper, serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man’. Elton Trueblood, in the preface to an edition of Johnson’s prayers, says, Dr Johnson was a deeply religious man and a conscious upholder of Christian doctrine all his days’.
Johnson was for many years a member of St Clement Danes, and a plaque in the gallery marks where his pew was (before the war). Today his statue stands outside the east end, facing Fleet Street. His house, on Gough Square just north of Fleet Street, miraculously escaped the bombing and is a shrine for Johnson lovers from around the world. The Good Doctor was an enthusiastic citizen of London, saying to Boswell on one occasion (20 September 1777),
‘Sir, when a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford’.