Remembering Doctor Johnson

Samuel Johnson ... born 300 years ago in 1709

Patrick Comerford

For a few years in the 1970s, I was a freelance contributor to the Lichfield Mercury, the local paper for the beautiful cathedral city where I have family connections going back generations and centuries.

I still go back to Lichfield a few times a year for a quiet retreat or just for a break. These days, the Lichfield Mercury has its offices in Breadmarket Street, just a few steps from the house where Doctor Johnson, Samuel Johnson, was born 300 years ago, on 18 September 1709.

Today we often think of fiction, poetry, essays, plays, short stories, and even journalism and biographies, as literary genres. But Johnson’s lasting contribution to English literature was his Dictionary of the English Language, which was first published in 1755.

Johnson’s Dictionary has had a far-reaching impact on Modern English, and has been described as “one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship.” With his Dictionary, Johnson achieved fame, popularity and the academic recognition he had long been denied.

Until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary a century and a half later, Johnson’s Dictionary was regarded as the definitive and pre-eminent English dictionary. It stands alongside the collected works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer as one of the works that shaped and formed the words we write and speak to this day.

Apart from his Lichfield connections, I suppose I also like Doctor Johnson because he too began his career as a journalist, working on Grub Street – a term for hack journalism which immortalised in his Dictionary. He had failed as a schoolmaster in Lichfield, but he went on to make an incalculable contribution to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, literary critic, translator biographer and editor.

Indeed, it is said that he was “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history.” On top of that, his biography by his friend, James Boswell, has been hailed as “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature.”

In Ireland, we often forget that Doctor Johnson had many important and influential Irish connections. And in Church circles, we can forget that this literary giant was a pious and practising Anglican all his life.

His social circle and friends included Irish writers such as the poet Oliver Goldsmith and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who successfully campaigned for a pension for Johnson that allowed him to live comfortably after the publication of his Dictionary, and the statesman Edmund Burke.

Samuel Johnson is known throughout the world simply as “Doctor Johnson.” He never actually graduated from Oxford, for he was forced to leave Pembroke College after a year and return to Lichfield because of the poverty brought about by the debts of his father, Michael Johnson, who badly managed a bookshop.

In 1738, a leading English politician, Lord Gower, asked the Irish writer Jonathan Swift to use his influence at Trinity College Dublin to have a masters degree awarded to Johnson so that he could then receive an MA from Oxford and continue working as a teacher. Swift declined, but by now Johnson was in London, setting out on what would become a major literary career.

Johnson eventually received the doctorate that gave him his popular title as an honour from Trinity College Dublin in 1765, ten years after his Dictionary was published. His doctorate from Oxford eventually came another ten years later – in 1775. And so, Doctor Johnson is truly an Irish literary doctor!

As a philosopher, Johnson was known is his days for his refutation of Bishop George Berkeley’s immaterialism. The Bishop of Cloyne argued that matter did not actually exist but only seemed to exist. But during a conversation with Boswell after church one morning, Johnson powerfully stomped against a nearby stone until he rebounded from it and then proclaimed of Berkeley’s theory: “I refute it thus!”

The house where Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield ... and the offices of the Lichfield Mercury in Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

Johnson was born in sight of Saint Mary’s Church, the guild church of Lichfield, and the Market Square, where a number of Reformation martyrs had been burned at the stake. At his birth, he was so sickly it was feared he would not survive, and the curate from Saint Mary’s was summoned hastily to baptise him.

Lichfield’s Market Square and Johnson’s statue viewed from Johnson’s house in Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

His education began at the age of three, and came from his mother who taught him to memorise and recite collects and passages from the Book of Common Prayer. For the rest of his life he was a devout Anglican and a compassionate man who supported a number of poor friends under his own roof, even when he was unable to fully provide for himself.

His Christian morality permeated his works, and he would write on moral topics with such authority and in such a trusting manner that one biographer said: “No other moralist in history excels or even begins to rival him.”

His faith did not prejudice him against others, and he respected members of other denominations who demonstrated a commitment to the teachings of Christ. However, although Johnson admired John Milton’s poetry, he could not tolerate Milton’s puritan and republican beliefs, feeling that they were contrary to England and Christianity.

Although politically he was a Tory, Johnson opposed slavery on moral grounds, and once famously proposed a toast to the “next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies.”

On his last visit to Church, the walk strained him, but while there, he wrote a prayer for his friends, the Thrale family: “To thy fatherly protection, O Lord, I commend this family. Bless, guide, and defend them, that they may pass through this world, as finally to enjoy in thy presence everlasting happiness, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.”

The spires of Lichfield Cathedral, seen from a window at the top of Johnson’s House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

Doctor Johnson died on 13 December 1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His life and work is celebrated in a stained glass window in Southwark Cathedral, he is named in the calendar of the Church of England as a modern Anglican saint, and he is being fondly commemorated in Lichfield throughout this year as the cathedral city marks the tercentenary of his birth.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. This essay is based on notes prepared for a radio interview on 6 May 2009.