JOHNSON,
Afterwards so famous as the great arbiter of literary criticism, is found leaving college without a degree, and, from sheer poverty, at the age of twenty-two. The sale of his deceased father’s effects, a few months after, affords him but twenty pounds, and he is constrained to become an usher in a grammar school in Leicestershire. In the next year he performs a translation of “Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia” for a Birmingham bookseller, returns to Lichfield, his birth-place, and publishes proposals for printing, by subscription, the Latin poems of Politian, the life of that author, and a history of Latin poetry from the era of Petrarch to the time of Politian. His project failed to attract patrons, and he next offered his services to Cave, the original projector of the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” Cave accepted his offer, but on conditions which compelled Johnson to make application elsewhere for earning the means of living. He again offered to become assistant to the master of a grammar school; but, in spite of the great learning he had even then acquired, he was rejected, from the fear that his peculiar nervous and involuntary gestures would render him an object of ridicule with his pupils. Such was one of the disabilities of constitution under which this humbly-born and strong-minded man laboured through life.
Won, not by his ungainly person, but by the high qualities of his mind, a widow, with a little fortune of eight hundred pounds, yielded him her hand, in this season of his poverty; and he immediately opened a classical school in his native town. The celebrated Garrick, then about eighteen years old, became his pupil. His scheme, however, did not succeed; his newly acquired property was exhausted; and he and Garrick, then eight years his junior, set out together for London, with the resolve to seek their fortunes in the larger world. Garrick in a short time was acknowledged as the first genius on the stage, and made his way to wealth almost without difficulty. A longer and more toilful period of trial fell to the lot of the scholar and author. He first offered to the booksellers a manuscript tragedy, supposed to be his “Irene,” but could find no one willing to accept it. Cave gave him an engagement to translate the “History of the Council of Trent.” He received forty-nine pounds for part of the translation, but it was never completed for lack of sale. His pecuniary condition was so low, soon after this, that he and Savage, having walked, conversing, round Grosvenor Square, till four in the morning, and beginning to feel the want of refreshment, could not muster between them more than fourpence-halfpenny! He received ten guineas for his celebrated poem of “London;” but though Pope said, “The author, whoever he was, could not be long concealed,” no further advantage was derived by Johnson from its publication. Hearing of a vacancy in the mastership of another grammar school in Leicestershire, he, once more, proceeds thither as a candidate. The consequences of the poverty which had prevented him from remaining at the university till he could take a degree were now grievously felt. The statutes of the place required that the person chosen should be a Master of Arts. Some interest was made to obtain him that degree from the Dublin University; but it failed, and he was again thrown back on London.
In spite of his melancholic constitution, these repeated disappointments, so far from filling him with despair, seem only to have quickened his invention, and strengthened his resolution to continue the struggle for fame. He formed numerous projects on his return to the metropolis; but none succeeded except his contributions to the “Gentleman’s Magazine;” these were, chiefly, the “Parliamentary Debates,” which the world read with the belief that they were thus becoming acquainted with the eloquence of Chatham, Walpole, and their compeers, and little dreaming that those speeches were “written in a garret in Exeter Street,” by a poverty-stricken author. The talent displayed in this anonymous labour did not serve, as yet, to free him from difficulties. He next undertook to collect and arrange the tracts forming the miscellany, entitled “Harleian.” Osborne, the bookseller, was his employer in this work; and, having purchased Lord Oxford’s library, the bookseller also employed Johnson to form a catalogue. To relieve his drudgery, Johnson occasionally paused to peruse the book that came to hand; Osborne complained of this; a dispute arose; and the bookseller, with great roughness, gave the author the lie. The incident so characteristic of Johnson, and so often related, now took place—Johnson seized a folio, and knocked the bookseller down. The act was far from justifiable; but his indignation under the offence must have been great, as his rigid adherence to speaking the truth was so observable, that one of his most intimate friends declared “he always talked as if he were speaking on oath.”
He escaped, at length, from some degree of the humiliation which attaches to poverty. He projected his great work—the English Dictionary; several of the wealthiest booksellers entered into the scheme, and Johnson now left lodging in the courts and alleys about the Strand, and took a house in Gough Square, Fleet Street. This did not occur till he was eight-and-thirty; so great a portion of life had he passed in almost perpetual contest with pecuniary difficulties; nor was he entirely freed from them for some years to come. During the years spent in the exhausting labour of his Dictionary, the fifteen hundred guineas he received for the copyright were consumed on amanuenses, and the provision necessary for himself and his wife. The “Rambler” was written during these years in which his Dictionary was in course of publication, and the circumstances of its composition are most note-worthy among the “Triumphs of Perseverance.” With the exception of five numbers, every essay was written by Johnson himself; and it was regularly issued every Tuesday and Friday, for two years. The perseverance which enabled him so punctually to execute a stated task, even while continuously labouring in the greater work in which he was engaged, is remarkable: but the young reader’s thought ought to be more deeply fixed on the consideration that a life of unremitting devotion to study—unconquered by difficulty, and straitness of circumstances—had rendered him able easily to pour forth the treasures of a full mind. Although apparently the product of great care, and stored with the richest moral reflections, these essays were usually written in haste, frequently while the printer’s boy was waiting, and not even read over before given to him. This was not recklessness in Johnson, though it would have been folly in one whose mind was not most opulently stored with matured thought, and who had not attained such a habit of modulating sentences, as to render it almost mechanical. Such attainments can only be reached by the most determined disciple of perseverance. “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it,” was Johnson’s own saying; but he could not have verified it, unless his mind, by assiduous application, had been filled with the materials of writing. He was, likewise, held in high celebrity as the best converser of his age; but he acknowledged that he had attained his extraordinary accuracy and flow of language by having early laid it down as a fixed rule to arrange his thoughts before expressing them, and never to suffer a careless or unmeaning expression to escape from him.
The profits of a second periodical, “The Idler,” and the subscriptions for his edition of Shakspeare, were the means by which he supported himself for the four or five years immediately preceding the age of fifty. His wife had already died, and his aged mother being near her dissolution, in order to reach Lichfield, and pay her the last offices of filial piety, he devoted one fortnight to the composition of his beautiful and immortal tale of “Rasselas,” for which he received one hundred pounds. He did not arrive in time to close her eyes, but saw her decently interred, and then hastened back to London, to go, once more, into lodgings and retrench expenses. The next three years of his life appear to have been passed in even more than his early poverty; but the end of his difficulties was approaching.
The last twenty-two years of his existence—from the age of fifty-three to seventy-five—were spent in the receipt of a royal pension of three hundred pounds per annum; in the society of persons of fortune, who considered themselves honoured by the company of the once poverty-stricken and unknown scholar; in the companionship of Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Joseph Warton, and others whose names are durably written on the roll of genius, and in the receipt of the highest honours of learning—for the Universities, both of Dublin and Oxford, conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws, and the Oxford University had previously sent him the degree of Master of Arts. Regarded as the great umpire of literary taste, receiving deference and respect wherever he went, and no longer driven to his pen by necessity, this honoured exemplar of perseverance did not pass through his remaining course in unproductive indolence. In addition to less important works, his “Lives of the Poets” was produced in this closing period of his life, and is well known as the most valuable and useful of his labours, with the exception of his great Dictionary.