Halleck's New English Literature

by Reuben Post Halleck

Samuel was prepared for Oxford at various schools and in the paternal bookstore, where he read widely and voraciously, but without much system. He said that at the age of eighteen, the year before he entered Oxford, he knew almost as much as at fifty-three. Poverty kept him from remaining at Oxford long enough to take a degree. He left the university, and, for more than a quarter of a century, struggled doggedly against poverty. When he was twenty-five, he married a widow of forty-eight. With the money which she brought him, he opened a private school, but failed. He never had more than eight pupils, one of whom was the actor, David Garrick.

In 1737 Johnson went to London and sought employment as a hack writer. Sometimes he had no money with which to hire a lodging, and was compelled to walk the streets all night to keep warm. Johnson reached London in the very darkest days for struggling authors, who were often subjected to the greatest hardships. They were the objects of general contempt, to which Pope's Dunciad had largely contributed.

During this period Johnson did much hack work for the Gentleman's Magazine. He was also the author of two satirical poems, London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), which won much praise.

Later Years.—By the time he had been for ten years in London, his abilities were sufficiently well known to the leading booksellers for them to hire him to compile a Dictionary of the English Language for £1575. He was seven years at this work, finishing it in 1755. Between 1750 and 1760 he wrote the matter for two periodicals, The Rambler (1750-1752) and The Idler (1758-1760), which contain papers on manners and morals. He intended to model these papers on the lines of The Tatler and The Spectator, but his essays are for the most part ponderously dull and uninteresting.

In 1762, for the first time, he was really an independent man, for then George III. gave him a life pension of £300 a year. Even as late as 1759, in order to pay his mother's funeral expenses, Johnson had been obliged to dash off the romance of Rasselas in a week; but from the time he received his pension, he had leisure "to cross his legs and have his talk out" in some of the most distinguished gatherings of the eighteenth century. During the rest of his life he produced little besides Lives of the English Poets, which is his most important contribution to literature. In 1784 he died, and was buried in Westminster Abbey among the poets whose lives he had written.

A Man of Character.—Any one who will read Macaulay's Life of Johnson[2] may become acquainted with some of Johnson's most striking peculiarities; but these do not constitute his claims to greatness. He had qualities that made him great in spite of his peculiarities. He knocked down a publisher who insulted him, and he would never take insolence from a superior; but there is no case on record of his having been unkind to an inferior. Goldsmith said: "Johnson has nothing of a bear but the skin." When some one manifested surprise that Johnson should have assisted a worthless character, Goldsmith promptly replied: "He has now become miserable, and that insures the protection of Johnson."

Johnson, coming home late at night, would frequently slip a coin into the hand of a sleeping street Arab, who, on awakening, was rejoiced to find provision thus made for his breakfast. He spent the greater part of his pension on the helpless, several of whom he received into his own house.

There have been many broader and more scholarly Englishmen, but there never walked the streets of London a man who battled more courageously for what he thought was right. The more we know of him, the more certain are we to agree with this closing sentence from Macaulay's Life of Johnson: "And it is but just to say that our intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man."

A Great Converser and Literary Lawgiver.—By nature Johnson was fitted to be a talker. He was happiest when he had intelligent listeners. Accordingly, he and Sir Joshua Reynolds, the artist, founded the famous Literary Club in 1764. During Johnson's lifetime this had for members such men as Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles James Fox, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, and David Garrick. Macaulay says: "The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk maker and the pastry cook… To predominate over such a society was not easy; yet even over such a society Johnson predominated."

He was consulted as an oracle on all kinds of subjects, and his replies were generally the pith of common sense. So famous had Johnson become for his conversations that George III. met him on purpose to hear him talk. A committee from forty of the leading London booksellers waited on Johnson to ask him to write the Lives of the English Poets. There was then in England no other man with so much influence in the world of literature.