Samuel Johnson
Stephen, Leslie, 1832-1904
English
We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address
Below is a summary of Samuel Johnson
Proofreaders
SAMUEL JOHNSON
BY
LESLIE STEPHEN
NEW YORK
1878
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE
CHAPTER II.
LITERARY CAREER
CHAPTER III.
JOHNSON AND HIS FRIENDS
CHAPTER IV.
JOHNSON AS A LITERARY DICTATOR
CHAPTER V.
THE CLOSING YEARS OF JOHNSON'S LIFE
CHAPTER VI.
JOHNSON'S WRITINGS
SAMUEL JOHNSON.
CHAPTER I.
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE.
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709. His father, Michael
Johnson, was a bookseller, highly respected by the cathedral clergy, and
for a time sufficiently prosperous to be a magistrate of the town, and,
in the year of his son's birth, sheriff of the county. He opened a
bookstall on market-days at neighbouring towns, including Birmingham,
which was as yet unable to maintain a separate bookseller. The tradesman
often exaggerates the prejudices of the class whose wants he supplies,
and Michael Johnson was probably a more devoted High Churchman and Tory
than many of the cathedral clergy themselves. He reconciled himself with
difficulty to taking the oaths against the exiled dynasty. He was a man
of considerable mental and physical power, but tormented by
hypochondriacal tendencies. His son inherited a share both of his
constitution and of his principles. Long afterwards Samuel associated
with his childish days a faint but solemn recollection of a lady in
diamonds and long black hood. The lady was Queen Anne, to whom, in
compliance with a superstition just dying a natural death, he had been
taken by his mother to be touched for the king's evil. The touch was
ineffectual. Perhaps, as Boswell suggested, he ought to have been
presented to the genuine heirs of the Stuarts in Rome. Disease and
superstition had thus stood by his cradle, and they never quitted him
during life. The demon of hypochondria was always lying in wait for him,
and could be exorcised for a time only by hard work or social
excitement. Of this we shall hear enough; but it may be as well to sum
up at once some of the physical characteristics which marked him through
life and greatly influenced his career.
The disease had scarred and disfigured features otherwise regular and
always impressive. It had seriously injured his eyes, entirely
destroying, it seems, the sight of one. He could not, it is said,
distinguish a friend's face half a yard off, and pictures were to him
meaningless patches, in which he could never see the resemblance to
their objects. The statement is perhaps exaggerated; for he could see
enough to condemn a portrait of himself. He expressed some annoyance
when Reynolds had painted him with a pen held close to his eye; and
protested that he would not be handed down to posterity as "blinking
Sam." It seems that habits of minute attention atoned in some degree for
this natural defect. Boswell tells us how Johnson once corrected him as
to the precise shape of a mountain; and Mrs. Thrale says that he was a
close and exacting critic of ladies' dress, even to the accidental
position of a riband. He could even lay down aesthetical canons upon
such matters. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress as unsuitable to
a "little creature." "What," he asked, "have not all insects gay
colours?" His insensibility to music was even more pronounced than his
dulness of sight. On hearing it said, in praise of a musical
performance, that it was in any case difficult, his feeling comment was,
"I wish it had been impossible!"
Back