Samuel Johnson 1709 – 1784

Biography

Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, England, the son of a bookseller, and studied briefly at Oxford before poverty forced him to leave. He moved to London and worked as a hack writer, publishing essays, poems, and the satire London, before undertaking his great Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755 after nine years of labour, a work that defined English for a century. His essays in The Rambler and The Idler, his philosophical tale Rasselas, and his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets made him the age’s most formidable man of letters. James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson made him immortal. He died in London in 1784 and is buried in Westminster Abbey. His Dictionary remained the standard work for more than a century, until the Oxford English Dictionary finally superseded it.