Early life and education in Market Square,
Lichfield Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 to bookseller Michael Johnson and his wife Sarah (née Ford). His mother was 40 when she gave birth to Johnson in the
family home above his father's bookshop in
Lichfield, Staffordshire. This was considered an unusually late pregnancy, so a man-midwife and surgeon of "great reputation" named George Hector was brought in to assist. The infant Johnson did not cry, and there were concerns for his health. His aunt exclaimed that "she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street". Two godfathers were chosen, Samuel Swynfen, a physician and graduate of
Pembroke College, Oxford, and Richard Wakefield, a lawyer, coroner and Lichfield town clerk. Johnson's health improved and he was put to
wet-nurse with Joan Marklew. Some time later he contracted
scrofula, known at the time as the "King's Evil" because it was thought that "
royal touch" could cure it. Upon the recommendation of
Sir John Floyer, former physician to
King Charles II, the young Johnson was touched by
Queen Anne on 30 March 1712. However, the ritual proved ineffective, and an operation was performed that left him with permanent scars across his face and body. Queen Anne gave Johnson an amulet on a chain he would wear the rest of his life. When Johnson was three, his brother Nathaniel was born. In a letter he wrote to his mother, Nathaniel complained that Johnson "would scarcely ever use me with common civility." With the birth of Johnson's brother their father was unable to pay the debts he had accrued over the years, and the family was no longer able to maintain its standard of living. {{quote box|width=25em|align=left|quote= When he was a child in petticoats, and had learnt to read, Mrs. Johnson one morning put the common prayer-book into his hands, pointed to the
collect for the day, and said, "Sam, you must get this by heart." She went up stairs, leaving him to study it: But by the time she had reached the second floor, she heard him following her. "What's the matter?" said she. "I can say it," he replied; and repeated it distinctly, though he could not have read it more than twice. Johnson displayed signs of great intelligence as a child, and his parents, to his later disgust, would show off his "newly acquired accomplishments". His education began at the age of three, and was provided by his mother, who had him memorise and recite passages from the
Book of Common Prayer. When Samuel turned four, he was sent to a nearby school, and, at the age of six he was sent to a retired shoemaker to continue his education. A year later Johnson went to
Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin. For his most personal poems, Johnson used Latin. During this time, Johnson started to exhibit the
tics that would influence how people viewed him in his later years, and which formed the basis for a posthumous diagnosis of
Tourette syndrome. He excelled at his studies and was promoted to the upper school at the age of nine. At the age of 16, Johnson stayed with his cousins, the Fords, at
Pedmore, Worcestershire. There he became a close friend of Cornelius Ford, who employed his knowledge of the classics to tutor Johnson while he was not attending school. Ford was a successful, well-connected academic, and notorious alcoholic whose excesses contributed to his death six years later. After spending six months with his cousins, Johnson returned to Lichfield, but Hunter, the headmaster, "angered by the impertinence of this long absence", refused to allow Johnson to continue at the school. Unable to return to Lichfield Grammar School, Johnson enrolled at the
King Edward VI grammar school at
Stourbridge. During this time, Johnson's future remained uncertain because his father was deeply in debt. To earn money, Johnson began to stitch books for his father, and it is likely that Johnson spent much time in his father's bookshop reading and building his literary knowledge. The family remained in poverty until his mother's cousin Elizabeth Harriotts died in February 1728 and left enough money to send Johnson to university. On 31 October 1728, a few weeks after he turned 19, Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford. The inheritance did not cover all of his expenses at Pembroke, and Andrew Corbet, a friend and fellow student at the college, offered to make up the deficit. Johnson made friends at Pembroke and read much. His tutor asked him to produce a Latin translation of
Alexander Pope's
Messiah as a Christmas exercise. Johnson completed half of the translation in one afternoon and the rest the following morning. Although the poem brought him praise, it did not bring the material benefit he had hoped for. The poem later appeared in
Miscellany of Poems (1731), edited by John Husbands, a Pembroke tutor, and is the earliest surviving publication of any of Johnson's writings. Johnson spent the rest of his time studying, even during the Christmas holiday. He drafted a "plan of study" called "Adversaria", which he left unfinished, and used his time to learn French while working on his Greek. Johnson's tutor, Jorden, left Pembroke some months after Johnson's arrival, and was replaced by
William Adams. Johnson enjoyed Adams's tutoring, but by December, was already a quarter behind in his student fees, and was forced to return to Lichfield without a degree, having spent 13 months at Oxford. He left behind many books that he had borrowed from his father because he could not afford to transport them, and also because he hoped to return. He eventually did receive a degree. Just before the publication of his
Dictionary in 1755, the
University of Oxford awarded Johnson the degree of
Master of Arts. He was awarded an honorary
doctorate in 1765 by
Trinity College Dublin and in 1775 by the University of Oxford. In 1776 he returned to Pembroke with
Boswell and toured the college with his former tutor Adams, who by then was the Master of the college. During that visit he recalled his time at the college and his early career, and expressed his later fondness for Jorden.
Early career Little is known about Johnson's life between the end of 1729 and 1731. It is likely that he lived with his parents. He experienced bouts of mental anguish and physical pain during years of illness; his tics and gesticulations associated with Tourette syndrome became more noticeable and were often commented upon. By 1731 Johnson's father was deeply in debt and had lost much of his standing in Lichfield. Johnson hoped to obtain the position of a
school usher, which became available at Stourbridge Grammar School, but since he did not have a degree, his application was passed over on 6 September 1731. Devastated by his father's death, Johnson sought to atone for an occasion he did not go with his father to sell books. Johnson stood for a "considerable time bareheaded in the rain" in the spot his father's stall used to be. After the publication of Boswell's
Life of Samuel Johnson, a statue was erected in that spot. Johnson was treated as a servant, and considered teaching boring, but nonetheless found pleasure in it. After an argument with Dixie he left the school, and by June 1732 he had returned home. Johnson continued to look for a position at a Lichfield school. After being turned down for a job at Ashbourne School, he spent time with his friend Edmund Hector, who was living in the home of the publisher
Thomas Warren. At the time, Warren was starting his
Birmingham Journal, and he enlisted Johnson's help. This connection with Warren grew, and Johnson proposed a translation of
Jerónimo Lobo's account of the
Abyssinians. Johnson read Abbé Joachim Le Grand's French translations, and thought that a shorter version might be "useful and profitable". Instead of writing the work himself, he dictated to Hector, who then took the copy to the printer and made any corrections. Johnson's
A Voyage to Abyssinia was published a year later. Johnson remained with his close friend Harry Porter during a terminal illness, which ended in Porter's death on 3 September 1734. Porter's wife
Elizabeth (née Jervis) (otherwise known as "Tetty") was now a widow at the age of 45, with three children. Some months later, Johnson began to court her.
William Shaw, a friend and biographer of Johnson, claims that "the first advances probably proceeded from her, as her attachment to Johnson was in opposition to the advice and desire of all her relations," Johnson was inexperienced in such relationships, but the well-to-do widow encouraged him and promised to provide for him with her substantial savings. They married on 9 July 1735, at
St Werburgh's Church in
Derby. The Porter family did not approve of the match, partly because of the difference in their ages: Johnson was 25 and Elizabeth was 46. Elizabeth's marriage to Johnson so disgusted her son Jervis that he severed all relations with her. However, her daughter Lucy accepted Johnson from the start, and her other son, Joseph, later came to accept the marriage. In June 1735, while working as a tutor for the children of Thomas Whitby, a local Staffordshire gentleman, Johnson had applied for the position of headmaster at
Solihull School. Although Johnson's friend
Gilbert Walmisley gave his support, Johnson was passed over because the school's directors thought he was "a very haughty, ill-natured gent, and that he has such a way of distorting his face (which though he can't help) the gents think it may affect some lads". With Walmisley's encouragement, Johnson decided that he could be a successful teacher if he ran his own school. In the autumn of 1735, Johnson opened
Edial Hall School as a private academy at
Edial, near Lichfield. He had only three pupils: Lawrence Offley, George Garrick, and the 18-year-old
David Garrick, who later became one of the most famous actors of his day. Biographer Robert DeMaria believed that Tourette syndrome likely made public occupations like schoolmaster or tutor almost impossible for Johnson. This may have led Johnson to "the invisible occupation of authorship". Johnson soon moved to
Greenwich near the Golden Hart Tavern to finish
Irene. On 12 July 1737 he wrote to
Edward Cave with a proposal for a translation of
Paolo Sarpi's
The History of the Council of Trent (1619), which Cave did not accept until months later. In October 1737 Johnson brought his wife to London, and he found employment with Cave as a writer for ''
The Gentleman's Magazine''. His assignments for the magazine and other publishers during this time were "almost unparalleled in range and variety," and "so numerous, so varied and scattered" that "Johnson himself could not make a complete list". In May 1738 his first major work, the poem
London, was published anonymously. Based on
Juvenal's
Satire III, it describes the character Thales leaving for Wales to escape the problems of London, which is portrayed as a place of crime, corruption, and poverty. Johnson could not bring himself to regard the poem as earning him any merit as a poet. Alexander Pope said that the author "will soon be déterré" (unearthed, dug up), but this would not happen until 15 years later. Gower petitioned Oxford for an honorary degree to be awarded to Johnson, but was told that it was "too much to be asked". Gower then asked a friend of
Jonathan Swift to plead with Swift to use his influence at
Trinity College Dublin to have a master's degree awarded to Johnson, in the hope that this could then be used to justify an MA from Oxford, Between 1737 and 1739, Johnson befriended poet
Richard Savage. Feeling guilty of living almost entirely on Tetty's money, Johnson stopped living with her and spent his time with Savage. They were poor and would stay in taverns or sleep in "night-cellars". Some nights they would roam the streets until dawn because they had no money. During this period, Johnson and Savage worked as
Grub Street writers who anonymously supplied publishers with on-demand material. In his
Dictionary, Johnson defined "grub street" as "the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called
grubstreet." Savage's friends tried to help him by attempting to persuade him to move to Wales, but Savage ended up in Bristol and again fell into debt. He was committed to debtors' prison and died in 1743. A year later, Johnson wrote
Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), a "moving" work which, in the words of the biographer and critic
Walter Jackson Bate, "remains one of the innovative works in the history of biography".
A Dictionary of the English Language In 1746, a group of publishers approached Johnson with the idea of creating an authoritative dictionary of the English language. Johnson claimed that he could finish the project in three years. In comparison, the
Académie Française had 40 scholars spending 40 years to complete their dictionary, which prompted Johnson to claim, "This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman." but according to Bate, the
Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time." Johnson's constant work on the
Dictionary disrupted his and Tetty's living conditions. He had to employ a number of assistants for the copying and mechanical work, which filled the house with incessant noise and clutter. He was always busy, and kept hundreds of books around him.
John Hawkins described the scene: "The books he used for this purpose were what he had in his own collection, a copious but a miserably ragged one, and all such as he could borrow; which latter, if ever they came back to those that lent them, were so defaced as to be scarce worth owning." Johnson's process included underlining words in the numerous books he wanted to include in his
Dictionary. The assistants would copy out the underlined sentences on individual paper slips, which would later be alphabetized and accompanied with examples. Johnson was also distracted by Tetty's poor health as she began to show signs of a terminal illness. . In preparation, Johnson wrote
Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language in 1747, of which
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield was the patron, to Johnson's displeasure. Seven years after first meeting Johnson to go over the work, Chesterfield wrote two anonymous essays in
The World recommending the
Dictionary. He complained that the English language lacked structure and argued in support of the dictionary. Johnson did not like the tone of the essays, and he felt that Chesterfield had not fulfilled his obligations as the work's patron. In a
letter to Chesterfield, Johnson expressed this view and harshly criticised Chesterfield, saying "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it." Chesterfield, impressed by the language, kept the letter displayed on a table for anyone to read. The dictionary as published was a large book. Its pages were nearly tall, and the book was wide when opened; it contained 42,773 entries, to which only a few more were added in subsequent editions, and it sold for the extravagant price of £4 10s, perhaps the rough equivalent of £350 today. An important innovation in English
lexicography was to illustrate the meanings of his words by literary quotation, of which there were approximately 114,000. The authors most frequently cited include
William Shakespeare,
John Milton and
John Dryden. It was years before ''Johnson's Dictionary'', as it came to be known, turned a profit. Authors' royalties were unknown at the time, and Johnson, once his contract to deliver the book was fulfilled, received no further money from its sale. Years later, many of its quotations would be repeated by various editions of the ''
Webster's Dictionary and the New English Dictionary''. Johnson's dictionary was not the first, nor was it unique. Other dictionaries, such as
Nathan Bailey's
Dictionarium Britannicum, included more words, However, there was open dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period. In 1741,
David Hume claimed: "The Elegance and Propriety of Stile have been very much neglected among us. We have no Dictionary of our Language, and scarce a tolerable Grammar." Johnson's
Dictionary offers insights into the 18th century and "a faithful record of the language people used". In 1750, he decided to produce a series of essays under the title
The Rambler that were to be published every Tuesday and Saturday and sell for
twopence each. During this time, Johnson published no fewer than 208 essays, each around 1,200–1,500 words long. Explaining the title years later, he told his friend and portraitist
Joshua Reynolds: "I was at a loss how to name it. I sat down at night upon my bedside, and resolved that I would not go to sleep till I had fixed its title.
The Rambler seemed the best that occurred, and I took it." These essays, often on moral and religious topics, tended to be more grave than the title of the series would suggest; his first comments in
The Rambler were to ask "that in this undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the salvation of myself and others." One friend, the novelist
Charlotte Lennox, includes a defence of
The Rambler in her novel
The Female Quixote (1752). In particular, the character Mr. Glanville says, "you may sit in Judgment upon the Productions of a
Young, a
Richardson, or a
Johnson. Rail with premeditated Malice at the
Rambler; and for the want of Faults, turn even its inimitable Beauties into Ridicule." (Book VI, Chapter XI) Later, the novel describes Johnson as "the greatest Genius in the present Age." Not all of his work was confined to
The Rambler. His most highly regarded poem,
The Vanity of Human Wishes, was written with such "extraordinary speed" that Boswell claimed Johnson "might have been perpetually a poet". The poem is an imitation of Juvenal's
Satire X and claims that "the antidote to vain human wishes is non-vain spiritual wishes". In particular, Johnson emphasises "the helpless vulnerability of the individual before the social context" and the "inevitable self-deception by which human beings are led astray". The poem was critically celebrated but it failed to become popular, and sold fewer copies than
London. In 1749, Garrick made good on his promise that he would produce
Irene, but its title was altered to
Mahomet and Irene to make it "fit for the stage."
Irene, which was written in blank verse, was received rather poorly with a friend of Boswell's commenting the play to be "as frigid as the regions of Nova Zembla: now and then you felt a little heat like what is produced by touching ice." The show eventually ran for nine nights. Tetty Johnson was ill during most of her time in London, and in 1752 she decided to return to the countryside while Johnson was busy working on his
Dictionary. She died on 17 March 1752, and, at word of her death, Johnson wrote a letter to his old friend Taylor, which according to Taylor "expressed grief in the strongest manner he had ever read". Johnson wrote a sermon in her honour, to be read at her funeral, but Taylor refused to read it, for reasons which are unknown. This only exacerbated Johnson's feelings of loss and despair. Consequently,
John Hawkesworth had to organise the funeral. Johnson felt guilty about the poverty in which he believed he had forced Tetty to live, and blamed himself for neglecting her. He became outwardly discontented, and his diary was filled with prayers and laments over her death which continued until his own. She was his primary motivation, and her death hindered his ability to complete his work.
Later career On 16 March 1756, Johnson was arrested for an outstanding debt of £5 18
s. Unable to contact anyone else, he wrote to the writer and publisher Samuel Richardson. Richardson, who had previously lent Johnson money, sent him six
guineas to show his good will, and the two became friends. Soon after, Johnson met and befriended the painter Joshua Reynolds, who so impressed Johnson that he declared him "almost the only man whom I call a friend". Reynolds's younger sister Frances observed during their time together "that men, women and children gathered around him [Johnson]", laughing at his gestures and gesticulations. In addition to Reynolds, Johnson was close to
Bennet Langton and
Arthur Murphy. Langton was a scholar and an admirer of Johnson who persuaded his way into a meeting with Johnson which led to a long friendship. Johnson met Murphy during the summer of 1754 after Murphy came to Johnson about the accidental republishing of the
Rambler No. 190, and the two became friends. Around this time,
Anna Williams began boarding with Johnson. She was a minor poet who was poor and becoming blind, two conditions that Johnson attempted to change by providing room for her and paying for a failed cataract surgery. Williams, in turn, became Johnson's housekeeper. To occupy himself, Johnson began to work on
The Literary Magazine, or Universal Review, the first issue of which was printed on 19 March 1756. Philosophical disagreements erupted over the purpose of the publication when the
Seven Years' War began and Johnson started to write polemical essays attacking the war. After the war began, the
Magazine included many reviews, at least 34 of which were written by Johnson. When not working on the
Magazine, Johnson wrote a series of prefaces for other writers, such as
Giuseppe Baretti,
William Payne and Charlotte Lennox. Johnson's relationship with Lennox and her works was particularly close during these years, and she in turn relied so heavily upon Johnson that he was "the most important single fact in Mrs Lennox's literary life". He later attempted to produce a new edition of her works, but even with his support they were unable to find enough interest to follow through with its publication. To help with domestic duties while Johnson was busy with his various projects, Richard Bathurst, a physician and a member of Johnson's Club, pressured him to take on a freed slave,
Francis Barber, as his servant. Johnson's work on
The Plays of William Shakespeare took up most of his time. On 8 June 1756, Johnson published his
Proposals for Printing, by Subscription, the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare, which argued that previous editions of Shakespeare were edited incorrectly and needed to be corrected. Johnson's progress on the work slowed as the months passed, and he told music historian
Charles Burney in December 1757 that it would take him until the following March to complete it. Before that could happen, he was arrested again, for a debt of £40, in February 1758. The debt was soon repaid by
Jacob Tonson, who had contracted Johnson to publish
Shakespeare, and this encouraged Johnson to finish his edition to repay the favour. Although it took him another seven years to finish, Johnson completed a few volumes of his
Shakespeare to prove his commitment to the project. In 1758, Johnson began to write a weekly series,
The Idler, which ran from 15 April 1758 to 5 April 1760, as a way to avoid finishing his
Shakespeare. This series was shorter and lacked many features of
The Rambler. Unlike his independent publication of
The Rambler,
The Idler was published in a weekly news journal
The Universal Chronicle, a publication supported by John Payne,
John Newbery, Robert Stevens and William Faden. Since
The Idler did not occupy all Johnson's time, he was able to publish his philosophical novella
Rasselas on 19 April 1759. The "little story book", as Johnson described it, describes the life of Prince Rasselas and Nekayah, his sister, who are kept in a place called the Happy Valley in the land of Abyssinia. The Valley is a place free of problems, where any desire is quickly satisfied. The constant pleasure does not, however, lead to satisfaction; and, with the help of a philosopher named Imlac, Rasselas escapes and explores the world to witness how all aspects of society and life in the outside world are filled with suffering. They return to Abyssinia, but do not wish to return to the state of constantly fulfilled pleasures found in the Happy Valley.
Rasselas was written in one week to pay for his mother's funeral and settle her debts; it became so popular that there was a new English edition of the work almost every year. References to it appear in many later works of fiction, including
Jane Eyre,
Cranford and
The House of the Seven Gables. Its fame was not limited to English-speaking nations:
Rasselas was immediately translated into five languages (French, Dutch, German, Russian and Italian), and later into nine others. at 25, by
George Willison By 1762, however, Johnson had gained notoriety for his dilatoriness in writing; the contemporary poet
Churchill teased Johnson for the delay in producing his long-promised edition of Shakespeare: "He for subscribers baits his hook / and takes your cash, but where's the book?" The comments soon motivated Johnson to finish his
Shakespeare, and, after receiving the first payment from a government pension on 20 July 1762, he was able to dedicate most of his time towards this goal. The award came largely through the efforts of
Sheridan and the
Earl of Bute. When Johnson questioned if the pension would force him to promote a political agenda or support various officials, he was told by Bute that the pension "is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done". On 16 May 1763, Johnson first met 22-year-old
James Boswell—who would later become Johnson's first major biographer—in the bookshop of Johnson's friend,
Tom Davies. They quickly became friends, although Boswell would return to his home in Scotland or travel abroad for months at a time. Around the spring of 1763, Johnson formed "
The Club", a social group that included his friends Reynolds,
Burke, Garrick,
Goldsmith and others (the membership later expanded to include
Adam Smith and
Edward Gibbon, in addition to Boswell himself). They decided to meet every Monday at 7:00 pm at the Turk's Head in
Gerrard Street,
Soho, and these meetings continued until long after the deaths of the original members. On 9 January 1765, Murphy introduced Johnson to
Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and
MP, and his wife
Hester. They struck up an instant friendship; Johnson was treated as a member of the family, and was once more motivated to continue working on his
Shakespeare. Afterwards, Johnson stayed with the Thrales for 17 years until Henry's death in 1781, sometimes staying in rooms at Thrale's
Anchor Brewery in
Southwark. Hester Thrale's documentation of Johnson's life during this time, in her correspondence and her diary (
Thraliana), became an important source of biographical information on Johnson after his death. Johnson's edition of
Shakespeare was finally published on 10 October 1765 as
The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes ... To which are added Notes by Sam. Johnson in a printing of one thousand copies. The first edition quickly sold out, and a second was soon printed. The plays themselves were in a version that Johnson felt was closest to the original, based on his analysis of the manuscript editions. Johnson's revolutionary innovation was to create a set of corresponding notes that allowed readers to clarify the meaning behind many of Shakespeare's more complicated passages, and to examine those which had been transcribed incorrectly in previous editions. Included within the notes are occasional attacks upon rival editors of Shakespeare's works. Years later,
Edmond Malone, an important Shakespearean scholar and friend of Johnson's, stated that Johnson's "vigorous and comprehensive understanding threw more light on his than all his predecessors had done".
Final works ". This unique portrait showing his nearsightedness is in the
Huntington Library in San Marino, California. On 6 August 1773, eleven years after first meeting Boswell, Johnson set out to visit his friend in Scotland, and to begin "a journey to the western islands of Scotland", as Johnson's
1775 account of their travels would put it. That account was intended to discuss the social problems and struggles that affected the Scottish people, but it also praised many of the unique facets of Scottish society, such as a school in Edinburgh for the deaf and mute. Also, Johnson used the work to enter into the dispute over the authenticity of
James Macpherson's
Ossian poems, claiming they could not have been translations of ancient Scottish literature on the grounds that "in those times nothing had been written in the Earse [i.e. Scots Gaelic] language". There were heated exchanges between the two, and according to one of Johnson's letters, MacPherson threatened physical violence. Boswell's account of their journey,
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786), was a preliminary step toward his later biography,
The Life of Samuel Johnson. Included were various quotations and descriptions of events, including anecdotes such as Johnson swinging a
broadsword while wearing Scottish garb, or dancing a Highland jig. In the 1770s, Johnson, who had tended to be an opponent of the government early in life, published a series of pamphlets in favour of various government policies. In 1770 he produced
The False Alarm, a political pamphlet attacking
John Wilkes. In 1771, his ''Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands
cautioned against war with Spain. In 1774 he printed The Patriot'', a critique of what he viewed as false patriotism. On the evening of 7 April 1775, he made the famous statement, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." This line was not, as widely believed, about patriotism in general, but what Johnson considered to be the false use of the term "patriotism" by Wilkes and his supporters. Johnson opposed "self-professed Patriots" in general, but valued what he considered "true" patriotism. The last of these pamphlets,
Taxation No Tyranny (1775), was a defence of the
Coercive Acts and a response to the
Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, which protested against
taxation without representation. Johnson argued that in emigrating to America, colonists had "voluntarily resigned the power of voting", but still retained
virtual representation in Parliament. He also criticised the proslavery positions and ownership of slaves by the
American Patriots, writing that if "slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among
the drivers of negroes?"" Johnson argued that colonists who wished to participate in Parliament should move to England and purchase an estate. He denounced British supporters of the Patriot cause as "traitors to this country" and hoped that the matter would be settled without bloodshed, but felt confident that it would ultimately end with "English superiority and American obedience". Years before, Johnson had stated that the
French and Indian War was a conflict between "two robbers" of Native American lands, and that neither side deserved to live there. On 3 May 1777, while Johnson was trying and failing to save
Reverend William Dodd from execution for forgery, he wrote to Boswell that he was busy preparing a "little Lives" and "little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets". Tom Davies, William Strahan and
Thomas Cadell had asked Johnson to create this final major work, the
Lives of the English Poets, for which he asked 200 guineas, an amount significantly less than the price he could have demanded. The
Lives, which were critical as well as biographical studies, appeared as prefaces to selections of each poet's work, and they were longer and more detailed than originally expected. The work was finished in March 1781 and the whole collection was published in six volumes. As Johnson justified in the advertisement for the work, "my purpose was only to have allotted to every Poet an Advertisement, like those which we find in the French Miscellanies, containing a few dates and a general character." Johnson was unable to enjoy this success because Henry Thrale, the dear friend with whom he lived, died on 4 April 1781. Life changed quickly for Johnson when Hester Thrale became romantically involved with the Italian singing teacher Gabriel Mario Piozzi, which forced Johnson to change his previous lifestyle. After returning home and then travelling for a short period, Johnson received word that his friend and tenant
Robert Levet, had died on 17 January 1782. Johnson was shocked by the death of Levet, who had resided at Johnson's London home since 1762. Shortly afterwards Johnson caught a cold that developed into
bronchitis and lasted for several months. His health was further complicated by "feeling forlorn and lonely" over Levet's death, and by the deaths of his friend
Thomas Lawrence and his housekeeper Williams.
Final years and her daughter Queeney Although he had recovered his health by August, Johnson experienced emotional trauma when he was given word that Hester Thrale would sell the residence that Johnson shared with the family. What hurt Johnson most was the possibility that he would be left without her constant company. Months later, on 6 October 1782, Johnson attended church for the final time in his life, to say goodbye to his former residence and life. The walk to the church strained him, but he managed the journey unaccompanied. While there, he wrote a prayer for the Thrale family: Hester Thrale did not completely abandon Johnson, and asked him to accompany the family on a trip to
Brighton. On his return, his health began to fail, and he was left alone after Boswell's visit on 29 May 1783. On 17 June 1783, Johnson's poor circulation resulted in a stroke and he wrote to his neighbour, Edmund Allen, that he had lost the ability to speak. Two doctors were brought in to aid Johnson; he regained his ability to speak two days later. Johnson feared that he was dying, and wrote: By this time he was sick and
gout-ridden. He had surgery for gout, and his remaining friends, including novelist
Fanny Burney (the daughter of Charles Burney), came to keep him company. He was confined to his room from 14 December 1783 to 21 April 1784. His health began to improve by May 1784, and he travelled to Oxford with Boswell on 5 May 1784. His final moments were filled with mental anguish and delusions; when his physician, Thomas Warren, visited and asked him if he were feeling better, Johnson burst out with: "No, Sir; you cannot conceive with what acceleration I advance towards death." Many visitors came to see Johnson as he lay sick in bed, but he preferred only Langton's company. On 13 December 1784, Johnson met with two others: a young woman, Miss Morris, whom Johnson blessed, and Francesco Sastres, an Italian teacher, who heard some of Johnson's final words: "
iam moriturus" ("now [I am] about to die"). Shortly afterwards he fell into a coma, and died at 7:00 pm. Boswell remarked, "My feeling was just one large expanse of Stupor ... I could not believe it. My imagination was not convinced."
William Gerard Hamilton joined in and stated, "He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which
nothing has a tendency to fill up. –Johnson is dead.– Let us go to the next best: There is nobody; –
no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson." He was buried on 20 December 1784 at
Westminster Abbey with an inscription that reads: ==Literary criticism==