SAMUEL
JOHNSON AND DIARIES
This year marks the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth. Liza Picard examines his life and work, and considers the literary value of the diaries of Boswell and other writers
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Such was Samuel Johnson, a man whose talents, acquirements and virtues were so extraordinary that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence
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Thus Boswell concluded his monumental Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). But if he could revisit the London literary scene now, he might be disappointed. Although the sheer volume of Johnson’s output must be admired, his style is more measured, his vocabulary more Latinate, than we are used to. Reverence, nowadays, is hard to come by. He was certainly an extraordinary man. He had to contend with appalling disabilities. One of his eyes was blind, the other short-sighted. His neck was scarred by childhood scrofula. He was deaf. ‘When he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters’ – Boswell again. Hogarth saw him ‘shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner’ , and concluded that he was ‘an idiot’ . When he was not talking he made meaningless clucking noises. With our superior hindsight we can label his strange behaviour as probably a form of Tourette’s syndrome: his contemporaries just had to accept it. As he aged, he suffered from gout, oedema and breathing difficulties. In the Preface to his Dictionary (1755) he referred to the sickness and sorrow in which he wrote it. He may have meant the ‘melancholia’ , the black dog of depression that haunted him all his life. He was largely self-taught. He read voraciously, but he 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
was expelled from two grammar schools. Penury drove him from Oxford University after a year. If he had been able to stay the academic course he could have excelled in so many fields. Mathematics was a form of relaxation for him. He spoke both classical ‘dead’ languages fluently, and wrote them elegantly. He interested himself in medical and scientific questions. If all else had failed he might have been a persuasive auctioneer; it was while trying to sell the Thrale brewery after his friend’s death
