Write a short note on the life of Samuel Johnson. | Ignou | BEGE 105| | Ignou Notes By Student Help |

Write a short note on the life of Samuel Johnson.

                     

BEGE-105 Understanding Prose

Samuel Johnson has been called the symbol of the genius of England.

Strong common sense, learning, wit, courage, honesty and sympathy are some of the qualities that people admire wherever we find them but we find all these together in any one person so rarely Johnson was born into a family of average means. His father Michael was a bookseller. 

He was also a learned man and his philosophical nature rather interfered with his trade and prosperity.

His mother, Sarah came Birmingham family of Fords who were well-to-do. She was not much educated but feared that their economic condition was getting worse.

 The result was that there was not much peace in the family. Johnson had a younger brother, called Nathaniel, He committed suicide in 1737 and within a few days Johnson too moved to London, in search of a job. There he entered the service of Edward Cave (1691-1754) the printer and wrote for The Gentleman's Magazine. Johnson had to give up his studies at Oxford in 1729 for financial reasons. In his search of employment he went, among other places, to Birmingham. There he wrote essays for the Birmingham Journal and translated Jeronymo Lobo's French version of Voyage to Abyssinia into English. Apparently, during his stay at Birmingham, Johnson also met Elizabeth Porter, wife of the draper Harry Porter.

After the death of her husband, Johnson married Elizabeth who had a son as old as Johnson himself. She was 20 years older than him. With the help of the dowry she brought, Johnson opened a school at Edial. One of its students, David Garrick, became eminent in the theatre and Johnson's lifelong friend. However, the attempt was unsuccessful and the school had to be closed.  One of the works that built Johnson's reputation was his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) in which he defined over 40,000 words, illustrating them with the help of 1,14,000 quotations.

These were drawn from books in every branch of knowledge written since the time of Sir Philip Sidney (1563-1626). Nathaniel Bailey had preceded Johnson in the task but Johnson's was so much superior to Bailey's that the latter was soon wiped out of public memory.

 However, there are many words in the dictionary to which Johnson attached indefensible meanings either in sport or petulance. Some of these were not of this class. 'Pastern' Johnson defined as 'the knee of a horse.' When a lady asked him how he came to do that, he replied with admirable frankness, Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance. There are some other definitions that are commonly remembered.

Lexicographer given to a state hireling for treason to his country. These, however, are no specimens of the precision of the definitions of words in the Dictionary Apart from the journalism for the Magazine, Johnson wrote many short lives of eminent and not so eminent men. In all he wrote about 70 of them. In Rambler, No. 60 (Oct. 13, 1750) he wrote: "I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a was defined as 'a harmless drudge' and pension 'a pay nt judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. For not only every   man has in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself to whom his mistake and miscarriage, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use.

However, there is such an uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill, but is common to human kind." In short, biographies are more useful to us than other branches of literature because from them we learn about the merits and shortcomings and their effect on the lives of certain people, which can be examples for to imitate or avoid. Johnson preferred autobiographies to biographies because the former could convey the truth better.