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Samuel Johnson
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When Samuel Johnson is discussed as an essayist, his Rambler and Idler are generally the works that are considered. This is the first study to take account of the effect of Johnson's essayistic talents on the entirety of his writing. Setting forth the particular characteristics of the genre that are present in Johnson's contributions to the political controversies of his time, this analysis examines those qualities of Johnson's thought and methods that naturally led to his dependence on the essay form in polemical engagements throughout his career. In detail, Spector's study then goes on to explore the manner in which Johnson employed the essay not only in forms normally related to the genre, but in literary types ordinarily considered remote from it. The Rambler and Idler, along with Johnson's periodical essays in the Adventurer, are themselves looked at from a fresh point of view--the ways in which Johnson the professional writer, without regard for posterity, addressed the interests of the common reader of his century.
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Samuel Johnson was the son of Michale Johnson, a bookseller, and his wife, Sarah. Ever since he was a little kid he had many medical problems including a form of TB called “scrofula.” His family tried many diffrent things to cure his problems, but these only made him disfigured and gave him other problems. He came to have scars on his face, be blind in one eye, and get a large twich. He didn’t learn to speak until he was quite older than normal, so most people who met him thought he was an idiot. Despite these problems, he later became very strong and athletic and is reported to have been able to pick up a man and the chair he was sitting in and hurl them a few feet.
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Samuel Johnson is arguably the most famous alumnus of Pembroke College, Oxford. Although his time as an undergraduate was to end after a mere thirteen months, Johnson continued to feel deep affection for Pembroke and remained a regular visitor to the College after the completion of his celebrated Dictionary in 1755. He paid his final visit in 1784 shortly before his death.
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On this day in 1784 Samuel Johnson died, at the age of seventy-five. The details of Johnson's last years have been told According to Queeney (Beryl Bainbridge, 2001) or Mrs. Thrale or Fanny Burney or Boswell or later biographer-critics, but his large personality seems to escape, or confound, any one perspective. FULL STORY »
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Samuel Johnson was born in Litchfield, Staffordshire, England, on September 18, 1709, the son of Michael Johnson and Sarah Ford. His father was a bookseller, and Johnson owed much of his education to the fact that he grew up in a bookstore. Johnson was plagued by illness all his life. As a child he suffered from scrofula (an infection of the face that causes scars), smallpox, and partial deafness and blindness. One of his first memories was of being taken to London, England, where he was touched by Queen Anne (1665–1714) (the touch of the ruler was then thought to be a cure for scrofula).
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Samuel Johnson was born in Denmark around 1863. He was living in Dunn County, Wisconsin, in 1884, and in Hammond, Wisconsin, in 1885. He may ... have lived at one time in Iowa Falls, Iowa. Johnson came to St. Paul in 1886. City directories indicate that he worked from the 1890s through the 1910s as a teamster, and later as a "stereotyper" and stenographer for West Publishing Company (1920s-[ca.1931]). Long active in local Socialist Labor Party organizations, Johnson served as treasurer (of the St. Paul section?) in the 1900s and 1910s and as state secretary in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Samuel Johnson