Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Linda Cantoni and PG Distributed
Proofreaders
1878
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709. His father, MichaelJohnson, was a bookseller, highly respected by the cathedral clergy, andfor a time sufficiently prosperous to be a magistrate of the town, and,in the year of his son's birth, sheriff of the county. He opened abookstall on market-days at neighbouring towns, including Birmingham,which was as yet unable to maintain a separate bookseller. The tradesmanoften exaggerates the prejudices of the class whose wants he supplies,and Michael Johnson was probably a more devoted High Churchman and Torythan many of the cathedral clergy themselves. He reconciled himself withdifficulty to taking the oaths against the exiled dynasty. He was a manof considerable mental and physical power, but tormented byhypochondriacal tendencies. His son inherited a share both of hisconstitution and of his principles. Long afterwards Samuel associatedwith his childish days a faint but solemn recollection of a lady indiamonds and long black hood. The lady was Queen Anne, to whom, incompliance with a superstition just dying a natural death, he had beentaken by his mother to be touched for the king's evil. The touch wasineffectual. Perhaps, as Boswell suggested, he ought to have beenpresented to the genuine heirs of the Stuarts in Rome. Disease andsuperstition had thus stood by his cradle, and they never quitted himduring life. The demon of hypochondria was always lying in wait for him,and could be exorcised for a time only by hard work or socialexcitement. Of this we shall hear enough; but it may be as well to sumup at once some of the physical characteristics which marked him throughlife and greatly influenced his career.
The disease had scarred and disfigured features otherwise regular andalways impressive. It had seriously injured his eyes, entirelydestroying, it seems, the sight of one. He could not, it is said,distinguish a friend's face half a yard off, and pictures were to himmeaningless patches, in which he could never see the resemblance totheir objects. The statement is perhaps exaggerated; for he could seeenough to condemn a portrait of himself. He expressed some annoyancewhen Reynolds had painted him with a pen held close to his eye; andprotested that he would not be handed down to posterity as "blinkingSam." It seems that habits of minute attention atoned in some degree forthis natural defect. Boswell tells us how Johnson once corrected him asto the precise shape of a mountain; and Mrs. Thrale says that he was aclose and exacting critic of ladies' dress, even to the accidentalposition of a riband. He could even lay down aesthetical canons uponsuch matters. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress as unsuitable toa "little creature." "What," he asked, "have not all insects gaycolours?" His insensibility to music was ev