History Creator / SamuelJohnson

* The narrator of ''Literature/BarneysVersion'' also keeps a copy of Boswell's ''Life of Johnson'' close by, on the assumption that if he were to suddenly die, people would think that that he was reading it at the time of his death.

* The narrator of ''Literature/BarneysVersion'' also keeps a copy of Boswell's ''Life of Johnson'' close by, on the assumption that if he were to suddenly die, people would think that that was the last book he ever read, or even the book that he was reading when he died.

He suffered from scrofula ("the King's Evil") in his childhood, and was touched by Queen Anne for it -- one of the last RealLife instances of MedicalMonarch.

As a critic, Johnson believed strongly in logic and decorum (in the 18th-century sense of probable characterization) in literary works; moreover, he believed that they should be judged on moral as well as artistic grounds. He was a firm Classicist who wrote many poems in Latin himself, and insofar as the incipient Romantic movement crossed his radar at all, he had a strong distaste for it. The Romantics returned the disfavour, disparaging him as "Ursa Major -- the [[BearsAreBadNews Great Bear]]"; Elizabeth Browning wrote of his ''Lives of the English Poets'' that he "wrote the lives of the poets and left out the poets!"[[note]]To be fair to Johnson, a consortium of booksellers commissioned him to write the ''Lives'' and they, not he, got to decide who was included, which is why it's overwhelmingly about 17th- and 18th-century poets and doesn't cover anyone earlier than Creator/JohnMilton.[[/note]] Later writers such as Creator/TSEliot and Creator/SamuelBeckett have been admirers of Johnson's work, especially for its emphasis on the [[StoicWoobie importance of enduring suffering]].

Although Johnson's views of black people [[ValuesDissonance were as paternalistic as any white man's of the time]], [[FairForItsDay he loathed slavery]]; when once asked to give a toast, he shocked the room with "Here's to the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies!" He hated the American revolutionaries not just for their disloyalty to the Crown but also for (as he saw it) the unforgivable hypocrisy of clamoring for "liberty" while denying it to their slaves, famously asking in his pamphlet ''Taxation No Tyranny'' (which also provided the first half of our page's image caption), "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" He himself left his entire estate (less a few legacies) to his black servant, Frank Barber, who had been born a slave.

Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 (7 September on the Julian calendar) – 13 December 1784) was an English writer, noted for his SesquipedalianLoquaciousness, his political and social conservatism, his gruff irascibility, and his confident literary and moral judgement. His works include ''A Dictionary of the English Language''[[note]]While it was not the first, as is commonly believed, it was by far the best and remained so until the Oxford English Dictionary was published 173 years later[[/note]] (which included such famous definitions as "N[-ETWORK-] -- ''Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections''" and "O[-ATS-] -- ''A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people''"); critical work, including an important annotated edition of the works of Creator/WilliamShakespeare; essays, published mostly in ''The Rambler'' and ''The Idler''; Parliamentary reports, at a time when reporting on debates in Parliament was technically illegal [[note]] which was why they were published in ''The Gentleman's Magazine'' as "Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia" using obvious aliases; this was actually his first regular writing job after moving to London[[/note]]; several poems (one of which, ''The Vanity of Human Wishes'', is awesome); and a novella, ''The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia''. He also wrote a popular book about his travels in Western and Northern Scotland, which many of his English contemporaries regarded as a remote, exotic, and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobite_Rising rather scary]] place. He also wrote a play, ''Irene'', which was very successful at the time but which has almost never been performed since its 1749 premiere, because it's come to be seen as very boring.