Samuel Johnson lived one of the most thoroughly documented lives of the eighteenth century, and he was the subject of what many consider the greatest biography ever written, James Boswell’s Lifeof Samuel Johnson, LL.D. To understand that life, however, we need to pay attention to a wide range of biographical materials, including not only the biographical works of Johnson’s contemporaries – Sir John Hawkins and Hester Lynch Piozzi above all – but also the more scholarly tradition of Johnsonian biography that has run through the twentieth century and continues to thrive in the twenty-first.

Early life

Samuel Johnson was born in the cathedral town of Lichfield, in the West Midlands of England, on September 7, 1709. (After England changed its calendar in 1752, Johnson observed his birthday on September 18.) His father, Michael, owned a bookshop, and his mother, Sarah, was of a prominent local family. From his wet nurse the infant Samuel contracted scrofula, a tubercular infection that affected his eyesight and his hearing and left his face badly scarred (see chapter 29, “Medicine”). It was to be the first in a long catalogue of physical and mental maladies that would torment Johnson throughout his seventy-five years. When Samuel was two years old, Sarah Johnson took her son to London to be “touched for the King’s evil,” a folk remedy for scrofula. Queen Anne was the last British monarch to “touch” her subjects and, though the ritual did nothing to improve his health, Johnson wore the amulet he received from her for the rest of his life.