Chapter M: Johnson.”

Once, the son was asked to take his place at the bookstall, the father being sick. This young Samuel refused to do. Fifty years later the memory of his snobbishness came to Johnson and, being at Lichfield, the town in which he had been unfilial, he left his friend’s house after breakfast and did not return until evening. Then, penance according to his own notion being done, he worried no more. He tells the story thus:

“To do away with this sin of disobedience, I this day went in a
post-chaise to Uttoxeter, and going into the market at the time of
high business, uncovered my head and stood with it bare an hour
before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the
sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather; a
penance by which I trust I have propitiated Heaven for this only
instance, I believe, of contumacy for my father.”

Samuel Johnson inherited hypochondriacal tendencies from his father and, as a child, was taken by his mother to London to be touched by the Queen to be cured of the “king’s evil.” So there was a queer twist in him for which he was in no wise responsible, a certain lack of co-ordination because of which he sometimes did strange things. Sometimes it would seem that the man was fighting against himself, as when he would stop in the middle of a room or in a street, then, presently continue his course correctly. At other times, as if off his guard, the hidden impulse had the better of him and there were strange gesticulations, queer acts. For instance, at dinner, in company, _a propos_ of nothing at all, he dived under the table and twisted off the shoe of the lady who sat next him. Then there was the peculiar affair at Twickenham when he imitated the movements of a jockey riding a race. His disease too had scarred and distorted his face and destroyed the sight of one eye. Altogether, the lad was terribly handicapped. Physically he was a tall, stout fellow. His uncle, who kept a kind of boxing school at Smithfield, had taught him boxing, wrestling and the trick of the quarter staff. At times he was a Berserker. Hawkins has told of the famous quarter staff, six feet in length and tapering from three inches diameter to one, which he had ready for the reception of one McPherson. Again there is the tale of a bookseller Osborne who refused to sell a huge folio to Johnson and who, for his refusal, was knocked down, the doctor using the book clubwise. Another tale tells of a scene in the Lichfield theater. Johnson, finding his favorite seat in the side scenes occupied by a man from Birmingham, pitched both chair and occupant into the pit.

The boy’s education was a patchwork affair. He attended the Lichfield schools, first a dame’s school and then a grammar school, but he was forever reading. It would be quite just to say that he educated himself. By chance he found his direction, for, looking on the book shelves for an apple, he took down a volume of Petrarch, became interested, and from that read outward, as it were, following up this and that and the other. At nineteen he went to Oxford as a servitor, working his way, as we would put it, poor indeed but full of personal independence and self respect, and certainly not the man to be patronized. When some wealthier, well-meaning fellow student put a new pair of shoes at Johnson’s door, the man finding them, pitched them out of the window. The stout hearted Johnson took no man’s pity. There were other times when he seemed to be wild and scornful of authority. In later years that being mentioned, he said: “Ah! sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and authority.” The words imply quite enough. He left the University in 1731 without taking a degree; his father died at the end of the same year, and young Johnson found the family fortunes amounted to no more than twenty pounds all told. So there were dark days with a mother to keep.

For a time he tried school teaching, in one case losing a promising position on the ground that his infirmities would excite the ridicule of the scholars. There was a little literary work on local papers and, in 1735, he received five guineas for a translation of Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, and married Elizabeth, the widow of a mercer who brought him as dowry some seven or eight hundred pounds with which he set up a private academy at Edial, in Staffordshire, with David Garrick as one of his pupils. The wife of his choice was more than twice his age, very fat and red of complexion, gaudy as to dress and affected as to manners. She drank and she painted and was lacking in education, but somehow the pair got on fairly well until she died in 1752. During their married life, Johnson had on hand a flirtation or two, as is the manner of men, but it caused no trouble. She on the other hand, according to Boswell, who quotes Mrs. Desmoulins, “indulged herself in country air and nice living, at an unsuitable expense, while her husband was drudging in the smoke of London, and that she by no means treated him with that complacency which is the most engaging quality in a wife.” So, taking it all in all, honors were even and by dint of the exercise of a mutual forbearance, the pair of them got along very well.

The year 1737 saw the Edial private academy on financial rocks and Johnson and his pupil Garrick setting out together to try their fortunes in London, the pupil with a tragedy in his pocket and Johnson with a letter of introduction from a Gilbert Walmsley which set forth the fact that the bearer was “a very good scholar and poet” and further added that the writer had great hopes that Johnson would “turn out a fine tragedy writer.”