Samuel Johnson. A Biography

by John Wain

John Wain, author presents a major new biography of England's greatest man of letters. He describes how "Johnson often mixed with people who were desperate human wrecks, some of whom were close friends; to the end of his life he filled house with people who were not successes in the eyes of the world, yet at the same time he conversed on equal and bettter than equeal terms with the most important and brilliant people of that time."

Genres: Biography, History, Literature, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Politics, 18th Century

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

John Barrington Wain was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement". For most of his life, Wain worked as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio.

Wain was born and grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the son of a dentist, Arnold Wain, and his wife Annie, née Turner. He had an older sister and a younger brother, Noel. After attending Newcastle under Lyme High School, he entered St. John's College, Oxford, gaining a first in his BA in 1946 and MA in 1950. He was a Fereday Fellow of St. John's between 1946 and 1949. On 4 July 1947, Wain married Marianne Uffenheimer (b. 1923 or 1924), but they divorced in 1956. Wain then married Eirian Mary James (1920 - 1988), deputy director of the recorded sound department of the British Council, on 1 January 1960. They had three sons and lived mainly in Wolvercote, Oxford. Wain married his third wife, Patricia Adams (born 1942 or 1943), an art teacher, in 1989. He died in Oxford on 24 May 1994.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful account of all of SJ's life and is the easy way in to the universe of Boswell and Johnson for modern readers. I think the best biography I ever read. SJ was an intensely moving and quite unique character. "Sir, why do you keep orange peel when you peel an orange?" " Sir, I shall not tell you. A hundred years from now, they will say to each other - why did he keep orange peel?"

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was recently in London
and decided that in my last week I would attempt to visit places
I had previously not made time for or completely forgotten about.
And I had no idea when I would be back in London,
although I wished it might be next year.
But arriving home with, it was soon discovered, my lungs covered in blood clots,
I had soon to consider just how much of my travelling days remained...
whether I was in a fit condition to travel by air,
or the impossibilities of travelling if you were six foot underground.

It amuses me now to realise that one of my First London Expeditions was to visit the home of a man who loved the thought of travel, although his ill health often prevented any such activity; and that one of his famous books was about a journey which was to be followed in quick succession by an annual journey for the next 5 years. He was 69 when he had to stop travelling and I was soon to find myself in exactly the same position and at the same age.
His name was Doctor Samuel Johnson and one of his famous homes was the object of my first lengthy walk, the home where he laboured to compile his still famous Dictionary, aided by 6 copyists working in the garrett. The house of several stories is to be found at 17 Gough Square, tucked away in a small maze of back streets, but still unable to illude the bombs of Hitler's blitz . The charred beams of the garrett bear witness to a close shave. When I entered the ground floor I knew I would be spending the rest of the day there. But not that this was only the first of 3 visits.

....to be continued

[Jeff Kelleher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samuel Johnson was very much the provincial Englishman of his age: monarchist, Tory, pious Anglican, defender of aristocracy. Though inhabiting an island, he first glimpsed the ocean at age 50. He never ventured farther from London than The Hebrides, except for one short sojourn to France at age 68 whose main effect was that he "appreciated England the more." Unlike his friend Burke, he opposed the American Revolution as subversive of natural order. Justifying hereditary aristocracy, he held that "there would be a perpetual struggle for precedence, were there no fixed invariable rules for the distinction of rank...."

Do we have any use for such a musty figure? Yes we do, a lot.

Johnson is the antidote to the singular characteristic of the age of video games, Facebook, and Twitter--superficiality. He had a Shakespearean understanding of human nature. Though blind in one eye, he saw everthing around him, ruminated deeply, and wrote out his ruminations with the profoundest clarity. Spend an afternoon reading "The Rambler" instead of surfing the Web and you will re-set your sensibilities.

Wain, a novelist and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, presents Johnson to us in a delightfully easy and personal style.

We find that the imposing figure we remember from school suffered from depression and long spells of indolence; had a powerful sex drive but was riven by guilt; was slovenly in dress; and had an almost superhuman memory. Contrary to his austere image, Johnson was, according to Wain, "as benevolent as any man who ever lived." He could be cranky, but seems to have been incapable of malice, was filled with compassion and what we would today call "empathy." He had a huge number of friends, most of them lasting a lifetime.

We all remember "The Rambler" and the famous Dictionary, but we might have forgotten "The Lives of the Poets", "Notes to Shakespeare", "Journey to the Western Isles", and "Rassalas, Prince of Abyssinia." When we feel our converation getting stale, we can just dip into these, and be energized again.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Samuel Johnson is a hero of mine. He was clearly a hero to Wain, too, except that Wain clearly feels called to defend his hero from any and all criticism and I really don't. This is a very good biography, and it's been much admired, but it's very old-fashioned in many ways and it verges at times on hagiography. I'm surprised it's taken me this long to get around to reading it. Library closures have forced me to resort more to my own bookshelves for new reading material, so that's at least one good consequence of this pandemic because I've had this book for ages and somehow hadn't gotten round to it yet.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel a fraud writing/reading about Johnson without having read more of Johnson himself. Of all his poetry, Rambler essays, critical, travel, and literary works (Lives of the Poets, Plays of William Shakespeare, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland), I’ve only read his little consolatory and philosophical romance Rasselas, though I enjoyed it enough to have read it three times. Though I’d missed the signal point in my youth of having read Boswell’s Life, the outlines of Johnson’s life have been accreting over nearly 60 years of reading. As with most of the Johnson literature that I have (critical studies, biographies, and some of his essays and poetry), the present Wain biography was a gift from my father, an avid admirer of Dr. Johnson as writer, thinker, and man.

John Wain makes clear at the outset that his work is a labor of love, that he has long admired Johnson and has read extensively of his work and delved into the large corpus of Johnsoniana. There’s an easy naturalness to the writing, and it’s clear that Wain is enjoying himself, much as if he were taking a beloved nephew/niece to see a favorite exhibit at the museum. Wain is thorough about a full and proper accounting of chronology and events, but he allows himself room for digressions and longueurs of appreciation for particular examples of Johnson’s writing. Touching on each of Johnson’s literary milestones, Wain savors each for us with synopses, samples, and appraisals.

Wain fleshes out the vague outlines of Johnson's life that I’d acquired over the years, and I felt myself in the company of a man who admires and loves his subject. Wain wants us to see the enormity of Johnson as a man, not just as a writer and thinker and talker. Certainly Johnson did his share of admirable works for literature and country (e.g., the long-labored and long-lived Dictionary, et al.), but it is Johnson’s transcendence of his unremitting self-censure and torpor/accidie (which is given a religious cast) that earns from Wain his most admiration. Despite a lifetime of what appears (my words) to be a case of clinical depression, Johnson strives over and over to exert the will to overcome sloth, either by working or by being in the company of others. This aspect of will is what appealed, I’m sure, to my own father, a strict adherent to stoic principles of getting on with it and doing one’s duty.

What Wain makes very clear is how much religious scruples entered into Johnson’s attempts to keep himself balanced and sane. As a rear-guard champion of the neo-Augustan balance in literature and social and moral thinking, Johnson’s first principle is the existence of an Anglican God to whom he owes gratitude and obedience. Johnson’s compulsive, obsessive concern about stray thoughts and urges, accidie, and lukewarm feelings for his parents and brother continue throughout his life to plague him as portents of unworthiness and damnation. The only bulwark against straying further into sin was the immersion in work and the company of friends. Religious/moral proscription was more influential in Johnson’s life than I would have expected of such a penetratingly rational man.

Wain’s is a full and affectionate portrait of Johnson, with foibles and fits of melancholy adjacent to extraordinary accomplishments. While there are some occasions to apologize for some of Johnson’s behavior/actions, Wain appears to be fair and even-handed in presenting good and bad, making it clear how Johnson had much ado to keep in check doubt and demons. That Johnson was largely successful is testified to by his large circle of friends and admirers, by the literary and lexicographical accomplishments that earned him a pension from the king, and by the continued fascination his life and works continue to exert.

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not seek John Wain’s biography, not knowing it existed. It was fortuity, by way of my father-in-law. John Wain was indeed a curious man; he wrote an essay on the Inklings which is tremendously misleading, quite deadpan. I had read it and have though John Wain someone I would like to know more about ever since. Wain was the kind of person who gladly perused the Dictionary, discerning character in the choices there displayed. He wrote well, and had wit and insight—was, in short, quite competent to do Johnson. It is an excellent biography.

I have myself read a bit of Samuel Johnson, though it seems incidental, looking back on it. Rasselas before anything else, the Lives, the occasional poem, never the Rambler. Then I did Boswell’s Life and Journal. Hence, mainly, my interest, and some also from remarks made by C.S. Lewis and Jorge Luis Borges (who read Boswell’s Life six times over). I have gathered that Johnson was the kind of person who represented his age, and so knew that to begin to understand him was to begin to understand more than him.

Unlike Samuel Johnson, John Wain was not a Christian. His sympathy for the pious Johnson, however, went deep. When a biography ends with a moving sense of the sadness of the subject’s death, of shutting down a house in which you have been happy, window by window, room by room, and finally locking the front door, you know that you have something written with the proper admiration of a good biography on a worthwhile person. I have a lot of biographies to get through and fear few of them will be so interesting and end so aptly; I am grateful for this one. For all his differences, Wain respected and understood Johnson.

This is an example of what Wain does: he not only makes an observation about Johnson, but puts the observation into perspective. “Another of the things about Johnson ‘everybody knows’ is that he never read a book all the way through; he leafed through it, snatching at the gist, ‘tearing the heart’ out of it. Readers without Johnson’s incredible powers of concentration should be warned that this method will not serve them as it served him.” Wain makes sense of it, rather than just gushing about the great miraculous feats of Johnson, and he uses this insight throughout to explain what exactly Johnson achieved. The observation is his key to understanding the Lexicon years.

“In this we see something of Johnson’s generous self-forgetfulness, his power to reach intellectual conclusions on impersonal grounds.” Reader, is that not a good way of putting something like that? Notice the complete absence of the more common, blunt and inadequate way of putting it: he was objective (nefarious, substandard word). John Wain’s prose is consistently superior. It refreshes any who has to spend long waste hours reading prose that only occasionally rises to adequacy and the wit of which is entirely recycled and worn. John Wain is a joy.

After years of misfortune, dropping out of college for lack of funds which were promised but never delivered, after inability to find proper employment, at least three teaching failures, poverty and then the Dictionary years of toil, after the decline and neglect of his wife, and her death, after all this Johnson received a royal pension that solved his protracted financial difficulties. He went on a holiday, and this is Wain’s comment: “We know very little, in detail, about these six weeks, but they must have been one of the few spells of unclouded happiness in Johnson’s life. To be free at last from the years of drudgery; to feel his freedom had been fairly earned, that it came from fame he had merited and a character he had kept unspotted; to ramble in one of the most delectable regions of the country that was beautiful as no part of the earth is beautiful now; and to have beside him a loving an unalterable friend—life does not often make up such a bouquet.” Quite right, and I find that observation about the ugliness of the world after industrialization, unobtrusively included, one of the many interesting things Wain accomplishes.

Early on in the book Wain drops ominous hints about Boswell. One gets the idea he is going to unmask Boswell as the great distorter of Johnson, the inept traducer. Nothing good can be said about Boswell before he enters the story in the sequence of events, and then comes the moment at which he actually does. The depth of Wain’s low opinion of Boswell is manifested. “Boswell’s thirst for self-observation was matched by his need to measure himself against others. He was, in that sense, a natural parasite, living form one intense relationship to the next and always drawing a great deal of energy from the host. His doglike hero-worship and his equally doglike sexual promiscuity were opposite sides of the same coin. Whether he was coupling his mind with that of some man of unquestioned achievement, or coupling his body with that of some attractive girl, he felt a relief from the intolerable burden of the unmitigated self, and in this sense his whole life was one long act of copulation.” There is a prepared, calculated and utterly scathing opinion. Wain has had it on his chest for more than half the book. Delivering himself proves quite cathartic, and his comments on Boswell subsequently improve; he eventually even brings himself to praise more than once and includes a sensitive account of the last parting between Johnson and Boswell. In the end ending there are quite respectable commendations of several of Boswell’s acts and decisions. It is the funniest thing.

Whatever else the peculiar John Wain was, he was humane, and that makes his biography warm. “In a man of such tender-heartedness, faithfulness to old friends and old associations was to be expected. Johnson never let go of a friend.” Wain can do tenderness and he can do shrewdness, as follows: “There is a deeper form of cant, the habitual use of misleading language which arises partly from a wish to deceive others and partly from a need to deceive ourselves. In this sense cant is always with us, and the more so as we allow propaganda and advertising a larger share in our lives.” He gives contemporary (1974) examples, the second of which is the use of the word ‘gay’ instead of ‘homosexual’.

One of the best things about this biography is that while distancing himself from Johnson’s Christianity, Wain still appreciated it. He quoted a prayer Johnson made at the side of a dying friend of his mother, after which one reads the observation above about tender-heartedness. Johnson apparently wrote many such prayers, and Wain includes this one whole: “Almighty and most merciful Father, whose loving kindness is over all thy works, behold, visit, and relieve this thy servant who is grieved with sickness. Grant that the sense of her weakness may add strength to her faith, and seriousness to her repentance. And grant that by the help of thy Holy Spirit, after the pains and labors of this short life, we may all obtain everlasting happiness through Jesus Christ, our Lord, for whose sake hear our prayers. Amen.” It was a spontaneous collect later recalled and transcribed that shows the religion of Samuel Johnson (and his ability to employ precise, choice expression). Wain was never dismissive about Johnson’s beliefs; he knew they belonged to a serious man.

From what I can tell, there was a lot of natural religion in Johnson’s conception; he was something of a moralist and feared he had not sufficiently exerted himself to satisfy God. He did not conceal his dread of dying, and Wain shows it was dread of the judgment. Johnson very much believed in a real and unending hell. He was never sure he would himself escape it. “Among the deeply rooted fears that preyed on Johnson’s mind when his thoughts turned to his religion, one of the most persistent was that he would not be able render sufficient account of the gifts he had been born with.” It is not my intention to determine the state of Samuel Johnson’s soul; may he rest in peace. But I do wonder if Wain is sensitive to Johnson’s religion because he tended to judge doubtfully of his merit, rather than to rely on God’s grace. Legal rather than evangelical humiliation can be more widely appreciated since it is more generally experienced. As I have said before, the biography is moving, and these scenes from the end of Johnson’s life are told with sense, decorum and pathos.

Here is one last interesting observation from Wain, of Johnson’s fondness for travel. “He experienced this beauty through his skin and his bone structure, through fatigue, though exposure to wind and weather. Anyone who has only seen a landscape (e.g., through a car window) might as well have stayed at home and watched travel films. But to experience the hills as gradient, to be toiled up; to feel the coldness of the streams, the texture of the earth under one’s feet, the roughness or smoothness of the rocks, the direction of the wind, is to possess that landscape and in this sense Johnson possessed the Hebrides.” And I think in a similar way Wain has not been looking out of the window of his car, but possessed Johnson.

[Tom Axworthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Wain was a noted 20th poet and critic and he produced a fine biography of the famous 18th century poet, critic and moralist Samuel Johnson.There are many biographies of Johnson- some studies of 18th century England are entitled " The Age of Johnson- but Wain is especially good at explaining the literary worth and techniques of Johnson.Other biographies have more about the conversation of Johnson and his celebrity status ,but if you want a book on why Johnson was such a celebrated writer in his time and why we should still read Johnson today, Wain is your man.

[James Preston · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is very hard to read of the greatest critic in the English language, and not feel that one’s own writing is sacrilegious scratching on the marble he’d sculpted. None, but for the great bard, inspire such beauty, depth of feeling, and wonder as Samuel Johnson. None demand such perfection, in both literature and morality, as Samuel Johnson. The good doctor was known to me, as he is to most, before this book. He is now in my mind eternally, and will steer my every decision.

[Steve Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had this on my shelf for thirty years and just now got around to it. I wish I’d started it sooner. It’s superbly written. While I could find flaw with some of Wain’s interpretations, it is so well done I’ll refrain.

I’m going to donate this to the library with mixed feelings. I want to keep it...but I also realize others will appreciate it.

[Joseph Weyek · Rating 4 out of 5]

No comment. I did, however, read it, every word.

[Richard Haynes · Rating 4 out of 5]

To understand greatest is to see words written in such a way as to leave the reader better than he or she was before. Samuel Johnson did just that.

[Daniel Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1999, on the last real trip my wife and I took before kids, we found ourselves in London strolling through the crypt of Westminster Abbey. One of the enscriptions was to Samuel Johnson, who at that time, I had just an inkling of who he was, as the grandmaster of the first real English dictionary. Fast foward some years later, and I picked up this wonderful book in a sale somewhere, where it has sat on my shelf since that time. I do not recall where I found the book but I'm glad I finally got to reading it. The book is so wonderfully written that I looked up the name of the author, John Wain, and was saddened to see that he had passed some years ago. This is a biography of Samuel Johnson, presented with all his eccentricities and the tremendous work he undertook in his lifetimes, and the sufferings he went through. The author presents the material with passion and with a keen sense of honorable, scholarly opinion of his subject. He takes us back to the 18th century of Johnson and does his best to present the genius and the humanity of the man. I would recommend this to anyone who loves a good biography. The author, Wain, looks to be a reputable poet, in his own right, though I am not familiar with any of his work. This book is such a work of art, Wain's poetry must be something sweet to read. He has left us with a memorable work about one of the world's most outstanding and forgotten citizens.

[David Buhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it - Boswell move over and make room for John Wain! This book will give you a good comprehenive view of the span of Johnson's life. Although it has been years since I read Boswell's book I finished Wain's feeling that I had learned more than from Boswell. (I must re-read Boswell some time.) I learned more about Johnson's sickly physique, his character, his great mental powers, his mental problems, his religious anguish, his political views, his compassion for the poor, his steadfast love of his friends - he never willingly lost a friend .............. and much more including his sex life. Read it, I urge you, if you enjoy biography.

I wish I had a copy of Johnson's famous dictionary.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This biography was interesting but not compelling. We do get a snapshot of 18th century English history and of course Johnson's life and influences. But Johnson was a strange man both physically and emotionally. Despite the author's admiration, Johnson does not come across as an interesting or particularly engaging character. The quoted passages from Boswell's Life and Johnson's own publications were the most enjoyable passages of this book.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent! Wain has captured in exacting detail the life and times of this complex, tormented genius and, at the same time, told us much about himself. Elegantly written with all the wit and intelligence of the Augustans whom he admires so much and rich in observations that bring Johnson and his society to vivid life.

[Kathy Kattenburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography of Samuel Johnson has been on my shelf for years. I'm so glad I finally decided to read it. I knew next to nothing about Dr. Johnson before this, and he really was an extraordinary man.