Nine years, 42,733 entries: Johnson's Dictionary
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) left Oxford penniless, then spent nine hard years forging A Dictionary of the English Language with some 42,733 entries. The Oxford DNB calls him arguably English letters' most distinguished man—Tourette tics, scrofula scars, and all.
Born 18 September 1709 above his father's Lichfield bookshop to bookseller Michael Johnson and Sarah Ford—she was forty—the infant barely cried and was hastily baptized. Wet-nursed by Joan Marklew, he later contracted scrofula ("King's Evil"); Queen Anne touched him on 30 March 1712, uselessly, and surgery left lifelong facial scars plus an amulet he wore forever. Brother Nathaniel arrived when Samuel was three. His mother taught him Common Prayer by three; Lichfield Grammar School made him a Latin standout and first displayed the tics later read as Tourette syndrome.
At sixteen, Pedmore cousins and classicist Cornelius Ford tutored him; headmaster Hunter barred his return after a long absence, so he spent six months at Stourbridge writing verse. Elizabeth Harriotts's February 1728 bequest sent him to Pembroke College, Oxford, on 31 October, weeks after he turned nineteen. He dazzled with a Latin Messiah translation done in a day and a half, yet by December was a quarter behind on fees and left after thirteen months without a degree—hoping to return, leaving father's borrowed books behind. Oxford later gave him an M.A. just before the Dictionary (1755), Dublin an honorary doctorate in 1765, Oxford another in 1775.
His father died in December 1731; Johnson later stood bareheaded in the rain at the old bookstall in atonement. Undermaster work at Market Bosworth under Sir Wolstan Dixie felt like servitude; by June 1732 he was home again. Through Edmund Hector and printer Thomas Warren he dictated A Voyage to Abyssinia from Le Grand's French. London years for The Gentleman's Magazine brought London (1738), Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), The Vanity of Human Wishes and Irene (1749). The Dictionary (1755) was hailed as a summit of scholarship, pre-eminent until the OED some 150 years later. Friendship with James Boswell from 1763 fed A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell's 1791 Life—Walter Jackson Bate's pick for biographical art's most famous single work. Lives of the Poets (1779–81) covered fifty-two writers. Deaf in one ear, blind in one eye, devout Anglican Tory, he died 13 December 1784, aged seventy-five, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Source: Samuel Johnson
