Poet, lexicographer, essayist and biographer are just some of the merits for which he is remembered Samuel Johnson; but his activity was also, and perhaps above all, that of a literary critic.
He was born on September 18, 1709 in England Lichfield (Staffordshire). In 1764 he founded the famous literary gathering, “The club“, which later became the”Literary Club“. Among the original members of the club were Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke; successively the club welcomed the actor David Garrick, as well as James Boswell. These personalities and those who were adhering in the following years, demonstrate how much the image of Samuel Johnson he stood out in the literary and social environment. In this period, among the friends of Johnson there was also the novelist Fanny Burney.
Due to financial problems Samuel was forced to leave Oxford without a degree, however important doctorates were awarded by the University of Oxford itself, as well as by Trinity College, Dublin.
His career began as a teacher and continued as a journalist. He spoke out in favor of the independence of the American colonies, but also against the abuses of the British government in Ireland.
As a writer he gained fame with the adaptation of the two satires: “London“(1738) and”The Vanity of Human Desires“(1749, The vanity of human wishes). However its greater fame was due mainly to the”English language dictionary“(1747-1755), the first and only of its kind, elaborated on his vast readings and almost entirely written by him.
From then on, in a few years, publishers dedicated to cataloging human knowledge proliferated, such as the Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert.
The best prose work of Samuel Johnson is the philosophical tale “Rasselas“(The Story of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 1759), characterized by long periods and well constructed. Then he curated an edition of”Shakespeare Dramas“(The Plays of William Shakespeare, 1765), rich in notes and with an in-depth critical prologue.
Johnson was a man of vast reading, a great connoisseur of the classics: with his “Lives of poets“(1779-1781) showed that in a certain sense the knowledge of the biographies of the authors, enriched in a sense of the literary value.” Lives of the poets “mixed literary criticism with the biographical data often reported by Johnson himself , also referring to the cultural context of England in the late 1600s and 1700s; among the authors criticized by Johnson there were, for example, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope.
Samuel Johnson died in London on December 13, 1784.
In 1791 James Boswell published “Life of Samuel Johnson“then considered a masterpiece in the genre of biography: Boswell’s principle was the same as Plutarch’s as biographer of Alexander the Great, according to him, a minor event, or a short phrase, manifests much more effectively the essence of a personality, than its most important battles.
Fifty years later, thanks to this biography, the prominent Scottish critic Thomas Carlyle defined Samuel Johnson What “able to overcome his time to incorporate the romantic idea of culture as a process“.