The Rest Is History - 650. London’s Golden Age: The Mad Life of Dr Johnson (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

Who was Samuel Johnson, the dominant literary celebrity of 18th century London and the man who wrote the Dictionary? Why did his friendship with James Boswell, a sex and celebrity obsessed, but very talented writer, flourish? And, how does this titanic friendship open a window onto Georgian Britain; from slavery to the politics of the day?  Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss one of history’s greatest Englishmen, Samuel Johnson, and his infamous friendship with the man who immortalised him forever, in an age that changed Britain’s politics forever…  Advertise with us: [e-mail] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek + Harry Swan  Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I drank tea at Davies's in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr. Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr. Davis introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy of the Scotch, I cried to Davis, don't tell where I come from. However, he said, from Scotland. Mr. Johnson, said I. Indeed, I come from Scotland, but I canna help it. "'Sir,' replied he, "'that I find is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.' Mr. Johnson is a man of a most dreadful appearance.

He's a very big man, his troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king's evil. He's very slovenly in his dress, and speaks with the most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect, and they render him very excellent company. He has great humor and he's a worthy man. But his dogmatical roughness of manners is disagreeable. You don't need AI agents, which may sound weird coming from service now, the leader in AI agents. The truth is, AI agents need you.

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This was the great Mr Samuel Johnson. He was a 53-year-old poet. He was a biographer. He was a critic. He was a great essayist on morals, and he was what's called a lexicographer, which means somebody who basically write down the definition of words and compiled dictionaries.

And Mr. Samuel Johnson had lived for decades in obscurity and indeed in relative poverty. But in recent years, before this meeting in 1763, he had emerged to become one of the pre-executive. eminent. Well, let's use the word, celebrities of Georgian London, fated across Britain and known indeed across Europe. So Tom, tell us all about Dr. Johnson. So yeah, he is absolutely by this point the dominant literary figure in London. And he is feared as well as admired. So he's been given this nickname, the great cham, which is basically, you know, like the chame is Khan. So like Genghis Khan or

Kubla Khan, that kind of thing. And it implies an idea that he is an oriental despot of literature. And you get that in the sense of how Boswell describes him, you know, refers to his dogmatical roughness of manners. And Johnson was very capable of aggression in his arguments. But he was also very much loved. He had an incredible genius for friendship. And by this point, he stands at the center of a social circle that included some of the most brilliant and famous men of the age. So that would include David Garrick, the great actor, Joshua Reynolds, famous portrait painter, Edmund Burke, who we've talked about a lot in the context of the French Revolution, one of the most brilliant parliamentarians and orators of his age.

And all of these people felt like planets revolving around the sun that was Samuel Johnson. And this is because he was above all, perhaps, even more than a great writer, He was one of the supreme talkers of history. And I would guess that in British culture, probably Oscar Wilde is his only rival as the most quoted conversationalist in English. So even now, you know, centuries on from Johnson's time, lots of his comments are still very familiar. So patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Yeah. When a man is tired of London, he's tired of life.

The triumph of hope over experience as a description of a second marriage. And to hear Johnson talk, by this point, had become one of the supreme pleasures of London life. He'd basically become an enormous tourist attraction. And there's a problem, obviously, with reports by people that this was a great conversation list before the age of audio recording. Because conversation by definition, as words are spoken, then they fall silent. And so we are told that Cicero was a great conversationalist, or say, Shonigan, the Japanese, writer who we did an episode on last year. But we have no real idea what it was like to listen to these people. We have no real record of Cicero's conversation. But with Johnson, it's different

because we can hear him talk more clearly, more completely than any person before him who had ever lived. And so I think that that kind of in and of itself makes him a brilliant topic for a history podcast because it's amazing to hear someone from so long ago the kind of the genuine timbre of what he was saying. But of course, people may be wondering how on earth do we have such detailed records of his conversation? Well, that's down to the man with whom we began the show. So that's his biographer, James Boswell, who at this point was a young man from Scotland. He was only age 22. And he's a pretty remarkable man in his own way, isn't he? Not, I think, remarkable as Johnson, but still a fascinating character.

Well, I think in many ways he is as remarkable as Johnson, it's just that for many, many years, this wasn't apparent. And the way in which it became clear to people that actually Boswell was, you know, was an extraordinary writer and innovator is something that we'll talk about over the course of this series. But just to give a sketch of who Boswell was, I mean, for starters, his accent was probably not as Scottish as you suggested, because otherwise he wouldn't have been able to disguise the fact that he was in fact Scottish.

He had been born to privilege, unlike Samuel Johnson, and he was the heir to a long line of lairds in Scotland. And his father was the laird of a place called Affleck. So a bit like Ben, but it's actually, if you read it, you would think it was Orkinlek, which is how I always assumed it was, but I then discovered wasn't. And the laird of Orkinleck, Boswell's father,

was absolutely from central casting, very stern, very moralistic, very Presbyterian. exactly what you would expect a kind of mid-18th century laird would be like. But Boswell himself, kind of almost as if in reaction to his father, was everything that the laird of Affleck wasn't. He was very gregarious. He was very kind of open-natured. He was absolutely obsessed by sex, particularly at this age. I mean, he just can't stop going on about it. He has a brilliant biographer, John Wayne, who was not the actor, but a poet and biographer. And he kind of perfectly describes Boswell as half ludicrous, half lovable. And part of what makes him

ludicrous is that he's absolutely obsessed by celebrity. And you kind of havered over whether to describe Johnson as a celebrity. But there is something very contemporary about Boswell's obsession with bagging famous people. You know, he'd absolutely be a person for a selfie today. And he had actually been stalking Johnson for weeks before he finally got to meet him in that bookshop. And the account of it that we began this episode with is from the journal entry that Boswell wrote that evening after he had met Johnson. And it is one of countless number of journal entries because if there was one thing that Boswell adored as much as meeting famous people, it was writing up details of the famous people that he had met. He was absolutely relentless.

He had this completely obsessional sense of industry. And he does meet loads and loads of famous people. But I think his meeting with Johnson was for him one of the great turning points of his life and indeed one of the great turning points in British literature. At first, Boswell is very anxious, isn't he, that Johnson will find out he's Scottish. And Johnson, of course, does find it out. But the bromance, as it were, begins pretty quickly, doesn't it? So just a few weeks after they've met, Johnson says to him,

give me your hand, I've taken a liking to you. And from that point on, you know, they are, they're best friends. Well, they're not best friends, but they're definitely very close to each other and their friendship lasts for 21 years until Johnson dies in 1784. And by that time, Boswell has compiled what he describes as a vast treasure of his conversation at different times. And Boswell isn't exaggerating. I mean, he has reams and reams of accounts of what Johnson had said over the course of these two decades. And it enabled him in 1791 to publish one of the great classics of British literature, the life of Samuel Johnson. And I think it is easily the greatest and most influential biography in the English language. And it is a work that brought a man

back to life more fully, I think, than anyone had ever been brought back to life before him. and just to lay my cards on the table, it is my personal desert island book. It is incredibly entertaining and it makes you feel like you're watching a fly on the wall documentary to a degree that nothing else quite like it does. It's an absolutely astonishing work. Well, to pursue this idea of the documentary, the thing about Boswell's Life of Johnson is it's not just a portrait of a man, it's a window onto an age. And this age is the 18th century, so Georgian Britain.

and Georgian Britain is a subject that we haven't really done massively on the podcast and actually doesn't really feature. It's a weird thing. It's a weird kind of lacuna, I think. It's a bit of a black hole in the British national imagination, which is odd because it's the 18th century that the Kingdom of Great Britain is created. It's in the 18th century that it becomes the world's greatest industrial pioneer, the world's greatest commercial power, that the British Empire takes its place as a kind of superpower on the world stage. It's in the 18th century that Britain establishes the template for modernity. And actually what Boswell's life of Johnson gives you, it gives you a sense of the kind of the teeming streets of London, the extremes of wealth and

poverty, all the habits and hobbies that made George and Britain tick, so everything from tea to wigs to brandy to stagecoaches, all of those kinds of things. It gives us a window onto the politics of the day. Again, something we haven't touched at all really in the rest of history, and something that goes almost unmentioned in popular history in Britain. So this is 18th century wigs and Tories, arguments about slavery, arguments about Jacobitism, about the seven years war, the American Revolution and so on. And actually the American Revolution, I mean, one of the great things about Samuel Johnson is he has very, very sound views on the tax revolt of the 1770s, doesn't he? Yeah. So this is to question.

Bozwell in his biography. Johnson is kind of chatting away, he's having a cup of tea, he's in a very amiable mood. And then suddenly he goes berserk. He said, I'm willing to love all mankind except an American. And Boswell puts except an American in italics. And his inflammable corruption bursting into horrid fire, he breathed out threatenings and slaughter, calling them rascals, robbers, pirates. So our American listeners, I hope, will enjoy that. So you've got, yeah, so you've got all of those kind of aspects of 18th century life. And then, of course, you have the friendship between Johnson, who's this kind of occasionally choleric Englishman.

He's the most English Englishman, arguably, who's ever lived. Yeah. And I think, Dominic, that there are elements of Johnson in you. You're not wrong, Tom. I mean, he's a brilliant man, let's be honest. And he's from the Midlands. Exactly so. And then you have Boswell, who is a romantically patriotic Scott.

And so the friendship between them offers a brilliant window onto, you know, the, this broader relationship, as you said, is evolving over the course of the 18th century. And that is between the two countries that are now part of a United Kingdom, England and Scotland. So the act of union that had created the United Kingdom of Great Britain had been passed back in 1707. And as you can see from Johnson's slightly performative scotophobia, there are still plenty of people in both kingdoms, England and Scotland, half a century and more on, who aren't

really happy at finding themselves in this United Kingdom. And I think it's, you know, it's evident from Boswell as well, because when he comes to write up that record in his journals and put it in the biography, he slightly expands on how mortified he'd felt that that opening gamut of his, so his comment, indeed, I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it. He's worried that this might have seemed, as he puts it, a humiliating abasement at the expense of my country. He doesn't, that hadn't been at all what he'd meant. But Johnson's response, that I find is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help. What Johnson is saying is, yeah, of course, you know, London is absolutely heaving with people who have come from Scotland,

i.e. immigrants from Scotland who are cluttering up the streets and taking jobs or whatever. So there's a definite sense of tension there. But, you know, as I say, they have that this great friendship emerges. And I think that it can be seen almost as a man. metaphor for how England and Scotland over the second half of the 18th century start to be reconciled, start to kind of build a common country together. There's a particular moment, isn't there, that symbolises this. And this is one of the most famous moments in the Johnson Boswell friendship. Actually, one of the most famous expeditions of the 18th century, when Boswell, overcoming Johnson's,

as you said, slightly performative disdain for Scotland, he persuades. Johnson to come with him to the very wildest, remotest and most Scottish bits of Scotland. Yeah, which are the Hebrides. And so they go on this amazing road trip in 1773, right out into kind of the loneliest, wildest island in the North Atlantic. And it's one of the great adventures of early tourism. And we will be coming to it in due course. Right. Well, before we get to Scotland, let us begin.

We'll begin where we ought to begin. where all podcasts should begin and we'll begin in the Midlands. So we're going to begin with, not with Boswell, but with the older man, with Samuel Johnson, the man who reigned like a despot over 18th century literary London. So the thing is, when Boswell meets him, Johnson is a celebrity, but he's 53 years old. And for most of those 53 years, he's been effectively a nobody. Nobody has been writing down what he did. Nobody has cared that he even exists. He has been toiling in obscurity. So take us into Johnson's background.

Well, I mean, the thing that's amazing that he becomes the great cham, this kind of despot ruling literary London, it's not just how long it takes him to reach the status, but the depths of disadvantage from which he emerges. And he has so much going against him. So first, his background, who said that Boswell is the son of a laird, Johnson comes from much humbler origins. So his father, Michael Johnson, is a bookseller, and he lived in Litchfield, which is a very ancient town in the Midlands. So my father briefly lived, actually. And at the time, the Midlands, as you all well know, Dominic, were experiencing kind of explosive growth. Cradle and modernity. And so Birmingham, which is a close neighbour of Litchfield, at this point, is probably the fastest growing city on the face of the planet. You know, industrialisation is starting to kick in. Lots and lots of money is being made. And this might have seemed good news for Michael with his bookshop.

But the problem is he's a terrible businessman. He has absolutely no head for figures at all. And so he is constantly teetering on the edge of financial ruin. Johnson's mother, Sarah, she prided herself on coming from a slightly superior family background to that of her husband. And she does have, you know, occasionally, as we will see, legacies come in. There are ways of sourcing money sometimes. But she finds herself being dragged down into the financial bis by her husband. And anyone who's read 18th or 19th century literature, it's a very, very familiar story. The kind of shopkeeper, who wants to maintain respectability, but ends up ultimately ruined. And this is Johnson's background. It's a little bit of the McCorbers about them, I think. Well, yes, except that there's ultimately no saving them, as we will see. So the infant Samuel, he gets, you know, it's not the most propitious kickoff,

but also he gets a very, very unfortunate start in life for health reasons, doesn't he? Yes. So this is the other factor that makes Johnson, kind of rise to literary fame so extraordinary. He has terrible health all his life. And the reason for this, I mean, it's kind of tragic. His mother is to blame. So she's 40 when she gives birth to Samuel,

which is old certainly for the 18th century. And so she's worried about whether she can give Samuel the milk that he will need. And so she looks around for a younger wet nurse and finds one, hands the baby over to this wet nurse. But the tragedy is that unknown to both Johnson's mother and the wet nurse, the wet nurse is tubercular. And after 10 weeks of breastfeeding, Johnson writes later, I was taken home a poor, diseased infant, almost blind. And in fact, he is left effectively blind in one eye and a terribly, terribly near-sighted in the other. And his mother is obviously devastated by this and is willing to try whatever she can to cure him.

And so she goes so far as to take him all the way to London there to be touched by Queen Anne, who was on the throne at the time, friend of the show, for what was called the King's Evil, which is Scrofila. And the Scrofila had infected him as a result of the wet nurse's milk. And there was this idea that the king or queen would touch the person with scrofila and miraculously heal the person. So unfortunately it doesn't work. And in fact, Queen Anne is the last monarch on the British throne.

who does this because, you know, this is an age of rationalism is dawning. I think they should bring that back. I think the king should do it, frankly. Well, it's the way to tell if they're the real king, right? And Johnson, as we will see, is very respectful of the throne. And so he doesn't dismisses out of hand. But he says, basically, he was left, and I quote him, with some confused remembrance of a lady in a black hood, which was Queen Anne. And the queen had given him a little amulet when she touched him, and he always wore this around his neck. The amulet doesn't really make up for the fact that he He's blind in one eye, and he's basically, whenever you meet Dr. Johnson later on, I mean, you will see straight away.

Like, he's got his scrofula, he's twitching, he's doing all kinds of stuff. Like, he's a very unprepossessing person, isn't he, physically? Yes. He has violent, convulsive gestures that a lot of people find alarming, I think. That's why I raised an eyebrow when you said there were elements of Dr. Johnson that reminded you of me, because I don't have violent convulsive gestures. Well, let's come on to something that is reminiscent of you, and that is Dominic. his incredible intellectual brilliance.

What do you want? I don't want anything. There's an agenda here undoubtedly. Like there's some of this is, they're gearing up for something. I find this sinister and unsettling. I'm just an incredibly nice person. And when there are compliments to be paid, I'm happy to pay them. Okay, go for it.

So this little boy is growing up. He's, you know, covered in scars on his face. He's twitching, always bumping into tables and things. And yet it is clear the moment he goes to school, you know, this guy is incredible. So his nursery teacher, who Johnson adored, she described him as the best scholar I ever had. And Johnson was always telling this to Paul Swell. He's very, very proud of it. And then he goes to grammar school and he masters Latin and Greek, and particularly Latin, to an incredibly proficient degree.

He'll be one of Britain's great Latinists. And so basically, the young Johnson will read anything, although interestingly, not all the way through. He was always very contemptuous of people who read books all the way through. He's an expert at gutting a book. Gutting a book. Exactly. Again, quite sound brookian. I will say he'd be very good on a podcast, although the convulsive motions would be

disturbing. Well, it would add drama to the video, I guess. And also he has an amazing memory. So all he has to do, it seems, is read a page from a book and he can recall it years later. So he's very, very intellectually impressive. However, there are clouds, it has to be said, on the academic horizon. So one of these is a quality that Johnson lamented all his life and was a always trying to deal with. And he saw it as his besetting fault that he was indolent. And what he

meant by indolent wasn't just kind of, you know, rank laziness, but I think a kind of depression. Yeah. The dejection so profound that he could barely move, let alone kind of open the pages of a book. And periodically this would afflict him. And interestingly, this is why he was a very robust believer in corporal punishment. So to quote him, no severity is cruel, which obstinacy makes necessary for the greatest cruelty would be to desist and leave the scholar too careless for instruction and too much hardened for reproof. You know, this would be an absolutely splendid Daily Mail page 8 article. The way to deal with the mental health crisis is to bring back corporal punishment. That's what Dr. Johnson would have done and he was the greatest Englishman.

I mean, one of the salient factors of Johnson is that he has no self-pity whatsoever. He does not say, oh, well, it's understandable that I didn't read a book because I was depressed. He says, thank God that I got beaten to make me read the book. and this is very much his approach to life. So that's one problem he has. And the other obvious problem is that his parents have no money. And this is a real problem because he's very qualified to go to university where he could earn the BA that would then open up all kinds of doors to him.

But you have to have the money. And he doesn't have the money. And then unexpected, I said how his mother is slightly better connected than his father. And she gets a small legacy. And this is enough not to pay for Johnson to go for the whole of the university course, but for one year. And his father very touchingly matches this legacy by making the only contribution that he could, which is the loan of 100 books. You know, and that's, you know, to remove 100 books from his shop is quite a big deal. And it's,

you know, it's a real investment. And so Johnson goes to Oxford. He's got his books. He's got enough money to last him for a year. And he goes to Pembroke College. And there, it seems to his teachers and his contemporaries that he is forging, you know, a brilliant career for himself. So one of his tutors said later of Johnson that he was the best qualified for the university that he had ever known come there and one of Johnson's fellow students. He was caressed and loved by all about him. This was, I am persuaded, the happiest part of his life. But that was not Johnson's memory of his time at Pembroke. And he said to Boswell years later, our sir, I was rude 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. And so I disregarded all power and all authority. So like so many students, he was putting a sort of brave face on his private pain and people didn't see it. Yeah. And there's a kind of quality of rebelliousness that Johnson is articulating there that again is a feature of his life, you know, the whole way through. And clearly also he's very sensitive to how poor he is relative to all the other students. And he felt the effects of poverty in various ways. So for instance, he couldn't afford to go home in the holidays.

So he's, you know, after all the other students have gone, he's left kicking his heels in the college. And he's a man who hates being left alone. So he feels very wretched about that. His shoes fall apart. And a fellow undergraduate notices this and buys him a new pair and leave them outside his door. and Johnson is absolutely mortified by this, and he experiences it not as how it was intended a kind of gesture of kindness, but as an insult. And worst of all, of course, as we've said, he can only afford to stay there for one year. And so at the end of that year, he has to leave Oxford and head back to Litchfield.

And there, it's miserable because his parents are incredibly guilty that they can't pay for him to continue his education. And he is guilty because he knows that, you know, his parents have made this massive. of investment in him, but, you know, he can't get a BA. And so he can't kind of earn the money that he would ideally have wanted to. And so then the question hangs over him, what is he going to do now? And I guess we have, we have listeners who've just left university. And I, you know, that's a pressing issue for many. And Johnson finds himself plunged into such a state of, as he calls it, dejection, gloom and despair, wondering what he's going to do with his life, that one of his friends who wrote years later to Boswell, because Boswell obviously didn't know Johnson at this period,

so I was always asking friends the reminiscences. This friend confessed, I was fearful that there was something wrong in his constitution, which might impair his intellects or shorten his life. And Boswell suppressed this. He didn't put it in the biography, because of course, at that time killing yourself was a crime. It's generally thought, isn't it, that Johnson suffered from depression? I think that would be the diagnosis today. It's not a diagnosis, of course, that that Johnson recognizes in himself. He called it his morbid melancholy. Melancholy or, you know, as we've heard he calls it,

indolence. And I think, so in the five years that follow his return from Oxford, he genuinely felt that he was on the edge of insanity. And again, all his life, he would worry that madness might be lurking. And it's so unexpected in a way because Johnson will become the embodiment of common sense. You know, there's the kind of philosophers who say that nothing is. real. He responds to this by kicking a stone and saying, thus I prove it is real. Now, that's the tamber of the man. He's a man of stolid common sense. And yet all the time he has this shadow,

this anxiety, that he might go mad. And so he tries to escape his, let's call it, depression in various ways. So he tries walking to Birmingham and back. And he does this a lot. And he thinks that an invigorating walk will cheer him up. And actually, I think invigorating walks do cheer you up. So I think it wasn't a foolish thing for him to do. And he also takes a range of jobs. So he tries school teaching. He tries tutoring. He tries hack journalism. But again, he doesn't really make a go of any of them. So that's really depressing.

He knows that he's brilliant, but he can't seem to make a mark on the world. And then on top of that, there's something that we've already mentioned, which is that he really isn't as prepossessing as he might be. So we have a description of him in his early 20s. He was lean and lank so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye. and the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible. And this is obviously a problem for Johnson when it comes to establishing good relations with the ladies.

And Johnson is very, very keen on the ladies. But none of them will give him so much as a second glance. And so, of course, this plunges him even deeper into dejection. But then, when he's 25 years old, lightning strikes, doesn't it? because he meets a woman, perhaps a little older than him, who sees in him a veritable Romeo and Adonis. Yeah, I mean, when you say a little bit, she is a 45-year-old widow. Yeah. But she thinks he's great.

And she says to her daughter, you know, she has a grown-up daughter by this point of Johnson, this is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life. And she falls madly in love with him. So there's a bit of a kind of macron vibe there, perhaps. And amazingly, on the 9th of July, 1735, in a church in Derby, there is this incredible development. Mr. Samuel Johnson and the widow who has fallen in love with him, Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, become man and wife. Well, what a twist that is. So in the second half, we will discuss Johnson's relationship with his wife, Tettie, as she's called.

and we will get to some of Johnson's great achievements and we'll discover how he begins to make himself a celebrity. This episode is brought to you by Vanguard. Now, Dominic history is full of examples of people who are promised the world and then got very badly let down. Can you think of a particular example? I can think of a couple of examples, Tom. So we've just been recording a series about the fall of the Inca's

and Francisco Pizarro, who was the Spanish conquista or in charge. First of all, he betrayed his business partner Diego dea Magro, and then, shockingly, he betrayed the Inca Emperor Atalpa. Well, Dominic, can I ask you a question? Had Atta Walper been in the hands of Vanguard? Do you think that Vanguard would have let him down? No. The thing about Vanguard, Vanguard was founded on one core principle, and that principle is putting investors first. Tom, for more than 50 years.

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In an astonishing twist, one of the most amazing turnarounds that we've ever discussed on the Rest is history, Samuel Johnson has got married. He's got married to Mrs. Elizabeth Porte, and he calls her tettie, doesn't he? And he, so he likes Tettie for various reasons. She's a sort of jolly and energetic woman. He thinks she's gorgeous. And particularly, he's very impressed by what he calls her bosom of more than ordinary protuberance. Yes.

And he has a lot of pent-up energy, I think it's fair to say. And is absolutely rapturous that he finds himself married to such a woman. So he, I mean, he remains devoted to her all his life. And also, I think, he feels incredible gratitude. You know, she has allowed him to know what it's like to be loved. She essentially is the person who has rescued him from his morbid melancholy. And also, she has brought some money into his life because, you know, she's inherited from her dead husband, quite a bit of cash. But of course, this only increases the pressure on him to make something of his life.

He doesn't want to end up like his father, who basically, you know, had been leaching off his mother. Johnson doesn't want to do that at all. And so he thinks, well, I've really got to put my shoulder to the wheel. I've really got to make something of myself. And so his first whee's is to invest Tetis in setting up a school. Johnson thinks, you know, I've got a very good education. I'm very smart. That might be something I can do.

And so he opens it in a small hamlet called Edgel outside Litchfield. And it is clear right from the beginning that it's not really going to be a success. He does not have parents flocking to hand over. their children to him. He doesn't have a degree, but also he has this convulsive twitch. I mean, he looks absolutely bizarre. Come on. You go to an open day at this school. The Blake's got no qualifications and he's jerking around like a madman. I mean, you're not going to say, trust your kids to him. So he does, however, end up with three pupils. And one of these, it's an 18-year-old lad called David Garrick. Oh. Is clearly a very, very impressive student. And Johnson actually becomes

comes great friends with Garrick. You know, they're separated by six years, so they're actually almost, you know, contemporaries. I mean, they're closer in age than Johnson and his wife. Completely. So, but despite this, it is obvious that Johnson is not cut out to be a teacher. And as Boswell puts it in his biography, his oddities of manner and uncouth gesticulations could not but be the subject of merriment to them, by which Boswell means his students. And in particular, the young rogues used to listen at the door of his bedchamber and peep through the keyhole that they might turn into ridicule his tumultuous and awkward fondness for Mrs Johnson. So, unsurprisingly, the school folds. And this leaves Johnson even more desperate not to let his beloved Tettie down.

So his next scheme is to write an exceedingly long and boring tragedy about a sultan and his. his Greek slave girl called Irene. And since Johnson has never seen a play at this point, and he's still only 25, it's not very good. And it doesn't make any money, and he's unable to sell it. And so finally, he settles on the plan that lots of people that we've covered over the course of the rest of his history settle on, which is to leave the provinces and head for London. And Johnson travels there with David Garrick, who is no longer. his pupil, of course, and is now planning to study for the law. And they, uh, they buy a single horse. It's all they can afford. And they take turns riding and walking. Uh, and then they, they arrive in

London. And from the moment he arrives there, Johnson is absolutely transfixed by the capital, by its scale, by its energy, by its sense of potential. And Johnson is famous to this day as a man who adored London. So 30 years after his arrival, it was still thrilling him, to quote him, the happiness of London is not to be conceived, but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say there is more learning in science within the circumference of 10 miles from where we now sit in London than in all the rest of the kingdom. So he loves it, doesn't he?

I wonder a little bit whether he's quite a spectacle, Samuel Johnson. And maybe in London, there's a slightly less of an issue of people, of him standing out and people staring at him as an odd ball than there would have been a much sleepier, quieter place like Litchfield. But also London offers all kinds of opportunities that frankly just aren't there in a much smaller Midlands town. And crucially, he can make money doing literary things because there are all kinds of opportunities that there were not in the West Midlands.

Yeah, and you say make money. I mean, he doesn't make that much money, but it's more than he would have done if he'd been kind of kicking his heels in Litchfield. And so he starts doing hack work for a publisher called Edward K. Cave. Cave is very, very enterprising and he's invented what is in effect, I think, the first magazine that we today would recognize as a magazine. It's called The Gentleman's Magazine, and it's just full of all kinds of different stuff. And pretty soon Johnson is writing most of it,

because he turns out to be brilliant at this kind of thing. And he also does biographies, and he does translations, and he does kind of studies of literature for Cave. And then for Cave, He pioneers a completely new form of journalism, which is to cover debates in Parliament, which his courage of these debates then goes into the Gentleman's Magazine. Now, Johnson doesn't actually attend the debates. In fact, he only ever heard one. Yeah. He's actually very like an ancient historian. He conveys the sense of what he thinks the speeches should have been. So he's basically it's about the vibe rather than accurate transcription. He's basically making up parliamentary debates. He's got a sense of the character of the people who are giving them. He's got a sense of, you know, what they're talking about. But he does this so effectively that essentially anyone who reads these reports assume that they are verbatim transcripts. And the politicians themselves are so flattered by the words that Johnson puts into their mouths that they keep stumb about it. They, you know, they don't reveal that they'd never said any of these speeches. And eventually Johnson comes to feel that, you know, he might be perpetuating a fraud by doing this. And so he says, I would not be accessory.

to the propagation of falsehood. And so he gives that up. But it's a kind of momentous invention, this idea that you can cover what people are saying in Parliament. And it's something that lives with us to this day. And Johnson is really the founder of that. Now, obviously, Johnson is doing this hat work to make a living. And if you are a writer, probably the most famous thing that Johnson ever said is his great phrase, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. I mean, I do not know a writer who is not familiar with that saying. Inspired by those words. Johnson isn't just writing for money.

Johnson wanted people to read him. In that sense, he wanted admiration. He wanted fame, I suppose. He wanted people to think of him as a great writer. And so one year after he's arrived in London, so that's 1738, he publishes a poem that inevitably is called London. It's about his experiences and thoughts on the capital. And it's a kind of feisty knockabout satire.

And it actually makes him a lot of money, more money than his earning for his hackwork for Cave. And it's also a kind of succinct esteem. It's a popular hit, but it's also very, very, it impresses the critics. And it makes a big smash. But it turns out, unfortunately for Johnson to be his space oddity. So Bowie, after he'd released space oddity, it takes him several years before he gets on to Ziggy Star dust. And Johnson, after he's published, London plunges back into obscurity. And by the time he's entered his 30s, he's increasingly feeling that he is a failure, that he is doomed to be a

hack for the rest of his life. He's comparing himself with his mate, isn't he? So he'd gone to London with David Garrick, his former pupil. But Garrick has given up the law by this point, and has embarking on arguably the most glittering theatrical career in British, if not Western history, becoming the most celebrated actor of his day, a man who establishes the template for acting in many ways. And Johnson is, he's not a particularly envious or jealous man, is he? No, I would say, I mean, I'd say further than that, that he treats envy as something to be despised and disdained.

But I think with Garrick, he does succumb to envy. And I think the chief reason for that is that because Garrick is often performing Shakespeare, You know, he becomes the most famous Shakespearean actor of his day, and he becomes associated with Shakespeare. And this for Johnson is agony, because Johnson probably knows more about Shakespeare than anyone in his day. I mean, he's read the plays backwards and he knows all about them. And it pains him, I think, to see Garrick pontificating about it while he is still a nobody. What about Teddy? So where does Teddy fit into all this?

Because let's be honest, Teddy flipping hates London, doesn't she? She's gutted that they've moved to London. Yeah, she's got all her friends back in the Midlands. She's really missing them. London's awful, she thinks. It's kind of crowded and noisy and smelly. And so poor old Johnson is feeling very guilty about this. He needs to be in London because partly because he likes it,

partly because it enables him to make money. And so he assuages his guilt by finding tettie quarters that are either on the margins of London or just outside it. And all the money that he's earning essentially is going towards paying for for the rent on these quarters where Teddy stays. But he, of course, has to stay in London, in the centre of the city. And so he has almost nothing left for himself. And in his poem, London, he had written this line,

slow rises worth by poverty depressed. You know, he knew what he was speaking about. And all the years of his hack work, he lives in kind of run down, squalid accommodation. He wore shabby, worn out clothes. And in fact, all his life, his clothes would be shabby. And even on one notorious occasion, he finds himself with a friend walking around St. James's square all night for want of a lodging. And the great literary biographer Richard Holmes has written a fabulous book about this stage of Johnson's life and his friendship with this guy he went roaming around St. James's with.

And it's called Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage. So yeah, this is a good example of how the Johnson-Boswell story is a lovely window onto George and London, isn't it? Because although Johnson loves London, he knows how grim and dark it can be if you're on the kind of the wrong side of their wheel of fortune. So the gin, you know, the sort of scenes from Hogarth's engravings, Gin, the kind of the sewers, the ash pits, the homeless people sleep on, the beggars, the prostitutes, all of that kind of thing. And he, he's not a judgmental person about the sort of down and outs, is he? He doesn't turn his nose up at them. He's a moral person, but not a judgmental person. And because he knows what it is to be poor, because he sees the suffering of prostitutes and beggar children and alcoholics all around him, he never despises them.

And if he does have a copper on him, he will always give it away. And if he has nothing on him, then he will stop and try and offer words of kindness. And I imagine that generally that they were received gratefully. I mean, there's a massive man by now, lumbering, twitching. I mean, he might be slightly frightening for people. But I think people always sense the kind of the kindness in Johnson, which coexists with a kind of gruffness and a fondness for, you know, literary spars and things. And Mrs. Thrail, who later in life became a great friend of Dr. Johnson's, she was the wife of a brewer. He became very close to her.

And she said of Johnson that he loved the poor as I never saw anyone else do. And in doing that, I think that he is being true to morals and political principles that he had held since his childhood. So Johnson, as Boswell will be as well, from his youth is a Tory. And as he saw it, he identified with the poor, not despite being a Tory, but because of it. And this may seem odd to some of our listeners, because I think the Tories today. are seen as the party of the affluent and of free market economics and all of that kind of thing. But the meaning of Tory in Johnson's day was subtly different. And we've said how Johnson was always a natural rebel. And I think that in the mid-18th century, to be a Tory could very easily be framed as a kind of rebellion, do you think? Yeah, totally, because the 18th century is the Whigs century. So the Wigs, we did a bonus episode for members of the,

the Restis History Club about the Wigs and the Tories with George Awers, who's written a brilliant book about this, which I call The Rage of Party. His online is Capel Loft. He's a great character. And he wrote this wonderful book about the origins of Wigs and Tories explaining exactly where all this comes from. So the Wigs really dominate British politics in this period. They are cosmopolitan.

They are the party of financiers. They're party of the commercial classes. The great landowners as well. Yes. So they really dominate politics. So the Tories, and this is very simplistic, the Tories are perhaps a little bit more inward-looking, they are more nostalgic,

they are more hierarchical, they are more paternalistic maybe, they are more suspicious of Europe and more suspicious of change and more suspicious of modernity than the wigs are. And so as Britain is being transformed in the 18th century, by the wheels of kind of, and industry and whatnot. The Tories, who are perhaps a little bit more rural and a bit more

backward-looking, they feel kind of endangered that the world of the country squire and of old-fashioned ways and of Merry England and stuff is being lost beneath the rush to embrace cosmopolitan modernity. Yeah, and you can see this in Parliament because in the House of Commons, the Tories in Johnson's Day are absolutely the underdogs. You know, they're never more than, say, a fifth of MPs. And so as you say, you know, as Britain booms, as commercial interests increasingly predominate, the Tories do come to feel like they're an endangered minority. And you said how the Tories are very keen on hierarchy. Johnson, all his life, and despite his own humble background, you know, he's a great enthusiast for hierarchy. So he put it to Boswell. I have great merit in being zealous for subordination and the honours of birth, for I can hardly tell who was my grandfather. He believes in the crown and specifically in the right of the exiled stewards to the crown.

So James II had been exiled, Jacobus in Latin. And so the Jacobites, these are the people who will support Bonnie Prince Charlie. Johnson always has a slight kind of leaning towards them. But simultaneously, he is also a devout and committed member of the established church, the Church of England. So if you're a monarchist and if you're a member of the Church of England, in what possible sense then can you be reckoned a rebel? And I think it's because Johnson saw both these institutions, the Crown and the Church, as essential safeguards for the poor and the vulnerable against what Johnson saw as the predatory greed of the wigs, the willingness of the wigs to sacrifice the poor on the altar of kind of commercial and industrial expansion. I mean, Johnson is a small sea conservative, isn't he? And you could see him as being in that sort of bit of the graph, if you're doing a kind of graph of writers. You know, Jero, Tolkien is not that far away. Maybe even George Orwell isn't that far away. People who like the small and the traditional and the established and the rooted and they're distrustful of people who are who like the latest fashionable concept from continental Europe. Yeah. And there's an echo of Orwell in the fact that one of,

Johnson's favorite words is can't. And can't, I mean, essentially it's the use of kind of modish, fashionable words or sentiments to veil self-interest. And the most famous expression of this appeared in a pamphlet that he wrote years later during the American Revolution. And he asks, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of... Yeah. In other words, the Americans whom he despises, He sees them as hypocritical. You know, their progressive sentiments are merely the veil for naked, greedy self-interest. Hey, he's not wrong.

I mean, that explains his take on the American Revolution. He's very hostile to it. But long before the American Revolution, he has, he's already begun making a name for himself. And it's not just as a, you know, for his kind of take on politics, but also as a moralist. By the 1740s, he's starting to, well, it's not exactly famous, but he's starting to be, read by people who find him a source of comfort and who find in him qualities that seem to his readers very attractive. So, you know, his deep sympathy for the underdog, be it the poor on the streets of London

or slaves in the Caribbean and America, or even Native Americans whose land is being stolen by British and French colonialists in the wilds of Canada. His kind of matching contempt for hypocrisy and by extension his insistence on what is practical, his impatience with theory, his feeling that kind of academic language, if you like, often expresses a form of oppression. And also, even as he has this sympathy for the underdog,

he also likes a punch-up. He has a relish for a fight. He talks for victory. as Boswell would one day put it. And in his writings, he does the same. All of that is so George Orwell, isn't it? Or somebody like that of that tradition, or John Kerry, or John Gray. There's a Johnsonian tradition that runs right through British intellectual culture, the kind of anti-intellectual intellectual, who speaks for the common man, who speaks for common sense, who is impatient with kind of camp and jargon and, dare I say, political correctness.

Johnson would have hated all that. Oh, absolutely. He really would. But you say, he's anti-intellectual. I mean, he's really not anti-intellectual. Of course, he's an intellectual, but he veils his intellectualism in the language of pragmatism and earthiness and common sense and ordinariness. I think that's absolutely true. But even as he's doing that, he is unapologetic in thinking that the things that interest him, Shakespeare or whatever, that there's no reason why people, you know, shouldn't read what he has to say about them. Of course, exactly. Yeah. And so again, through the 1740s, into the 1750s, it's not just his kind of moral sentiments, but his

learning that is coming to be admired. There is the sense that here is a man who knows almost everything there is to know, that his judgment on matters of literature or language or whatever is absolutely precise, and that he has an incredible mastery of the English language. and it's this sense that in 1746 brings him the commission for which, I guess, thanks to Blackadder, he's probably best known today. And that is the compilation of a comprehensive English dictionary. And to give a measure of the task that Johnson is taking on when he accepts this commission, in Italy, the task of compiling a comprehensive Italian dictionary had taken an entire academy of scholars 20 years to complete. In France, it had taken an Academy of Scholars 55 years to complete. It took Samuel Johnson, who had six junior assistants working with him.

And interestingly, of those six junior assistants, five were Scottish. So, you know, his scotophobia clearly was performative. It takes them nine years. And Johnson was a very robust English patriot, and he did not neglect pointing out how well this reflected on English. scholarship relative to French scholarship. Having said that, he's been a hack writer all his life, and in a sense, the compilation of a dictionary was the ultimate masterpiece of hackwork. And famously in his dictionary, he defined lexicographer, the writer of a dictionary, as a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge. But the brilliant thing about the dictionary is that it does

actually, when it's finally published, serve to emancipate him from drudgery forever. So for decades, he's been working in obscurity, hasn't he? With this. sort of anxiety that he's not really made anything of himself. But now all of that changes. Yeah, and he signals his emergence into what is a kind of blaze of fame with a celebrated letter, probably one of the most famous letters ever written in English literature. So at the start of his project, this compilation of the dictionary, his publisher had found him this incredible patron. Johnson had never had a patron before, but now he has one. And this is, he's a statesman, He's a scholar. He's the supreme arbiter of elegance, writes a series of kind of famous letters advising his son on the correct way to behave. And this is the Earl of Chesterfield. And Johnson is granted an initial audience with the Earl of Chesterfield, just as he's about to start writing his dictionary. He then goes back to Chesterfield's house and he's refused admittance to his lordship by, you know, an array of servants. And so Johnson just gives up going to Chesterfield. And basically he forgets all of

about him. And then the dictionary comes out and Chesterfield writes at a glowing review and basically says, isn't it great? I'm the patron of this. How fantastic. And Johnson completely loses his patience at this and feels that Chesterfield is trying to kind of step in and claim credit where credit is not due. And he writes him this letter. And Chesterfield, to give him credit, is so impressed by it that he actually kind of leaves it lying around in his salon so that people can read it. And so the news of it gets out and people find it very funny. So this is the letter. Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain and

have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Is not a patron, my lord? One who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help. And I think it's fame among writers is precisely because it's something that so many writers have recognized it perhaps in their own careers. So the dictionary really turns Johnson into a star, doesn't it? And then he pours out a series of works that make him equally well-known, because he basically capitalizes on his celebrities.

talk us through these? Well, so there's a poem that we've quoted from in our series on Peter the Great. It's called The Vanity of Human Wishes, and it featured Charles the 12th. So people who want to hear that, go back and listen to our series on Peter the Great. He does biographies. He does a massive study of Shakespeare's plays. And he even gets his terrible tragedy, Ireneon, and that's courtesy of Garrick, who by this point has his own theatre. It's not a great critical success, but it does make him a bit of money. And that's important because despite his fame, Johnson is still incredibly poor. He's not making that much cash, I guess, and also he does have this tendency to just give it away to beggars and so on. And actually, in 1758, he gets

arrested for debt. And he has to be bailed out by Samuel Richardson, the famous novelist, the author of Clarissa. And then a year later, his mother dies. And he's so short of money to pay for her funeral, that he hurriedly writes this novella, which is called Rasselas. You can still read it to this day. It's actually great. I mean, it's pleasantly short. It has to be said. And it's the story of a prince who he grows up in this kind of sheltered paradise, the paradise of Abyssinia. And then he leaves it to search for the key to happiness and he never finds it. And you can see, you know, Johnson is clearly kind of working issues through there. And it's a great publishing sensation. And again, it gives Johnson a bit of money. But again, it kind of all drives. away. And finally, what does serve to set Johnson on a kind of secure financial footing is that in 1762, he is given a pension of £300. And this comes from the crown, and it is an expression of the state's regard to Johnson for his creation of the dictionary. And Johnson hesitates whether to take it. And one of the reasons for that is that it's coming from George III, who is from the House of Hanover, so not from the House of Stuart,

and Johnson is still affecting his loyalty to the Stuarts. And also there's a famous definition of pension in his dictionary. In England, it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country. So you could say there's an element of hypocrisy in him taking the pension, but the Prime Minister, the Earl of Butte, says to him, this is not for anything you are to do, but for what you have done. So basically, there's no strings attached. This is just a recognition for your achievements.

Don't worry. There's no political subtext here. And Johnson takes it. And this transforms his finances. It does. And from that point on, he always defends his taking of the pension in very robust terms. So that's a great help. But throughout this period, even as he is starting to become a celebrity, he remains

beset by, you know, his indolence, his dejection, his feelings of depression. And I think that this is bred of a besetting sense of loneliness. So Tettie, his beloved wife, had died in 1752. And that means that Johnson is, you know, he's now living without a female companion. And I think he feels the lack of female companionship very deeply. He, you know, he remains a creature of flesh and blood. But he's not the kind of man, as we will discover Boswell is, who will go out and pay. Johnson is also a man of the utmost moral probity.

And there's a wonderful story that's in Bosworth's biography of how during the rehearsals for Rairini, so at Garrick's theatre, Johnson writes to Garrick, I'll come no more behind your scenes, David, for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities. Yeah, he can't trust himself. No, he can't trust himself. And so he doesn't have a wife, and so he becomes ever more dependent on his friends to keep his melancholy. Collie at Bay. And he's always been a sociable man, but now he becomes sociable in a kind of almost relentless way, I think.

If there aren't people to talk to, he misses their company terribly. And he sort of hangs around. So people will come and see him in his rooms. So he has an apartment in the Intert Temple Lane. He'll hang out on the Fleet Street in his favorite pub, which is called the Maiter. He'll hang out at the shops at Covent Garden. And so it is. then on 16th of May 1763 he meets one fan in particular, a Johnson superfan, the man who is going to ensure his immortality.

Yeah, and that fan, of course, was the 22-year-old James Boswell, and he will be the subject of our next episode. And just a warning, unlike in this episode, there will be quite a lot of bad behavior. All right. So that episode will be out on Thursday. Now, there will be a lot of people, I imagine, who are thinking about the social social, of which Johnson was a part with Garrick and Boswell and all these great characters will reflect on how lovely it is to be part of a social circle themselves, a club modeled after Dr. Johnson's own club, and that is, of course, The Rest is History Club, which is probably the only club in

human history that dazzles more brightly than the clubs of the 18th century. And members of the Restis History Club can hear the whole of this series about Johnson and Boswell right now. And if you want to join them and be part of our chat community, as Dr. Johnson will have called it, then you just head to the rest is history.com. And on that bombshell, Tom, thank you very much. And goodbye, everybody. Goodbye. Hi, everybody.

We have a very exciting merchandise update to share with you all. We do indeed, Dominic. So we have come back to you with another exclusive Rest is History T-shirt. And I say exclusive because it is only for me. members. So Graham Johnson, who is one of our beloved Athelstands, has come up with an absolutely stunning illustration. So this time, it is an absolutely beautiful scene that he has created to commemorate the journey of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. So the scene on the t-shirt is kind of modelled in the style of a 1930s railway advert in Britain and it shows Johnson and Boswell on their

tour of the Highlands and Hebrides. And Boswell is sat there taking notes. And a large, I think it's fair to say, Dr. Johnson is riding off into the mountains while his horse buckles slightly under his weight. It truly is a wonderful t-shirt. I love it so much that under my hoodie, I'm actually wearing three of them right now

because I like them so much. And if you want to get your hands on one of these lovely t-shirts, what you need to do? Well, you need to head to the new The Restis History website. log in and head to the members section and there you'll be able to get your hands on one of these delightful garments. And if you're an Apple member,

then you'll need to join our members mailing list to get access. So to do that, just send an email to the rest is history at goalhanger.com with Apple member in the subject line and a screenshot of your membership and you will then be sent the link.

Now, there'll be some people watching this who are not yet members of the show. And this surely is the spur that you need to get involved. So if you join the show, not only you will be able to get your hands on this tremendous merchandise, you will also get early access to all our series. So you'll be listening before the Hoypiloi. You will get exclusive members content. So the exclusive mini series that are rolling out this year.

You'll get bonus episodes. You'll get all kinds of unbelievable benefits. So many benefits that I can't even begin to. to list them now. There's literally never been a better time to join up. So just go to the rest is history.com and you know what you've got to do.