Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (. * 7 Septemberjul / September 18 1709greg in Lichfield, . † December 13, 1784 in London), named for its scholarship usually Dr. Johnson ( Trinity College Dublin in 1765 appointed him to the Doctor of Laws honorary, 10 years later he received another honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford), was an English scholar, lexicographer, writer, poet and critic. He is the most quoted English writer after William Shakespeare in the 18th century and was the most important person in the literary life of England, comparable with Gottsched in Germany.
Life and work
Samuel Johnson was born on September 18, 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Here he attended along with the future doctor Robert James the Lichfield Grammar School (now King Edward VI School ( Lichfield ) ), both remained friends all their lives over. On its publication, the three-volume Dictionary A medicinal dictionary, including physic, surgery, anatomy, and botany chimistry (1743-1745), he worked with his own articles with.
He later studied for a while at Oxford, but was forced for financial reasons to take the place of a sub teacher at a free school in Leicestershire before the end of the course. Soon he gave up this position to earn as a translator and writer of his maintenance. So he translated the French translation of Joachim le Grand of the trip to Abyssinia by the Portuguese Jesuit Jerónimo Lobos ( Relation historique d' Abbisinie d ' RP Jerome Lobo, etc.) into English, for which he received five guineas. Johnson lived with friend Harry Porter, who suffered from an incurable disease. When Harry Porter died on September 3, 1734, he left behind his 45 -year-old wife Elizabeth Jervis Porter ( " Tetty " ) and three children. Samuel Johnson began to advertise the 21 years older widow (maybe vice versa) and they were married on July 9, 1735 in the St Werburgh Church in Derby. Elizabeth Porter brought 800 pounds sterling into the marriage. Her family did not approve of the marriage, their son broke out protest any contact with her from. The couple founded a pupil Institute in Birmingham. When this venture failed, Johnson went in 1737 with his pupil, later the famous actor David Garrick, to London to give a performance of his rhymed tragedy Irene, but failed. He published for the Gentleman's Magazine Parliament reports. He became known through several poems, such as the satire London ( 1738), an imitation of the third satire of Juvenal, in which he castigated the vices and follies of the British capital with wit and irony. It followed the debates of the Senate to Liliput, commented excerpts from the speeches of the most famous members of parliament of that time, and in 1744 a biography of his friend, the poet Richard Savage.
Between 1747 and 1755 developed the Johnson Dictionary of the English Language (1755, 2 volumes), published in 1758 in 6th edition and has to this day influenced all similar lexicons of the English language. Noah Webster compared Johnson's performance in the lexicography with the Isaac Newton in mathematics. Four features raised the dictionary of his English precursors from:
- It was designed to take stock of the entire developing language skills - in marked contrast to the previously usual haphazard statements " difficult words ".
- It was based on a corpus of applied examples, specific vocabulary groups excluded in advance remained (eg proper names).
- It had a literary dimension, was the language of the best English authors ( William Shakespeare, John Milton, Francis Bacon) and more so by prevailing sense from a strictly objective language.
- It gave the utensil dictionary respect, so that the dictionaries to Johnson until today - are also used for normative purposes and serve as a guide for good style (though the normative character of the dictionaries has been greatly mitigated by the Modern linguistics ).
During or after work on dictionary Johnson also published the magazines The Rambler (1750-1752) and The Idler ( 1758-1760 ). 1759 appeared to be political - didactic novel History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.
1762 freed him a suspended by the government pension of £ 300 from acute need of money, for which he thanked by two pamphlets of a political nature - The False Alarm ( 1770) and Taxation No Tyranny (1775 ). During this time his edition of Shakespeare ( 1765, 8 volumes), which has become epochal in the history of literary criticism falls. Although Johnson's characteristic of Shakespearean drama reveals the then ruling French influence, especially the shared also by Denis Diderot view of the moralizing tendency of bourgeois drama ( " melodrama "), then breaks his Shakespearean view the other hand, the usual hitherto critical views of the age. While Johnson sees represented in the ancient writers, the high "art ," he sees in Shakespeare, like John Milton, the poet of "nature." Johnson was in England the first Shakespeare not condemned because of its mixture of the tragic and the comic or the neglect of the "unity of place and time."
The literary fruit of a trip to Scotland and the Hebrides in 1773 was his Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775 ), which involved him because of his expressed therein doubt as to the authenticity of the seals of Ossian in a violent feud with James Macpherson. At the age of 70 years, Johnson wrote the biographies of English poet ( The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, from 1779 to 1781 ) for a collection of the English classics. He died on December 13, 1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey in London.
Johnson promoted Oliver Goldsmith, whom he to whose novel freed by selling the manuscript, The Vicar of Wakefield by guilt arrest. Even Johnson patronized a number of writers who belonged to his literary circle, where he lifted out Charlotte Lennox against Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More and Frances Burney.
Johnson founded two of the most prestigious British clubs, the Literary Club ( 1764) and the Evening Club (1783 ). His life and his views were meticulously recorded by one of his admirers, James Boswell and published after his death as The Life of Johnson ( 1791). Another important biographical source form the letters, anecdotes and diaries of Hester Thrale, in whose salon Johnson reversed and with whose family he was a close friend.
Popular Front Desk
• Johnson had a cat named Hodge, who gained fame through a passage in James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson and is later mentioned in the works of Vladimir Nabokov and Percival Stockdale.
• Johnson's quote " He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man" ( " Who makes himself a beast, free from suffering, to be a man " ), both in the opening credits of the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and at the beginning of the song Bat Country from Avenged Sevenfold ( A7X ), and in the intro to computer game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs used.
• hold in the teen book trilogy "Stone Heart" by Charlie Fletcher both "Dictionary Johnson " and his cat Hodge not unimportant roles. There, Johnson delivers in the history alive expectant statue - the original is on the back of St. Clement Danes Church, in London - the main people important information, and supports them in their tasks. Here Fletcher Johnson used eloquence and humor to make the character appear authentic.