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The community of pains and pleasures – our subject’s Origins and Upbringing, with some speculations on what we may learn from them

Lichfield in Staffordshire, where Samuel Johnson was born and grew up, was at the time the cultural hub of the West Midlands. His parents’ dignified new house stood in the marketplace. His father Michael, who had spent more than he could afford on its construction, ran a bookshop on the ground floor. Johnson would later refer to his family’s poverty, which will surprise anyone who now visits the house at the corner of Breadmarket and Sadler Streets. Its solid facade and fifteen rooms suggest prosperity, but Michael often found it hard to pay his taxes, and to keep afloat he had to be versatile, selling patent medicines and stationery, binding books and presiding over auctions, and even dishing up practical or professional guidance to people who dropped in at the shop and treated it like a citizens advice bureau.

When Johnson compiled his Dictionary of the English Language in early middle age, he would salute his birthplace. In the entry for lich, meaning ‘carcass’, he explained that Lichfield was ‘the field of the dead . . . so named from martyred Christians’. To this he added the Latin phrase ‘Salve, magna parens’ (‘Hail, great parent’), a deliberate echo of a line in Virgil’s Georgics, from a section in which the Roman poet praises his country – the mother of vigorous men, as he puts it. Thanks to his origins, the poet feels able to unseal the sacred fountains of poetic inspiration (or ‘divulge the hallowed sources’, according to the translation I have to hand). He can make his voice heard. He can ‘plunge into material and measures prized in days of old’.1 The reference is apt, since Virgil is saluting the influence of the place he is from and the traditions that shape it. The challenge – for the poet, and for Johnson – is to leave this special place, vanquish the wider world’s hardships and then return, ever loyal, to add something to its greatness.

Johnson portrays his childhood as an ordeal, but with pride rather than self-pity. His stock of anecdotes about his early years is small, perhaps because a few well-rehearsed set pieces were enough to satisfy people’s curiosity without obliging him to revisit anything too sensitive. Yet the stories are evocative. For instance, when he was just a few weeks old ‘an inflammation was discovered on my buttock, which was . . . taken for a burn’: soon ‘it swelled, broke, and healed’. Later in infancy an ‘issue’ was cut in his left arm so that pus from his tubercular infection could drain away. He reports his mother saying that he took little notice of this painful procedure because he was otherwise engaged – ‘having my little hand in a custard’. The issue was kept open until he was six, which must have drawn unwelcome attention from other children.

The first school he attended was a short distance from home, but his eyesight was so poor that he had to be shepherded back there after lessons. According to legend, he once decided to make his own way and, crossing the marketplace, crawled near the gutter. As he did so he became aware that his teacher Anne Oliver was following him; he sprang to his feet and, feeling she had insulted his independence, attacked her. Another story, which he would eventually disclaim, centred on his pronouncing, aged three or four, the first half of a short poem to commemorate a duckling he had trodden on and killed – apparently one of a fleet of eleven that he had been allowed to look after. These tales of the infant Johnson have endured because they show him pugnaciously refusing assistance and responding creatively to death. Both behaviours were themes of his whole life.

It is tempting not to quote the poem on the duckling, because it’s feeble. But this is the first of the many epitaphs he wrote, and gives a flavour of his later direct and rather droll approach to the form’s standard element of what if? ‘Here lies poor Duck / That Samuel Johnson trod on! / If it had liv’d, ’twould have been good luck / Because it was an odd one.’² In maturity, when he wrote about the deaths of others, it was with the hope that some detail from their lives could be turned to use – ‘to exhibit patterns of virtue’. But he usually included a hint of the incongruous and even the absurd, of life’s fragility being both painful and farcical. Though terrified of death, he could cherish the insight that its very ‘uncertainty’ is ‘the great support of the whole system of life’.

Early on, school was a relief from the tensions of home. When Sarah Ford wed Michael Johnson in the summer of 1706, they were thirty-seven and forty-nine respectively. Their famous son later reflected that they ‘had not much happiness from each other’. Part of the problem was that his mother came from a landowning family and had little time for her husband’s relatives – ‘those indeed whom we knew of were much lower than hers’. ‘This contempt,’ he explains, ‘began . . . very early: but, as my father was little at home, it had not much effect.’ When his father was present, he disliked talking about business, and when his mother broached the subject ‘her discourse was composed only of complaint, fear, and suspicion’. Another revealing detail: when Michael was short of funds, he expressed shock at the price of tea and discouraged Sarah from socializing with their neighbours, with the result that she festered at home, unfulfilled.

Samuel’s relationship with his mother was complicated. (Whose is not? But still . . . ) There was tenderness on both sides; she sometimes spoiled him, and he and his brother Nathaniel, born three years after him in the autumn of 1712, were rivals for her affection. Yet at other times, unsettled by his ill health or by having too little money, she treated him less warmly. She nagged him about his failure to learn ‘behaviour’ and bridled when he objected to the vagueness of this; he wanted precise instruction, not woolly platitudes. As he grew older, his disrespectfulness increased – when she called him a puppy he asked if she knew what people called a puppy’s mother – and he seems to have gone to some lengths to avoid her. Part of the problem was that she saw in him some of the same traits that she found unattractive in her husband and his relations. He recorded her letting him know what an embarrassment it was when he visited his aunt and gobbled a large quantity of boiled leg of mutton; his mother had lived ‘in a narrow sphere, and was then affected by little things’, so ‘told me seriously that it would hardly ever be forgotten’. Children get used to the words ‘You haven’t heard the last of this’. Typically, the punishment is the threat itself, but in Samuel’s case the episode suggested a future in which his shame would extend in every imaginable direction.

Sarah was right to think that, at least in terms of temperament, her elder son had more in common with his rugged, brooding father. For Sam this was no great source of satisfaction, and in adulthood he would grumble that he had inherited from Michael a ‘vile melancholy’. Today we are likely to associate melancholy with a blue pensiveness or bittersweet autumnal mood of introspection, but for Sam it was akin to madness. It heightened his awareness of the animal energies within him, of urges that needed to be restrained and voices he wanted to silence, and gave him a foretaste of death – not the moment of death itself, but the slow shutting down of the powers of reason. Like insanity, it could be considered an illness (a medical problem) or a character fault (a moral one), according to his mood. He was heir, then, to a corrosive wretchedness, a psyche with the blackest of undercurrents.

Michael Johnson had some standing in Lichfield, serving as sheriff in 1709 and becoming a magistrate three years later; in 1725 he would be the senior bailiff, chairing the local council. Yet his moodiness affected his work and he tended to overstretch himself. For instance, in the year following his marriage he chose not only to erect a new house, but also to add to his shop’s stock 2,900 volumes – mostly folio – that had previously belonged to the Earl of Derby. At the same time, he began a sideline as a manufacturer of parchment. In his lighter moments, Michael liked to exhibit his son to friends and visitors, and Sam would rush off and climb a tree to avoid being his father’s plaything. Later he would reflect that the offspring of a doting old man were likely to have ‘much the same sort of life as a child’s dog’.

One of the childhood episodes that Sam pictures most sharply is being sent, aged ten, to Birmingham. There he and Nathaniel stayed with their uncle John Harrison, whom Sam describes as ‘drunk every night, but drunk with little drink, very peevish, very proud, very ostentatious, but luckily not rich’. On another occasion around the same time, his Birmingham cousin Sally Ford visited Lichfield; one day, as he sat in the kitchen writing, believing himself alone, he momentarily became aware of her presence and saw that she had begun to dance, but he was so absorbed in his work that he barely paid her any notice. His biographer John Wain suggests that this scene may have looked like a painting by Vermeer, one of those small images of an interior where nothing much is happening, its detail at once limpid and elusive. Sam’s own take on the episode was that it illustrated vividly ‘the power of continuity of attention, of application not suffered to wander or to pause’ – but ‘This close attention I have seldom in my whole life obtained.’ Given what we know of his later literary output, it seems strange that he should refer to his errant attention. Therein lies a paradox: it requires an unusual degree of attentiveness to one’s self to know how fallible one’s powers of attention really are.

At the grammar school in Lichfield, which he entered aged seven, he was initially in the care of Humphrey Hawkins, a kindly teacher of about fifty who was ‘very skilful in his little way’. After a couple of years he moved on to the upper school and received less congenial tuition: first from Edward Holbrooke, a recent Cambridge graduate who apparently used ill temper to mask deficiencies of knowledge, and then from the stern and scholarly John Hunter, who could be savage in his treatment of difficult pupils. Sam belonged in that category; a schoolmate described him as a ‘long, lank, lounging boy’, and he had an adolescent’s urge to question authority – one third genuine curiosity about why things are the way they are, two thirds recalcitrant cockiness. Unsurprisingly, Hunter’s methods didn’t endear him to his pupils. He joked that he was cruel in order to save them from what would otherwise be their certain fate – the gallows. Sam would recall Hunter with horror, but conceded that he was ‘a very good master’ and ‘whipped me very well. Without that . . . I should have done nothing.’ Half a century later he would reflect on how much educational practices had changed, concluding that ‘There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end, they lose at the other.’

Few readers today will share his apparent enthusiasm for corporal punishment, and in Sam’s lifetime it became increasingly contentious. Beating was widely regarded as therapeutic and a means of visibly and palpably underscoring schoolmasters’ authority; it was common to claim that it could harm no one besides the recipient (Sam told Boswell that ‘The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself’). Yet arguments against the practice stressed how counterproductive it could be, achieving discipline in the short term but causing longer-term resentments. Its decline owed much to the philosopher John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which noted that such methods did nothing to reward good habits. For Locke, shame was more effective than pain in getting pupils to recognize their offences, and incentives were essential in order to reinforce positive conduct. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would restate the case against corporal punishment. But Sam’s schooldays made him think of public education as a system of correction; guidance and edification barely came into it. The problem, as he saw it, was that education worked best when self-administered. Children who were educated together, in public, learned more about obstinacy than mental elasticity, more about self-preservation than free expression, and more about crime than virtue – and sometimes it took a sadist with a rod to cut through the mephitic atmosphere of vice. By contrast, self-education was a happy mixture of freedom, volition and purposeful exertion, a kind of ‘learning to learn’ and a process rather than a product.

At sixteen, he escaped Hunter and enjoyed a taste of a more cosmopolitan life. He went to stay for more than six months with Cornelius Ford, his thirty-one-year-old cousin, who had recently become a clergyman and was living in the Worcestershire village of Pedmore. Ford had taught at Cambridge, was a wit and a drinker, and mixed in bookish London circles; now he was married to Judith Crowley, a woman twelve years his senior who had paid off debts he had incurred in Cambridge, and had renounced her Quaker upbringing to join him in the Church of England. Cornelius relished the presence of his well-read, unusual and oddly rustic relation, and encouraged him to make the most of the fine library he maintained at Pedmore. The time Sam spent with this sophisticated figure gave him a notion of what intelligent conversation could be, and it introduced him to the idea of London as a centre of literary excellence.

It was not the last time that Sam would revel in the witty company of a charming, dissolute man. In his edition of Shakespeare, forty years later, he writes shrewdly about Falstaff, in terms that illuminate his experience of dissolute charmers. Falstaff is a ‘compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested’. For all his faults, he ‘makes himself necessary . . . by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter’. What moral can be drawn from Shakespeare’s complex portrait of this boastful, cowardly, engaging glutton? Simply this: ‘that no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please’. Although this is not an exact image of Cornelius Ford or of Sam’s later debauched yet likeable companions, it speaks revealingly of his capacity to succumb to the seductions of a person he knew he ought to condemn. In a note on Falstaff’s failure to form a bond with Prince Hal’s brother, he identifies ‘community of pleasures’ as the root of friendship, and a few years later he would repeat the phrase, with a little more focus, when telling Boswell that ‘Many friendships are formed by a community of sensual pleasures’.

As he says this, in his sixties, he is thinking over the friendships he has enjoyed, and he is looking back to his time with his cousin Ford. The sharing of pleasures builds relationships, and the sharing of illicit or decadent ones builds relationships that contain a hint of the flirtatious and the competitive. Friendships are undergirded by ideas of respect, and (on the whole less explicitly) by the potential for benefit, but they also involve an element of risk, the consciousness of laying oneself open. Sam’s experience at Pedmore showed him that we form such bonds by chance, not choice, though we may pretend otherwise, and that part of their magic is that there is always a hint of something unequal in them. It is usual to claim that friendship must be evenly proportioned, and Sam is sometimes held up as an advocate of this state of affairs, since he wrote in the Rambler that ‘Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals’. Yet he thought that its essential property was that it ‘enlivened’ us: through friendship ‘our virtues may be guarded and encouraged, and our vices repressed . . . by timely detection and salutary remonstrances’, and at any moment only one of a pair of friends can occupy the role of guardian and booster. In practice, it was what he called ‘conformity of inclinations’, rather than their parity, that buoyed such a relationship.