Johnson

By Timothy Wilson Smith

The poet, essayist, critic, journalist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson was one of the pre-eminent figures of 18th-century English letters. Johnson was also a legendary wit and conversationalist, whose sharp-tongued pronouncements and many eccentricities are well recorded in Boswell's classic Life. In 1755 he published the first proper dictionary of the English language, defining some 40,000 wordswith great verve. In it he defined a lexicographer as a 'harmless drudge'. His essays on Shakespeare, his Lives of the Poets and his extensive periodical essays were all seminal works in their field and his philosophical romance Rasselas is as pungent today as ever.

'This brief and pithy introduction to the legendary king of the coffee house.’

The Independent, 18 June 2005

Timothy Wilson Smith is the author of the prize-winning Delacroix, Napoleon and his Artists, Caravaggio and Napoleon: Man of War, Man of Peace. He has degrees in History and English, taught at Eton College, lectured at the National Portrait Gallery and broadcast on the BBC.