Samuel Johnson

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The formative years

Birth and family; early illness

First years at school

The Lichfield Upper Grammar School

A second beginning: Cornelius Ford and the year at Stourbridge

Poems at Stourbridge

Back at Lichfield; a further model: Gilbert Walmesley

Oxford

The years of trial and obscurity

Breakdown and despair; psychology of the young Johnson

Efforts to begin again; Birmingham; the first book

Johnson's marriage; the school at Edial

The move to London; first writings there; temporary separation from his wife

Range as a journalist; Jonson's politics generally; parliamentary debates; speed in writing

Lost in Grub Street; biography and the world of books

In the middle of the way: the moral pilgrimage

Entrance into Middle Age; uncertainties; problems in the marriage

Storming the main gate: the dictionary

Personal life; Tetty's illness and death; a straggler

The moral landscape: the vanity of human wishes and the rambler

The condition of man: Johnson as a moralist

Later forties: growing difficulties; the start on Shakespeare; rasselas

Into his fifties; the pension; Boswell; the club

The Johnson of legend

Approaching breakdown; religious struggles; fear of insanity

Shakespeare

Toward recovery: the Thrales; law lectures

Early sixties

Writings; continuing religious struggles

Travel: the Hebrides; Wales

Humor and wit

Indian summer

Lives of the poets

Gathering clouds; death of Henry Thrale

Loss of the Thrale family; failing health

I am Moriturus