Johnson’s education was thorough and severe. He went to a school that trained him in the classical curriculum that was the core of Western education from the Renaissance until the twentieth century—Ovid, Virgil, Horace, the Athenians. He learned Latin and Greek. When he was lazy he was beaten. His teachers would have the boys lean over their chairs and then they’d swing at them with a rod. “And this I do to save you from the gallows,” they’d say.3 Later in life, Johnson would have some complaints about the beatings. But he believed the rod was still kinder than psychological pressure and emotional manipulation—the sort of suasion many parents use today.
Johnson’s most important education was self-administered. Though he never warmed to his elderly father, he read through his father’s stock of books, devouring travel books, romances, and histories, with a special taste for daring tales of chivalry. He read vividly. At age nine he was reading Hamlet when he came upon the ghost scene. He ran frantically out into the street, terrified and desperate to be reminded of the living world. His memory was tenacious. He could read a prayer once or twice and recite it for the rest of his life. He seems to have remembered everything he read, bringing obscure authors into conversations decades after encountering them. When he was a small boy, his father would parade him before dinner parties and force him to recite for the admiring crowd. Young Sam was disgusted by his father’s vanity.
When Johnson was nineteen, his mother came into a small legacy, which was enough to pay for a single year at Oxford. Johnson promptly made the least of the opportunity. He came to Oxford fully aware of his ability, burning with ambition, panting, as he would later put it, for a name and the “pleasing hope of endless fame.” But, accustomed to his independent autodidactic life and feeling financially and socially inferior to many of the students around him, he was incapable of playing by Oxford rules. Instead of submitting to the torpid system, he battled against it, reacting to the slightest touch of authority with rude aggression. “I was mad and violent,” he would later recall. “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; so I disregarded all power and all authority.”4
Johnson was recognized as a brilliant student, winning praise for his translation into Latin of a poem by Alexander Pope; Pope himself said he couldn’t tell which was better, the Latin version or the original. But he was also rebellious, rude, and lazy. He told his tutor that he had neglected to attend lectures because he preferred to go sledding. He worked in a stop-and-start pattern that he would use all his life. He would sit in complete indolence for days, staring at a clock face but unable even to tell the time, and then he would rise to a feverish level of activity and fire off an assignment in a single masterful draft just before it was due.
Johnson became a Christian at Oxford, after a fashion. He sat down one day with the theological book by William Law titled A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, expecting, he wrote, “to find it a dull book (as such books generally are) and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me, and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.” Law’s book, like Johnson’s later moral writing, is concrete and practical. He invents characters to construct satirical portraits of types who neglect their spiritual interests. He emphasized that worldly pursuits fail to fill the heart. Christianity didn’t really change Johnson, but it made him more of what he already was—extremely suspicious of self-indulgence, rigorous in his moral demands of himself.
Aware of his own mental abilities, he fixed his attention all his life on the biblical parable of the talents, and the lesson that the “wicked and slothful servant” who has not fully used the talents that have been bestowed upon him will be cast “into outer darkness, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Johnson’s God was a rigorous God more than a loving or healing God. Johnson would spend his life with a sense of being perpetually judged, aware of his inadequacy, fearing his own damnation.
After that one year at Oxford, Johnson’s money ran out, and he returned to Lichfield in disgrace. He suffered what seems to have been a bout of severe depression. As his chronicler, James Boswell, would write, “He felt himself overwhelmed with a horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom and despair, which made existence misery.”5
Johnson took thirty-two-mile hikes to occupy himself. He may have contemplated suicide. He seemed completely incapable of controlling his body movements. He developed a series of tics and gestures that look to many modern experts like Tourette’s syndrome. He would twist his hands, rock back and forth, roll his head in a strange and compulsive manner. He would emit a bizarre whistling sound and display symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, tapping his cane in odd rhythms as he walked down the street, counting the number of steps it took him to enter a room and then reentering if the number wasn’t right. To dine with him was a challenge. He ate like a wild animal, devouring huge quantities of food in messy haste, spewing it over his notoriously slovenly clothing. The novelist Fanny Burney would write, “[He] has a face most ugly, a person the most awkward, & manners the most singular that ever were, or ever can be seen. He has almost perpetual convulsive motions, either of his hands, lips, feet, knees and sometimes all together.”6 Strangers would see him in a tavern and mistake him for a village idiot, or somebody with a debilitating mental affliction. He would then astonish them by unfurling full paragraphs studded with erudition and classical allusion. He seemed to enjoy this effect.
Johnson’s misery continued for years. He tried to teach, but a man with his tics was bound to generate more ridicule than respect from his students. The school he started, one historian noted, was “perhaps the most unsuccessful private school in the history of education.” He married Elizabeth Porter when he was twenty-six and she was forty-six, in what many thought an odd pairing. Biographers have never known what to make of Porter, whom he called Tetty. Was she beautiful or haggard? Was she philosophical or frivolous? She, to her credit, saw a sign of the future greatness beneath the rough exterior, and he, to his credit, would remain loyal to her throughout his life. He was a very tender and grateful lover, with a great capacity for empathy and affection, but they spent many of those years apart, leading separate lives. It was her money that furnished the capital to start the school, and much of it was lost.
Until his late twenties, his life had been a steady calamity. On March 2, 1737, Johnson set off for London with his former pupil David Garrick (who would go on to become one of the most famous actors in British history). Johnson settled near Grub Street and began scratching out a living as a freelance writer. He wrote on any subject and across genres: poetry, drama, political essays, literary criticism, gossip items, casual essays, and on and on. The life of a Grub Street hack was hand-to-mouth, chaotic, disheveled, and frequently miserable. One poet, Samuel Boyse, pawned all his clothing and sat on his bed naked but for his blanket. He cut a hole in it large enough to stick his arm through and wrote poems on sheets of paper balanced on his knee. When he was writing a book, he would pawn the first few pages to raise money to pay for food so he could complete the next ones.7Johnson never quite sank to that low state, but much of the time, especially in the early years, he barely scraped by.