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Samuel Johnson, born 300 years ago today, is one of the great adoptive Londoners. Certainly few people have insisted so resoundingly on the city's magnificence. His line that "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life" may be the most overused quotation in the panoply of journalistic standbys but he reiterated the point frequently.
"A country gentleman should bring his lady to visit London as soon as he can," he opined. Why? So that they may have "agreeable topics for conversation when they are by themselves". The city's "wonderful" immensity was evident, he asserted, in "the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together". Its jostle was an antidote to the long empty vistas of rural life.
Ensconced with his biographer James Boswell in a Fleet Street tavern, Johnson declared: "There is more learning and science within the circumference of 10 miles from where we now sit, than in all the rest of the world." The claim was even then deliciously absurd. Yet Boswell, rather than object, merely commented that it was a shame it took so long for the possessors of this science and learning to get across town to see each other.
Johnson's relish of the capital was conditioned by a sense of the narrowness of the environment from which he came. In Lichfield, where he was born and grew up, his encouragers had been older, churchy men. There were no intellectual sparring partners among his peers at school, and his teachers were peevish. His education was mostly achieved in his father's well-stocked bookshop.
London was a different matter. When he arrived he was in his late twenties. Having failed as a schoolmaster largely on account of his peculiar mannerisms (possibly due to Tourette's syndrome), he was now targeting literary success. In the grungily bohemian milieu of Grub Street he could be both celebrated and invisible, and there were plenty of people against whom he could test himself intellectually.
Although Johnson is rightly remembered for achievements that combined scholarship with a populist educational mission - his Dictionary, edition of Shakespeare, moral essays and biographies of the nation's poets - his appetite for such projects was stimulated by life as a Grub Street quill-driver. Before he was a scholar, he learnt to be a hack - for instance, knocking out reports of the debates in Parliament, up to 10,000 words in a day.
Like many who arrive in London with sophomoric dreams, Johnson was at once repulsed and exhilarated by a world where crime, filth, money and fashion intersected. His London was that of Canaletto and of Hogarth - full of large prospects and toxic surprises - and he hungrily investigated both these sides. To know the city well, he said, one had to be familiar with not just its grand streets and public spaces but also "the innumerable little lanes and courts". He nursed a particular ambition to explore - of all neighbourhoods - Wapping.
On one of his nocturnal forays Johnson was attacked by four men. Though he managed to overpower them, he afterwards carried a cudgel when he went out after dark. But, crucially, he kept going out - the lurking dangers were evidence to him of the many-coloured diversity of the metropolis.
We may not see things quite this way. Yet we should cherish Johnson's inquisitiveness. His appreciation of London was based on personal knowledge of it, not some mishmash of received opinions. Commemorating Johnson is an opportunity to salute his view of the city where he made his home. So perhaps today I'll stop a moment to savour his tantalisingly quirky judgment that "the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross".
Reader views (1)
Johnson is definitely one of the great Londoners, and he is to be applauded for the idea that, whatever London throws at you, you've got to keep exploring it, rather than letting it get to you and drive you into some gated-community existence. Hip hip hooray for the good Doctor!
- Mike Garfield, London, 18/09/2009 13:12
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