The Blagger's Guide To...Samuel Johnson

Ten pages of quotes, but none about oranges

*The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction will be presented this Wednesday in a ceremony at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London which will be broadcast on BBC Two's The Culture Show on Thursday.

The shortlist comprises: Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury); Caravaggio by Andrew Graham Dixon (Allen Lane); Liberty's Exiles by Maya Jasanoff (HarperPress); The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (Fourth Estate); Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg (Oxford University Press); and Reprobates by John Stubbs (Viking). Controversial omissions from the longlist include Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem and Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson. Perhaps Ferguson (and his spellings) will be better appreciated in America. The week before the longlist was announced, he said that he would soon be returning to the States, asking: "Who wants to stick around to be sneered at when you can actually be appreciated?"

*The motto of the prize is "All the best stories are true", which applies equally to the life of its inspiration, Samuel Johnson. Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, and was educated at Oxford until he had to leave because he couldn't afford the fees. He married a woman 21 years his senior (for money), spent nine years writing his Dictionary of the English Language (published in 1755), was buried at Westminster Abbey in 1784 and left all of his money to his servant, Francis Barber, a Jamaican freedman.

*The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has 10 pages devoted to the sayings of Samuel Johnson, poet, critic, and lexicographer. Groucho Marx has less than half a page, Dorothy Parker about a page, and Winston Churchill a page and a half. Shakespeare has 31 pages.

*One of many books published in 2009 to mark the 300th anniversary of Johnson's birth was David Nokes's critically acclaimed Samuel Johnson: A Life. In it, Nokes summarises Johnson as "a man alone, a half-blind widower balanced neatly by his own disproportionate bulk, making clarity in the dictionary out of chaos". (Sadly, Nokes's book was not longlisted for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize, which was won by Philip Hoare for Leviathan, Or the Whale.

*James Boswell's 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson was exacting in its appreciations of Dr Johnson and all his habits. One reported conversation between the two men concerned Johnson's collection of orange peelings. Boswell asked him to explain. "I have a great love for them," Johnson replied. "And pray, Sir, what do you do with them? You scrape them, it seems, very neatly, and what next?" "I let them dry, Sir." "And what next?" "Nay, Sir, you shall know their fate no further."

*Johnson opposed slavery and loved his cats, Hodge and Lily.

*A report in the British Medical Journal in 1979 was among the first to speculate that Johnson might have had Tourette's Syndrome. It wrote: "Dr Samuel Johnson was noted by his friends to have almost constant tics and gesticulations .... He also made noises and whistling sounds; he made repeated sounds and words and irregular or blowing respiratory noises ..."

*Johnson considered his life to have been "a barren waste of time" with "disturbances of the mind very close to madness".

Independent Comment
blog comments powered by Disqus
News in pictures
World news in pictures
Arts & Ents blogs

Children’s Books: Recommended read – ‘A Monster Calls’ by Patrick Ness

Thirteen-year-old Conor awakes in bed one night to discover that the yew tree outside his house has ...

Made in Chelsea – Series 5, Episode 11

SPOILERS: Do not read this if you have not seen series 5, episode 11 of ‘Made in Chelsea’ It’s hard ...

The Returned: ‘Simon’ – Series 1, episode 2

Fragility of life looms large over an episode that closes with the scarring on Julie's stomach. Whil...

       
 

ES Rentals

    Beards, brawn and body art

    Beards, brawn and body art

    Meet London’s new batch of male models
    Scandi-geeks descend on Nordicana for fan-convention

    Scandi-geeks descend on Nordicana for fan-convention

    British love of shows such as The Bridge, Borgen and The Killing shows no sign of fading
    Behind the rhetoric what is really being done to combat desertification?

    The Great Green Wall of Africa,

    Behind the rhetoric what is really being done to combat desertification?
    Laughter Inc: the cheering growth of the chuckle industry

    Laughter Inc

    The cheering growth of the chuckle industry
    The bad science scandal: how fact-fabrication is damaging UK's global name for research

    The bad science scandal

    How fact-fabrication is damaging UK's global name for research
    To the manor born: The female aristocrats battling to inherit the title

    Female aristocrats battle to inherit the title

    A passionate protest is gathering pace among the women of Britain's aristocracy, who believe that men should no longer automatically inherit the family pile and title.
    Love struck: Photographs of JFK's visit to Berlin 50 years ago reveal a nation instantly smitten

    In pictures: JFK's visit to Berlin in 1963

    Photographer Ulrich Mack accompanied Kennedy on the entire trip. The results are an astonishing record of a watershed moment.
    Eat shoots and leaves: Mark Hix gets creative with fresh peas, mangetouts and sugar snaps

    Mark Hix gets creative with English peas

    English peas and their offsprings, such as mangetouts and sugar snaps, are great tossed into a salad, says our chef.
    Ceviche with a smile: Chef Martin Morales has turned South America's elegant cuisine into one of London's hottest food trends

    Chef Martin Morales: Ceviche with a smile

    Morales has turned South America's elegant cuisine into one of London's hottest food trends
    Incredible edible: Guerrilla gardeners are planting veg for the masses in West Yorkshire

    Incredible edible: Guerrilla gardeners

    Holly Williams joins the volunteers who have turned a small town into a thriving community with a guerrilla gardening scheme that has provided a blueprint for sustainability.
    Seasoned to taste: The restaurants that draw happy diners back year after year

    Seasoned to taste: Food institutions

    In an industry famed for short-lived success and pop-up pretenders, it takes something special to stick around.
    Anatomy of a waiter: Service staff spill the secrets of their trade

    Anatomy of a waiter: Staff spill their secrets

    Next Sunday is the first ever National Waiters' Day. To celebrate, we share tales from the restaurant trenches by those in the front line.
    Drink in the sun: The season's best wines

    Drink in the sun: The season's best wines

    From complex English sparkling wine to juicy Sicilian reds...
    Iran election: Farewell Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, we’ll miss you – but not that much...

    Robert Fisk

    Farewell Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, we’ll miss you – but not that much...
    India sends its final telegram -(Stop)-

    After 163 years India sends its final telegram -(Stop)-

    Mobile phones and the internet have superseded the once-essential service