The Life of Samuel Johnson

This section covers Johnson’s later school years and his college years at Oxford. Johnson’s literary talent first shows itself during this time, and Boswell includes several examples of his early poetry.

At the age of 15, Johnson is sent to a school in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, where he assists the headmaster in teaching the younger boys. After a little over a year at the school, Johnson returns home where he is idle for two years, spending most of his time reading and lacking any “settled plan of life” (43). Boswell considers Johnson’s state at this time “very unworthy his uncommon abilities” (37), yet he admits that Johnson’s random and “desultory” reading habits fed his literary imagination better than a more structured course of study might have done.

Thanks to the promise of “a gentleman of Shropshire” (44) to pay for his tuition, Johnson is able to enroll in Oxford University, which would otherwise be beyond his father’s means. While at Oxford, Johnson shows his skill in writing Latin poetry; yet his “low spirits of melancholy” (55) return, leading to hypochondria and depression. At the end of three years, Johnson is running out of money and his Shropshire patron fails to supply more funds. Johnson is therefore forced to leave college and return home “destitute, and not knowing how he should gain even a decent livelihood” (57). In December 1731, Johnson’s father dies.

In this section of the book, Boswell emphasizes the struggles Johnson undergoes as he passes from adolescence to adulthood as a youth who is both gifted and unconventional. In particular, Boswell dwells on Johnson’s college education, which comes to an end before he is able to complete a degree. Boswell depicts Johnson’s college years as formative for the writer and scholar he later became, stressing the unique nature of Johnson’s genius. Boswell also suggests that the melancholia which will follow Johnson for the rest of his life begins during this young adult period. The depiction stresses that Johnson does not have an easy path to literary glory but overcomes significant obstacles—physical, psychological, economic—which will affect his political and philosophical beliefs in later life.