X-Nico

16 unusual facts about Samuel Johnson


Ansar Ud Deen

The new elites also promoted the use of the word Yoruba to promote a unifying social and ethnic group in Southwestern Nigeria; among the new groups was Samuel Johnson, a pioneering Nigerian historian.

Ayton, Scottish Borders

The Scottish diarist and author James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson passed through Ayton on his journey to London on 15 November 1762.

Cubley, Derbyshire

Michael Johnson, the father of Samuel Johnson (author of the first English dictionary), was born here.

Ivy Lane Club

The Ivy Lane Club was a literary and social club founded by Samuel Johnson in the 1740s.

John Rutty

He deplored these excesses in language which caused Samuel Johnson to laugh.

Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Campet de Saujon

There she was fêted once again and met Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole, who she received in Paris and at the Château de Stors, granted to her by the Prince de Conti after the death of Mme Panneau d'Arty in 1765.

Oxfordshire County Cricket Club

Dr Samuel Johnson stated that he played cricket during his time at Oxford University and he was there in 1729 for one year only.

Pembroke Square, Oxford

Samuel Johnson, a student of Pembroke; and J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow at Pembroke, variously had rooms overlooking the square.

Religion of the Yellow Stick

Dr Samuel Johnson, on his famous journey round the Hebrides (1775) encountered the story; in Rum he said that there were

Revolution Controversy

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a prolific writer admired by Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth and wife of the minister at Newington Green, alluded to Burke's work and his opponents in her "Sins of the Government, Sins of the Nation" (1793).

Samuel Johnson's health

Hester Thrale Piozzi, in her British Synonymy Book 2, did not joke about Johnson's possible madness, and claimed, in a discussion on Smart's mental state, that Johnson was her "friend who feared an apple should intoxicate him".

Samuel Johnson's political views

He was an opponent of slavery, well before the heyday of abolitionism, and once proposed a toast to the "next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies".

Samuel Johnson's religious views

In his review of Soame Jenyns's A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil and its argument that those "born to poverty" should not be educated so they could enjoy the "opiate of ignorance", Johnson wrote, "To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation only because the ancestor happened to be poor, is, in itself, cruel, if not unjust".

Sublunary sphere

Samuel Johnson praised Shakespeare's plays as “exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, intermingled”.

Vicious intromission

His attempt was unsuccessful, but led to an exchange with his friend Doctor Johnson in July 1772, recorded in his Life of Samuel Johnson, in which the latter wrote a paper on the legal principles involved, stating misera est servitus ubi jus est aut incognitum aut vagum ("miserable is that state of slavery in which the law is unknown or uncertain").

William Budworth

He taught several notable pupils, but he is most remembered for not employing Samuel Johnson as an assistant at Brewood Grammar School.


1642 in poetry

John Denham, Cooper's Hill, the first example in English of a poem devoted to local description, in this case the Thames scenery around the author's home at Egham in Surrey; the poem was rewritten many times and later received high praise from Samuel Johnson, although Denham's reputation later ebbed

Alexander Druzhinin

He translated three of Shakespeare's plays; King Lear, Coriolanus and Richard III; he published a series of essays entitled Boswell and Johnson, about English life in the eighteenth century; and he wrote a life of George Crabbe which included numerous extracts from his poetry.

Andrew Crosbie

An office-bearer ('Assassin') of The Poker Club, and a friend of Boswell and Johnson, Crosbie was the basis of the character Councillor Pleydell in Sir Walter Scotts's novel Guy Mannering.

Barring out

Dr. Samuel Johnson reports a story that Joseph Addison, when a schoolboy, was the ringleader of a barring out at his school.

Charlotte Lennox

She is most famous now as the author of The Female Quixote and for her association with Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and Samuel Richardson, but she had a long career and wrote poetry, prose, and drama.

Corriechatachan

Notable visitors included Thomas Pennant, in the course of the travels that resulted in the publication of A Tour of Scotland in 1769, and Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, on their tour of the Highlands.

Gumley

Cradock moved in the literary society of Goldsmith, Johnson, and Burke, and built a theatre at Gumley which was used for amateur productions and by Garrick.

Gunby Hall

The Hall contains significant collections of art, furniture, porcelain and silver including original pieces by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edward Lear, William Morris, Lord Tennyson, William Holman Hunt, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Sheraton and Lucio Rannuci.

Hester Thrale

Due to her husband's financial status, she was able to enter London society, as a result of which she met Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Bishop Thomas Percy, Oliver Goldsmith and other literary figures, including the young Fanny Burney, whom she took with her to Gay Street, Bath.

Isaac Reed

He also revised Robert Dodsley's Collection of Old Plays (12 vols., 1780); and re-edited Samuel Johnson and George Steevens's edition (1773) of Shakespeare.

John Lemprière

Lemprière may have been influenced by another Pembroke man, the lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson, whose famous A Dictionary of the English Language had appeared in 1755.

John Pomfret

He published a number of poems, and was regarded as significant enough in his time to be included by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets. 'The Choice' is the poem for which Pomfret is now probably most remembered, especially as it was chosen by Roger Lonsdale as the first poem in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse.

John Stafford Smith

He was elected as a member of the select Anacreontic Society which boasted amongst its membership such persons as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Henry Purcell.

Kalamata F.C.

The Papadopoulos era of Kalamata F.C. was notable for the signing of many international players from the African nation of Ghana, such as Samuel Johnson, Afo Dodoo, Ebenezer Hagan, Peter Ofori-Quaye and Derek Boateng.

Lillian de la Torre

Her most popular works were the Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector series of 33 detective stories that cast 18th century literary figures Samuel Johnson and James Boswell into Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson roles.

Old Red Lion Theatre

At this time descriptions state that the Old Red Lion was a small brick house with three trees in its forecourt, visited by William Hogarth (who portrayed it in the middle distance of his painting "Evening", with the foreground being Sadler's Wells), Samuel Johnson and Thomas Paine (who wrote The Rights of Man in the shade of the trees in its forecourt).

Paragraph

For example, the following excerpt from Dr. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, the first sentence is the main idea: that Joseph Addison is a skilled "describer of life and manners".

Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War

It has won the £5,000 Duff Cooper Prize for an outstanding literary work in the field of history, biography or politics, the £3,000 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, the prestigious BBC Samuel Johnson for the best work of non-fiction published in the United Kingdom and the 2003 Governor General's Literary Award in Canada.

Philip Skelton

In 1744 Skelton published The Candid Reader, a satire on the verse-making of Hill the mathematician, on the Rhapsody of Lord Shaftesbury, and the Hurlothrumbo of Samuel Johnson.

Richard Alexander Arnold

Richard Alexander Arnold is the Eminent Professor and Chair of English at Alfaisal University and an author and editor specializing in rhetoric, English literature, Canadian literature, and Medieval literature (focusing on Chaucer, John Milton, William Blake, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope).

Steven Millhauser

This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson.

Streatham Park

Streatham Park later passed to Ralph's son Henry Thrale, who with his wife Hester Thrale entertained many of the leading literary and artistic characters of the day, most notably the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, who was fond of a summer house in the grounds.

Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

Samuel Johnson, 1765 The Plays of William Shakespeare: "Shakespeare's adherence to general nature has exposed him to the censure of criticks, who form their judgments upon narrower principles. Dennis and Rymer think his Romans not sufficiently Roman; and Voltaire censures his kings as not completely royal. ... These are the petty cavils of petty minds."