Samuel Johnson eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 213 pages of information about Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 213 pages of information about Samuel Johnson.

Johnson was not the first professional author, in this sense, but perhaps the first man who made the profession respectable.  The principal habitat of authors, in his age, was Grub Street—­a region which, in later years, has ceased to be ashamed of itself, and has adopted the more pretentious name Bohemia.  The original Grub Street, it is said, first became associated with authorship during the increase of pamphlet literature, produced by the civil wars.  Fox, the martyrologist, was one of its original inhabitants.  Another of its heroes was a certain Mr. Welby, of whom the sole record is, that he “lived there forty years without being seen of any.”  In fact, it was a region of holes and corners, calculated to illustrate that great advantage of London life, which a friend of Boswell’s described by saying, that a man could there be always “close to his burrow.”  The “burrow” which received the luckless wight, was indeed no pleasant refuge.  Since poor Green, in the earliest generation of dramatists, bought his “groat’sworth of wit with a million of repentance,” too many of his brethren had trodden the path which led to hopeless misery or death in a tavern brawl.  The history of men who had to support themselves by their pens, is a record of almost universal gloom.  The names of Spenser, of Butler, and of Otway, are enough to remind us that even warm contemporary recognition was not enough to raise an author above the fear of dying in want of necessaries.  The two great dictators of literature, Ben Jonson in the earlier and Dryden in the later part of the century, only kept their heads above water by help of the laureate’s pittance, though reckless imprudence, encouraged by the precarious life, was the cause of much of their sufferings.  Patronage gave but a fitful resource, and the author could hope at most but an occasional crust, flung to him from better provided tables.

In the happy days of Queen Anne, it is true, there had been a gleam of prosperity.  Many authors, Addison, Congreve, Swift, and others of less name, had won by their pens not only temporary profits but permanent places.  The class which came into power at the Revolution was willing for a time, to share some of the public patronage with men distinguished for intellectual eminence.  Patronage was liberal when the funds came out of other men’s pockets.  But, as the system of party government developed, it soon became evident that this involved a waste of power.  There were enough political partisans to absorb all the comfortable sinecures to be had; and such money as was still spent upon literature, was given in return for services equally degrading to giver and receiver.  Nor did the patronage of literature reach the poor inhabitants of Grub Street.  Addison’s poetical power might suggest or justify the gift of a place from his elegant friends; but a man like De Foe, who really looked to his pen for great part of his daily subsistence, was below the region of such prizes, and was obliged in later years

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Samuel Johnson from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.