Summary

Samuel Johnson was born at the beginning of the 18th century. He was sickly as a child, developing tuberculosis and smallpox. This left him mostly blind, half deaf, and permanently scarred on most of his face. He thought that disease often caused people to grow self-indulgent, and refused to take that path. He took his education seriously, perhaps because his teachers did as well and often enforced their rules with physical punishments. As a student, he stumbled upon a religious text and converted to Christianity.

After his year was up, he returned home and was seriously depressed for a number of years. Finally, when he was almost thirty, he moved to London to be a freelance writer. This barely paid him, until he found a job at a magazine where he wrote fictional accounts of specific speeches that might have been given in Parliament...