Early Works
Johnson's early works and early life have been neglected topics within Johnson scholarship. As a result, he is primarily known for the events surrounding his later life and later works like A Dictionary of the English Language. This imbalance originates in the failure of James Boswell, Johnson's friend and companion, to discuss in great detail Johnson's childhood and the beginning of his career within the Life of Samuel Johnson, the most famous biography on Johnson. In particular, Boswell ignored Johnson's early politics and political writings which show a concern with Sir Robert Walpole's political administration.
His first major work, the poem London, contains an early version of Johnson's ethics and morality system. Within the poem, he combined attacks on the politics of Walpole and the British government with the immoral actions of the common Londoner in order to form a general satire of 18th-century London society. Johnson compares London to the Roman Empire in its decline and blames moral and political corruption for its fall. Although Johnson did not start his literary criticism career until later, London is an example of what Johnson thought poetry should be: it is youthful and joyous, but it also relies on simple language and easy to understand imagery.
Johnson's first major success came with Life of Savage, but it was not his first biography; Savage was the fourth in a series which also included biographies of Jean-Philippe Baratier, Robert Blake and Francis Drake. Although it was not the only biography that appeared immediately after Savage's death, it became the most popular, and it embodied Johnson's ideas on what a biography should be.
The book did contain some inaccuracies, particularly those surrounding Savage's claim that he was the illegitimate child of a nobleman. It was successful in its partial analysis of Savage's poetry and in portraying insights into Savage's personality, but for all of its literary achievements it did not bring immediate fame or income to Johnson or to Cave; it did, though, provide Johnson with a welcome small income at an opportune time in his life. More importantly, the work helped to mould Johnson into a biographical career; it was included in his later Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets series.
Read more about this topic: Early Life Of Samuel Johnson
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