Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 above his father’s bookshop in Lichfield, England, and died in London in 1784. After nine years’ work, with a few assistants copying out the quotations he marked in books, he published A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). It was the most used English dictionary for the next 150 years, until the Oxford English Dictionary was completed.
While working on the dictionary, he wrote The Rambler, essays that came out every Tuesday and Saturday from March 1750 and sold for twopence each. There were 208 of them, often on moral and religious questions and more serious than the title suggests. He later edited Shakespeare’s plays (1765) and wrote Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781). His friend James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) was called by the Johnson biographer Walter Jackson Bate “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature.”