Samuel Johnson: A Chronology

1709
Samuel Johnson is born in Lichfield, England to Michael and Sarah Johnson.

1728
Johnson enrolls in Pembroke College, Oxford. Unable to continue paying his bills, he withdraws little more than a year later.

1731
"Messia," Johnson’s Latin translation of Alexander Pope's "Messiah" is published in Husbands's Miscellany, the first of his works to see print.

1735
Johnson marries Elizabeth (Jervis) Porter, a widow twenty years his senior. With the inheritance from her late husband, he opens a grammar school. Attracting few pupils, he is forced to close it in January 1737.

1737
With his friend and former pupil David Garrick, Johnson sets off for London to pursue a career as an author.

1738
Johnson's poem London, his first important literary work, is published anonymously.

1746
Johnson begins work on his dictionary, and writes A Short Scheme for Compiling a New Dictionary of the English Language, published the following year.

1749
David Garrick’s Drury Lane Theatre performs Johnson’s tragedy Irene. Johnson publishes his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes.

1750
Johnson issues the first of his twice-weekly series of essays entitled The Rambler. It will continue for two years, totaling 208 installments, all but seven written by Johnson.

1752
Elizabeth Johnson dies. Johnson never remarries.

1755
After nine years of labor, A Dictionary of the English Language is published.

1759
Johnson writes The Prince of Abyssinia (better known as Rasselas), in just one week’s time, to pay the expenses of his mother’s final illness and funeral.

1762
Johnson is granted a royal pension of £300 per year.

1763
Johnson meets James Boswell for the first time.

1764
Sir Joshua Reynolds founds the Club, its membership drawn from Johnson’s circle of friends.

1765
Johnson publishes his long-awaited edition of the works of Shakespeare.

1773
Boswell and Johnson tour Scotland together; the trip forms the basis of Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785).

1779
Johnson publishes the first volumes of his Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, completed in 1781.

1784
Johnson dies on December 13th, at age 75. He is buried in Westminster Abbey the following week.