Three hundred years is a long time for a person to command the world’s consistent attention, and yet, that is precisely the kind of hold Dictionary Johnson continues to exercise on the popular imagination. Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the tercentenary of whose birth last week spawned much festivity in his native town of Lichfield, England, and much of the English speaking world, stands next only to Shakespeare in terms of being quoted and in the number of biographies he has inspired. With yet another biography out next month (David Noakes's Samuel Johnson: A Life), the Johnson myth, it is evident, continues to captivate.

Poet, biographer, critic, journalist, compiler of the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, the subject of the most celebrated biography in the history of literature (Boswell’s Life of Johnson) and wit extraordinaire, Johnson was regarded as the leading literary figure of the 18th century.

Born to a bookseller, Johnson’s was a laborious trudge from near-obscurity to unassailable genius. Left scarred, partially deaf and near-sighted by a childhood attack of TB and small pox, Johnson’s facial tics and twitches (later attributed to Tourette’s syndrome) earned him the disparaging epithet of “The Great Convulsionary”. Forced to drop out of Pembroke College, Oxford in 1729, Johnson moved to London in 1737 and struggled to earn a living as a journalist, quietly churning out articles, poetry, even a biography, until commissioned to compile a dictionary.

Coming out in 1755 after nine years of painstaking research, his Dictionary of the English Language was within easy reach of anyone who was looking for a standardised text to navigate the language. It served as the standard bearer for the language for the next 150 years until replaced by the Oxford English Dictionary, which it is widely considered the basis of. Controversially, Johnson’s wry sense of humour often penetrates the staid tone of his task. While the definition for oats is “A grain, which in England is given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”, a patron is “Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery”. But he is hard to condemn in the face of his definition of a Lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge”.

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