Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use

Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program

Hello, quote, there's no arguing with Johnson for when his pistol misses fire

He knocks you down with a butt of it

The poet Oliver Goldsmith was not alone in falling victim to the bludgeoning wit of Samuel Johnson

The greatest luminers of 18th century England, including the painted Joshua Reynolds the philosopher Edmund Burke and the politician Charles James

Foxx all deferred to him happily or otherwise

Samuel Johnson was credited with defining English literature with his lives of the poets and his addition of Shakespeare and

Of defining English language with his dictionary

It despite these lofty acclimations he failed to get a degree suffered from violent depressions

Claim he'd never finished a book and was an in veteran hack hotel to his friend James Boswell

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money

How do you an oxford drop out become England's most famous and well-connected man of letters and how did generations of readers come to see him as the father of English literature

With me to discuss some in Johnson is John Mullin professor of English at University College London

Judith Hawley senior lecturer in English at Royal Holloway University of London and Jim McLevitt

Professor of English at Keel University John Mullin Johnson was rather an awkward child beset by physical tics

Scrophular possibly even Tourette syndrome, but he was a son of a literal bookseller

These two things the illness and the father bookseller must have played the seem to play the dramatic part in his life

Yes, I mean he's a great lumbering awkward provincial boy

Who becomes a kind of literary self-made man and that's always very important to Johnson, I think

His father was a bookseller and of course Johnson's

Extraordinary erudition which people notice from the very early ages

...