Dr. Johnson's First Book

Extract

The present writer’s earliest recollections are of an old-fashioned square of solid, red-brick, Georgian houses, all long since ‘improved’ off the face of the earth. From the windows of his home, he could see on the front of an adjoining dwelling a stone tablet which bore the legend :

Here Edmund Hector was the Host and

Samuel Johnson the Guest.

This Edmund Hector was a Lichfield man who practised in Birmingham as a surgeon from about the year 1731, and whose praises in graceful Latinity may yet be read on a monument in the church of St.. Philip in that city. His sister was Dr. Johnson’s first love; Boswell saw her fifty years later,’ a clergyman’s widow, advanced in age, a genteel woman, very agreeable and well-bred.’ Hector had been the Doctor’s school-mate in the early Lichfield days, and almost all we know of that period of Johnson’s life we learn from the good surgeon’s reminiscences. He it is who has told us of Johnson’s predominance over the other boys, the submission and deference with which they treated him, how he would help his favourites in their lessons, how he seemed to learn by intuition, how he never forgot anything he either heard or read.

When, as a youth of twenty-three, Johnson drifted to Birmingham, it was by Hector’s invitation. Johnson was then poor, unknown, very forlorn. His sole employment so far had been that of usher in a boys’ school, a life to him of most painful and irksome drudgery, ‘as unvaried (he said)’ as the note of the cuckoo.’