Travels Through History: Lichfield

The book Travels Through History: Leicester, Lichfield, Lincoln, and Loughborough is available at a discount price between 29th July and 5th August 2026.

Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller. There is a Samuel Johnson museum in the town, which is worth visiting if you are at all interested in the English Language. 

Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford, but struggled to afford the fees, complained of the intellectual idleness of his contemporaries, and felt humiliated when a fellow student took pity on him and presented him with a replacement pair of shoes as a gift.

He left university without completing his degree and launched himself into the coffeehouses and print shops of literary London, living a life of genteel poverty, forever under threat from his creditors. His earliest works included the long-form poems ‘London’ and ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ and the periodicals The Rambler and The Idler. 

Johnson is best known as the author of the Dictionary of the English Language. This tome appeared in 1755 and remains a landmark achievement of English prose, an extraordinary individual undertaking, which took its writer nine long years to assemble. 

Approached to write this epic book by a group of prominent London booksellers including Thomas Longman, Johnson was paid 1,500 guineas (about £220,000 in modern money) and set about the task with relish, meticulously gathering quotations to support his definitions. The resulting work contains 42,733 entries over 2,300 pages and remains a colossal achievement, revered to this day, and famed for its many droll comic touches. The word “lexicographer”, for instance, is defined as “a harmless drudge”.  

Having completed the mammoth task of assembling the dictionary, Johnson wrote an analysis of Shakespeare and a biography of his friend Richard Savage, a poet convicted of murder. 

A rare foray into fiction, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), followed and proved a commercial success. This novella was an exotic philosophical fable that told the story of a wayward young royal’s decision to leave behind his isolated homeland, the Happy Valley, in search of true contentment in the wider world. 

The primary reason for Johnson’s enduring appeal though, outside of his own remarkable achievements in print, is the ongoing popularity of James Boswell’s detailed Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). The book recounts the many wise, comic and vitriolic sayings its subject produced when “talking for victory” late into the night with his peers and club mates. That circle included such great figures of the age as the founder of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds, actor David Garrick – also from Lichfield, politician Edmund Burke, and playwright Oliver Goldsmith.  

Boswell recalls such delightful comic incidents as Johnson good-naturedly dismissing Burke as “a vile Whig”, rebuking Goldsmith for being “loose in his principles” and declining a repeat visit backstage to visit Garrick at the theatre because, “the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.” His opinions on everything from remarriage (the triumph of hope over experience) to women vicars and the merits of Alexander Pope are preserved for the ages in a work whose value cannot be overstated. 

Boswell would also document Johnson’s tour of Scotland in his company, while his life was recorded in a separate biography by another friend, the socialite Mrs Hester Thrale, who published her own reminiscences of their time together in 1786.

My favourite quotation, relating to travelling, is: “The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”