SAMUEL JOHNSON PREFACE TO SHAKESPEAre I. LIFE OF DR. JOHNSON Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, Staffordshire, on September 18, 1709. His father was a provincial bookseller; it was through browsing in his shop that the boy acquired much of remarkable knowledge. Physically handicapped, with bad eyesight and facial disfigurements, he later developed a pronounced neurotic tic’. Showing early emotional instability, he was ever afterwards subject to long fits of lassitude and depression. In the grammar schools of Lichfield and Stourbridge, and for some thirteen months at Oxford, he was well grounded in the classics, but because of financial difficulties left the university in 1729 without a degree. During the next few years all attempts to find a permanent post as a teacher failed. Then in 1735 he married a widow over twenty years his senior, with whose small fortune he set up his own school. When this, too, proved unsuccessful, he and his wife late in 1737 moved to ...