Such sums prove that some few authors might achieve independence by a successful work; and it is well to remember them in considering Johnson’s life from the business point of view.  Though he never grumbled at the booksellers, and on the contrary, was always ready to defend them as liberal men, he certainly failed, whether from carelessness or want of skill, to turn them to as much profit as many less celebrated rivals.  Meanwhile, pecuniary success of this kind was beyond any reasonable hopes.  A man who has to work like his own dependent Levett, and to make the “modest toil of every day” supply “the wants of every day,” must discount his talents until he can secure leisure for some more sustained effort.  Johnson, coming up from the country to seek for work, could have but a slender prospect of rising above the ordinary level of his Grub Street companions and rivals.  One publisher to whom he applied suggested to him that it would be his wisest course to buy a porter’s knot and carry trunks; and, in the struggle which followed, Johnson must sometimes have been tempted to regret that the advice was not taken.

The details of the ordeal through which he was now to pass have naturally vanished.  Johnson, long afterwards, burst into tears on recalling the trials of this period.  But, at the time, no one was interested in noting the history of an obscure literary drudge, and it has not been described by the sufferer himself.  What we know is derived from a few letters and incidental references of Johnson in later days.  On first arriving in London he was almost destitute, and had to join with Garrick in raising a loan of five pounds, which, we are glad to say, was repaid.  He dined for eightpence at an ordinary:  a cut of meat for sixpence, bread for a penny, and a penny to the waiter, making out the charge.  One of his acquaintance had told him that a man might live in London for thirty pounds a year.  Ten pounds would pay for clothes; a garret might be hired for eighteen-pence a week; if any one asked for an address, it was easy to reply, “I am to be found at such a place.”  Threepence laid out at a coffee-house would enable him to pass some hours a day in good company; dinner might be had for sixpence, a bread-and-milk breakfast for a penny, and supper was superfluous.  On clean shirt day you might go abroad and pay visits.  This leaves a surplus of nearly one pound from the thirty.

Johnson, however, had a wife to support; and to raise funds for even so ascetic a mode of existence required steady labour.  Often, it seems, his purse was at the very lowest ebb.  One of his letters to his employer is signed impransus; and whether or not the dinnerless condition was in this case accidental, or significant of absolute impecuniosity, the less pleasant interpretation is not improbable.  He would walk the streets all night with his friend, Savage, when their combined funds could not pay for a lodging.  One night, as he told Sir Joshua Reynolds in later years, they thus perambulated St. James’s Square, warming themselves by declaiming against Walpole, and nobly resolved that they would stand by their country.