Johnson’s father was a bookworm, like his son, rather than a tradesman.  He knew and loved his books, but he made little money by them.  A student himself, he was proud of his studious boy, and wanted to send him to college.  But he was miserably poor and could not afford it.  A well-off friend, however, offered to help, and so at eighteen Samuel went to Oxford.

Here he remained three years.  Those years were not altogether happy ones, for Johnson’s huge ungainly figure, and shabby, patched clothes were matters for laughter among his fellow-students.  He became a sloven in his dress.  His gown was tattered and his linen dirty, and his toes showed through his boots.  Yet when some one, meaning no doubt to be kind, placed a new pair at his door, he kicked them away in anger.  He would not stoop to accept charity.  But in spite of his poverty and shabby clothes, he was a leader at college as he had been at school, and might often be seen at his college gates with a crowd of young men round him, “entertaining them with wit and keeping them from their studies."*

Boswell.

After remaining about three years at college, Johnson left without taking a degree.  Perhaps poverty had something to do with that.  At any rate, with a great deal of strange, unordered learning and no degree, and with his fortune still to make, Samuel returned to his poverty-stricken home.  There in a few months the father died, leaving to his son an inheritance of forty pounds.

With forty pounds not much is to be done, and Samuel became an usher, or under-master in a school.  He was little fitted to teach, and the months which followed were to him a torture, and all his life after he looked back on them with something of horror.

After a few months, he left the school where he had been so unhappy, and went to Birmingham to be near an old schoolfellow.  Here he managed to live somehow, doing odd bits of writing, and here he met the lady who became his wife.

Johnson was now twenty-five and a strange-looking figure.  He was tall and lank, and his huge bones seemed to start out of his lean body.  His face was deeply marked with scars, and although he was very near-sighted, his gray eyes were bright and wild, so wild at times that they frightened those upon whom they were turned.  He wore his own hair, which was coarse and straight, and in an age when every man wore a wig this made him look absurd.  He had a trick of making queer gestures with hands and feet.  He would shake his head and roll himself about, and would mutter to himself until strangers though that he was an idiot.

And this queer genius fell in love with a widow lady more than twenty years older than himself.  She, we are told, was coarse, fat, and unlovely, but she was not without brains, for she saw beneath the strange outside of her young lover.  “This is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life,” she said, after talking with him.  So this strange couple married.  “Sir,” said Johnson afterwards, “It was a love-marriage on both sides.”  And there can be no doubt that Samuel loved his wife devotedly while she lived, and treasured her memory tenderly after her death.