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Rags to riches of forgotten genius; MIDLANDS millennium Chris Upton looks back at the life of Lichfield's most famous son, literary giant Samuel Johnson, while Ross Reyburn, below, reports on how his home city remembers him.(National)

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From: The Birmingham Post (England)
Date: 19990828
Author:Upton, Chris

Son of an almost bankrupt bookseller, short-sighted, deaf in one ear, too poor to finish his degree, yet the most brilliant scholar of his time was a literary giant, had a royal pension and a burial in Westminster Abbey.

It would be difficult to find anyone who charted the route from rags to riches as triumphantly as Samuel Johnson, except perhaps for (another Midlander) William Shakespeare.

And just as the Bard of Avon defined the age he lived in, so the second half of the 18th Century has become known as the Age of Johnson. The chief difference between the two is that ...

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