About this design
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson was an English author, poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. He is also the subject of "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature": James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.
However it is for the creation of his Dictionary of the English Language, nine years in the making that is his most renowned feat and until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary, 150 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary.
Johnson had a tall and robust figure, but his odd gestures and tics were confusing to some on their first encounter with him. Boswell's Life, along with other biographies, documented Johnson's behaviour and mannerisms in such detail that they have informed the posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.