Samuel Johnson, the Sage of Lichfield, was born on 18 September (or 7 September if you are using the old system. It is very confusing, the result of running two calendars side by side, but we can be sure that Johnson was born sometime in September 1709, so let’s celebrate the whole month)*

Scholar, wit, lexicographer, philologist, poet, biographer, journo, critic, essayist, novelist, biographer - in fact, all-round überwordsmith - Johnson was celebrated in his day, and remains a cultural icon. This is because of his monumental work, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), eight years in the making, and written entirely by Johnson. It wasn’t the first ever dictionary, but it was the first one to standardise spelling and usage, and to use literary quotations to clarify definitions. It was not bettered until the arrival of the Oxford English Dictionary, a team effort, 150 years later.

Admirable though all this is, Johnson’s true claim to fame was as one of the nation’s pioneer cat butlers.

Most 18th-century cats weren’t pets, they were tolerated as pest control operatives, a necessary nuisance at best. Pay and conditions were usually terrible. Johnson, however, was extremely fond of cats - he had several, including the mighty Hodge. We know about Hodge because James Boswell, the Watson to Johnson’s Holmes, wrote about him in his biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). 

Boswell, who got antsy being in the same room with a cat, noted that , ‘I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters.’  Apparently, Johnson didn’t want the servants to do it as they might start to resent Hodge for being a spoilt diva. 

One scene in particular nails Johnson as a boss cat dad. Boswell describes Hodge

‘scrambling up Dr Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tai; and when I observed that he was a fine cat, saying, “Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then, as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding,”but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed”. 

Hodge himself is immortalised with his oysters in bronze on a plinth in Gough Square where Johnson lived in London. The bronze was created by Jon Bickley and unveiled in 1997. Johnson has a bronze statue (with no oysters) near St Clement Dane’s church in the Strand, and a stone one in Market Square, Lichfield. 

Strangely. in his Dictionary, Johnson’s definition of a cat reads:

‘A domestick animal that catches mice.’

Hardly begins to scratch the surface does it?   

For more about cats and wordsmiths, see Literary Cats, part of the Clowder Press Creative Cats series. 

* Pope Gregory XIII launched the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 to replace the Julian calendar, which had some niggly Leap Year bugs. With upgrades come glitches. In this case, an extra 10 days no one could deal with. So they deleted them.  Both calendars were used for a century or so, and Great Britain did not fully embrace the Gregorian system until 1752. Therefore any Brit born between 1582 and 1752 could legitimately celebrate two birthdays. Result .