Samuel Johnson Quotes
It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Vol. 2, Charles Dilly, 1791, p. 444.
At the time in Britain, women who gave birth to out-of-wedlock children were not only disgraced, but also disciminated agains them in almost every phase of life. Poor single women would be fired by their employers even if it was the employer who had impregnated her. Few would hire a woman who had given birth to a bastard child. As a resukt of this terrible pressure on women, many would murder their own new-born child, and others would "leave it to others".
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
