Lichfield in 1709 was a small cathedral city about fifteen miles north of Birmingham, its skyline pricked by three sandstone spires nicknamed the Ladies of the Vale. Michael Johnson built his three-storey timber-framed townhouse on the corner of Market Street and Breadmarket Street, opposite the market square, the jettied upper floors reaching out over the cobbles in the medieval fashion that English law had been quietly trying to outlaw for decades. He sold books on the ground floor. The family lived above the shop. On 18 September 1709 Samuel was born here, the elder of the two surviving Johnson children, into a household that loved books and could not afford them.

Johnson left for London in 1737, taking with him a former pupil named David Garrick who would become the most famous actor of his age. Sarah Johnson stayed behind in the house, and on 31 January 1739 she and her son mortgaged it to Lichfield town clerk Theophilus Levett, an old family friend, for eighty pounds. The debt sat between them for years. Letters survive between Johnson and Levett, and after Levett's death between Johnson and Levett's son John, the great dictionary-maker writing apologetically about money he did not have. Eventually he paid it off in full. When his mother died in 1759, he asked his stepdaughter Lucy Porter and the family servant Catherine Chambers to keep the house and continue the bookshop. The Johnsons may have owned the building right up to Samuel's own death in 1784. The year after, the house was auctioned at the Swan Inn for £235 to a bookseller named Major Morgan, who kept it as a bookshop because it had always been one.

The museum opened in 1901 and now spreads through the three storeys. Visitors are led through Johnson's life in roughly chronological fashion, from the scrofulous infant carried to London at the age of two to be touched by Queen Anne for the King's Evil, through the long literary apprenticeship and the financial poverty, to the publication of the Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 and the eventual royal pension. The collection holds Johnson's own armchair, his tea set, his breakfast table, the portable writing desk he carried on his travels. There is David Garrick's walking stick. There is a bookcase that belonged to James Boswell, the Scottish lawyer whose Life of Samuel Johnson would invent modern biography. The book collection runs to thousands of volumes, much of it through two enormous bequests held now in the Hay Hunter, Blum, and Wood libraries upstairs.

Lichfield has not let Johnson go. The Johnson Society, founded in 1910, still meets and uses the museum as its postal address. The BBC documentary Seven Ages of Britain came here so David Dimbleby could stand in the front parlour and read aloud from the Dictionary. Every September the city marks Johnson's birthday with a supper and a wreath laid in the cathedral. The carved wooden figure by Denis Parsons watches the visitors from a corner. Outside on Market Square a larger statue of Johnson sits opposite a smaller statue of Boswell, the two of them facing each other across the cobbles for eternity, biographer and subject locked into a conversation neither of them can end.