Qualla: Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum

Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 3.0. Michael Johnson, a struggling bookseller, built the house in 1707 because he wanted a shop on the best corner in Lichfield. Two years later his wife Sarah, then in her forties, gave birth upstairs to a sickly infant nobody expected to live. The infant lived. He grew into a boy half-blind, scarred by scrofula, prone to fits, ferociously clever. He spent twenty-seven years inside this house before he left for London at the age of twenty-seven, and the man who walked out of the door in 1737 would write the first authoritative dictionary of the English language and become the most quoted Englishman of his century after Shakespeare. The house still leans over Market Square, jettied upper storeys overhanging the pavement, a Grade I listed building that has been a museum to him since 1901.

Image: Bs0u10e01 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum: Birth on the Corner

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nessy-Pic, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 Stre...

Image: Nessy-Pic | CC BY-SA 4.0

Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum: The Mortgage of 1739

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bs0u10e01, CC BY 3.0. 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 f...

Image: Bs0u10e01 | CC BY 3.0

Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum: Rooms That Remember Him

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bs0u10e01, CC BY 3.0. 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...

Image: Bs0u10e01 | CC BY 3.0

Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum: A City That Kept Its Son

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leon Hawley, CC BY 3.0. 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 Septembe...

Image: Leon Hawley | CC BY 3.0