Dr Johnson’s House

This wonderful house, built in 1700, is a rare surviving example of a Georgian city mansion. All around it today huge office blocks loom and tiny Gough Sq can be quite hard to find as a result. The house has been preserved, of course, as it was the home of the great Georgian wit Samuel Johnson, the author of the first serious dictionary of the English language (transcribed by a team of six clerks in the attic) and the man who proclaimed ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’. The museum doesn’t exactly crackle with Dr Johnson’s immortal wit, yet it’s still an atmospheric and worthy place to visit, with its antique furniture and artefacts from Johnson’s life (his brick from the Great Wall of China must surely be the oddest of these). The numerous paintings of Dr Johnson and his associates, including his black manservant Francis Barber and his clerk and biographer James Boswell, are, sadly, not particularly revealing of the great minds who would have considered the building a home from home. A more revealing object is a chair from Johnson’s local pub, the Old Cock Tavern on Fleet St. There’s a rather ponderous video, plus leaflets telling how the lexicographer and six clerks (Boswell wasn’t among them, yet) developed the first English dictionary in the house’s attic during the period he lived here from 1748 to 1759. Children will love the Georgian dressing-up clothes on the top floor, and the temporary exhibits in the attic look at other aspects of 18th-century life. Across Gough Sq is a statue of Johnson’s cat, Hodge, sitting above the full quote explaining why when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life: ‘For there is in London all that life can afford.’