Recently, I visited Dr. Johnson’s home in a small courtyard just off London’s former centre of journalism, Fleet Street.

Samuel Johnson is a titan of English letters. Every Briton should know him, which means that – I highly suspect – that the only people who do are academics and the literary minded. His reputation, of course, rests on his famous Dictionary. It wasn’t the first of its kind to exist, but was the best.

However, there is much more to Johnson than the Dictionary. He was an erudite man, and a moral one; he was a kind friend and benefactor. He was also very self-critical, particularly in spiritual matters, and suffered a great deal in later years from ill health.

I learnt all these things from the book that brought me to the house: The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr. Johnson’s Guide to Life by Henry Hitchings. I saw this book favourably mentioned on social media c.2018 and bought a copy. Towards the end of last year, I finally started reading it. I’m glad I did. Samuel Johnson is very much a man worth knowing.

I will never read as much as him, or be as smart; I’ll never write anything as significant as him, or be as well known. All that, however, is fine. For what attracts me to Johnson is not his literary genius but the seriousness with which he took the moral life. How to live out my faith: this question is ever on my mind. Johnson is someone I can learn from, and find comfort in, because the path that I am on is one that he walked before me.

By-the-bye, I like the idea of walking in Dr. Johnson’s footsteps. It makes me think that after I die, perhaps I will wake up in heaven (God willing!), cross the stream ahead of me, and find a gentleman taking a rest on a fallen tree: Dr. Johnson. Our paths will finally cross, now the friendship of eternity can begin.

That is a very nice thought, though it seems too incredible that an obscure man from the twenty-first century will ever meet such a famous figure from the eighteenth. Surely, the latter will be ever surrounded by the many friends he made in his own time. That’s the beauty of heaven, though: however, we imagine it to be, it will be so much more, and so much better.

I mentioned above that Dr. Johnson’s reputation rests with his Dictionary. Boswell’s biography The Life of Johnson also has a lot to do with it. Did you know, however, for I didn’t, that Johnson was also a cat lover? In the courtyard outside Johnson’s house is a statue of one of them: Hodge. While in Johnson’s house, I was in awe. When I saw Hodge, however, the great man’s humanity came spilling out. He liked cats: just like me! Now, if we meet by that stream, I know we will have something to talk about: no need to feel inferior in his presence. In heaven, no one will feel or be inferior to anyone else, but I am delighted to have this point of feline connection with Johnson all the same.