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BIOGRAPHY: Samuel Johnson: A Life By David Nokes Faber Faber, 415pp, £25

IN 1752, A FULL half-century before slavery was abolished in Britain, Samuel Johnson took on a freed black slave as his manservant. Francis Barber had been entrusted to him by an English planter with connections in Jamaica. By employing Barber, Dr Johnson could put into practice Britain’s fundamental principle of liberty (as he saw it) and realise the idea of “imperial trusteeship” for the betterment of “native societies”.

His hatred of slavery was genuine. Sugar-rich Jamaica, in Dr Johnson’s formula, was “a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness”, and slavery a stigma on the English-speaking peoples. Earlier he had shocked a dinner party in Oxford by proposing a toast to “the next insurrection of Negros” in the British Caribbean.

According to David Nokes, Barber waited on Dr Johnson at table, answered his door and provided him with a distraction from his habitual low spirits. Dr Johnson, for his part, indulged his West Indian charge in a way that few 18th-century Tories would have considered proper. He refused to let Barber buy fish for his cat, Hodge, as he did not want Barber to have to attend on an animal; he paid for his education and, after 30 years of service, made him the principal beneficiary of his will. In gratitude, the Jamaican named his first son Samuel and later settled in Johnson’s birthplace in the English midlands, where he achieved some note as a Methodist minister. Barber’s descendants still live in the midlands – but they are all white now.

Dr Johnson was born in Lichfield to impoverished bookseller parents. To mark the tricentenary of his birth there, in 1709, Nokes has written a biography distinguished by Johnsonian clarity and verve. In captivating detail it reveals a progressive liberal spirit beneath the man’s gruff John Bull exterior.

Not only had Dr Johnson favoured a “Negro” in his will, but he lost no opportunity to trumpet his anti-imperialist sentiments in pamphlets and prefaces. The usefulness of the British colonies in America was questionable, said Dr Johnson, who may even have favoured Charles Edward Stuart’s attempt in 1745 to wrest the British crown from the Hanoverian monarchy. Such non-conformity was unusual in a Tory Anglican, says Nokes.

Beneath the large, combative personality, however, was a fear-ridden soul plagued by bouts of depression ("the black dog"), loneliness and thoughts of suicide. Samuel Beckett, for one, recognised a kindred spirit, and in 1935 he made a pilgrimage from Dublin to Lichfield. Afterwards he was inspired to write a play about Dr Johnson's relationship with the much younger Mrs Hester Thrale, the wife of the Italian music teacher Gabriel Piozzi. The play Human Wishes(after Johnson's poem The Vanity of Human Wishes) was never completed, yet all his life Beckett remained haunted by "the Great Cham", and he even contemplated a dramatic monologue between Dr Johnson and his cat, in which cats other than Hodge might enter, but no other human beings.

In lively prose Nokes portrays the teeming humanity around Dr Johnson's house on Fleet Street in London, where six amanuenses helped him to complete his great Dictionary of the English Languagein 1755. There had been other English dictionaries before Dr Johnson's, notably Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaediaof 1728, yet Dr Johnson's was the first that could be read with pleasure, and it helped to establish a standard English at a time when "Britishness" was a fledgling but important idea. Begun in 1747, the project swelled into a lexical juggernaut of more than 42,000 entries, some fortified by a subversive irony and not a little clotted nonsense.

The verb "Frenchify", for example, is equated with "fopdoodles" and other wiseacres. Dr Johnson felt he was in competition with the French, who were busy compiling their own dictionary-cyclopaedia under the aegis of the rationalist philosophers Diderot and d'Alembert. Like the encyclopédistes, he believed that the pursuit of knowledge was a universal pleasure and that clarity of expression was the writer's sovereign duty. From A to Z, the dictionary took eight years to compile; progress was hampered by Dr Johnson's recurrent melancholy. Nothing of such magnitude had ever been attempted in Britain; it remains a towering work of 18th-century literature.

With his Lives of the English Poets, moreover, Samuel Johnson effectively invented biography as a genre, says Nokes, and went on to star in one of the greatest biographies ever written, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. Biography was a competitive business even then, however. When Dr Johnson died, in 1784, at the age of 75, Boswell had spent 20 years gathering material. He set to work immediately, but his rival Hester Thrale pipped him to the bookstalls with her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson.

Throughout, David Nokes highlights the personal vanities and animosities that distracted (and sometimes divided) Dr Johnson and his circle from their task of writing for Grub Street. Disagreements flared among printers, etchers, compositors, bookbinders, typesetters and, notably, the dictionary’s fair-weather patron, the earl of Chesterfield, whom Dr Johnson came to see as a dolt puffed up by vanity and self-interest. Engagingly written, this is a charming book, by turns witty and erudite, like its subject.

Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi is published by Vintage and his account of contemporary Jamaica,The Dead Yard , by Faber and Faber