The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections

by A. Edward Newton

Sir [she wrote]; I have this morning received from you so rough a letter in reply to one which was both tenderly and respectfully written, that I am forced to desire the conclusion of a correspondence which I can bear to continue no longer. The birth of my second husband is not meaner than that of my first; his sentiments are not meaner; his profession is not meaner; and his superiority in what he professes acknowledged by all mankind. Is it want of fortune, then, that is ignominious? The character of the man I have chosen has no other claim to such an epithet. The religion to which he has been always a zealous adherent will, I hope, teach him to forgive insults he has not deserved; mine will, I hope, enable me to bear them at once with dignity and patience. To hear that I have forfeited my fame is indeed the greatest insult I ever yet received. My fame is as unsullied as snow, or I should think it unworthy of him who must henceforth protect it.

Johnson, she says, wrote once more, but the letter has never come to light; the correspondence, which had continued over a period of twenty years, was at an end. An interesting letter of Thomas Hardy on this subject came into my possession recently. In it he says, “I am in full sympathy with Mrs. Thrale under the painful opposition to her marriage with Piozzi. The single excuse for Johnson’s letter to her on that occasion would be that he was her lover himself, and hoped to win her, otherwise it was simply brutal.” I do not think that Johnson was her lover, and I am afraid I must agree that Johnson was brutal. In extenuation I urge that he was a very weary, sick old man.

At the time Mrs. Thrale’s detractors were many and her defenders few. Two dates were given as to the time of her marriage, which started some wandering lies, much to her disadvantage. The fact is that both dates were correct, for she was married to Piozzi once by a Catholic and several weeks later by a Church of England ceremony. In her journal she writes under date of July 25, 1784, “I am now the wife of my faithful Piozzi ... he loves me and will be mine forever.... The whole Christian Church, Catholic and Protestant, all are witnesses.”

For two years they traveled on the continent. No marriage could have been happier. Piozzi, by comparison with his wife, is a rather shadowy person. He is described as being a handsome man, a few months older than she, with gentle, pleasant, unaffected manners, very eminent in his profession; nor was he, as was so frequently stated, a man without a fortune. The difference in their religious views was the cause of no difficulty. Each respected the religion of the other and kept his or her own. “I would preserve my religious opinions inviolate at Milan as my husband did his at London,” is an entry in her journal.

She was staying at Milan when tidings of Johnson’s death reached her. All of her correspondents hastened to apprize her of the news. I have a long letter to her from one Henry Johnson,—who he was, I am unable to determine,—written one day after the funeral, describing the procession forming in Bolt Court; the taking of mourning coaches in Fleet Street and “proceeding to Westminster Abbey where the corpse was laid close to the remains of David Garrick, Esquire.”

That Madam Piozzi, as we must now call her, was deeply affected, we cannot doubt. Only a few days before the news of his death reached her, we find her writing to a friend, urging him not to neglect Dr. Johnson, saying, “You will never see any other mortal so wise or so good. I keep his picture constantly before me.” Before long she heard, too, that several of her old friends had engaged to write his life, and Piozzi urged her to be one of the number. The result was the “Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson during the last Twenty Years of his Life.” It is not a great work, but considering the circumstances under which it was written, her journals being locked up in England while she was writing at Florence, greater faults than were found in it could have been overlooked. It provided Boswell with some good anecdotes for his great book, and it antedated Hawkins’s “Life of Johnson” by about a year.

The public appetite was whetted by the earlier publication of Boswell’s “Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides,” in which he had given a taste of his quality, and the “Anecdotes” appeared at a time when everything which related to Johnson had a great vogue. The book was published by Cadell, and so great was the demand, that the first edition was exhausted on the day of publication; so that, when the King sent for a copy in the evening, on the day of its publication, the publisher had to beg for one from a friend.

Bozzy and Piozzi thus became rival biographers in the opinion of the public, and the public got what pleasure it could out of numerous caricatures and satires with which the bookshops abounded, many of these being amusing and some simply scurrilous, after the fashion of the time.

Meanwhile, the Piozzis had become tired of travel and wished again to enjoy the luxury of a home. “Prevail on Mr. Piozzi to settle in England,” had been Dr. Johnson’s parting advice. It was not difficult to do so, and on their return, after a short stay in London, they took up residence in Bath.

Here Madam Piozzi, encouraged by the success of the “Anecdotes,” devoted herself to the publication of two volumes of “Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson.” Their preparation for the press was somewhat crude: it consisted largely in making omissions here and there, and substituting asterisks for proper names; but the copyright was sold for five hundred pounds, and the letters showed, if indeed it was necessary to show, how intimate had been the relationship between the Doctor and herself.