FACSIMILE, MUCH REDUCED IN SIZE, OF THE LAST PAGE OF MRS. THRALE’S “JOURNAL OF A TOUR IN WALES,” UNDERTAKEN IN THE COMPANY OF DR. JOHNSON IN THE SUMMER OF 1774.
Mr. Broadley took an ardent interest in everything that related to Mrs. Thrale, and published, a few years ago, her “Journal of the Welsh Tour,” undertaken in the summer of 1774. Dr. Johnson also kept a diary on this journey, but his is bald and fragmentary, while that of the lady is an intimate and consecutive narrative. The original manuscript volume, in its original dark, limp leather binding is before me. It comprises ninety-seven pages in Mrs. Thrale’s beautiful hand, beginning, “On Tuesday, 5th July, 1774, I began my journey through Wales. We set out from Streatham in our coach and four post horses, accompanied by Dr. Johnson and our eldest daughter. Baretti went with us as far as London, where we left him and hiring fresh horses they carried us to the Mitre at Barnet”; and so on throughout the whole tour, until she made this, her final entry:—
September 30th. When I rose Mr. Thrale informed me that the Parliament was suddenly dissolved and that all the world was bustle; that we were to go to Southwark, not to Streatham, and canvass away. I heard the first part of this report with pleasure, the latter with pain; nothing but a real misfortune could, I think, affect me so much as the thoughts of going to Town thus to settle for the Winter before I have had any enjoyment of Streatham at all; and so all my hopes of pleasure blow away. I thought to have lived in Streatham in quiet and comfort, have kissed my children and cuffed them by turns, and had a place always for them to play in; and here I must be shut up in that odious dungeon, where nobody will come near me, the children are to be sick for want of air, and I am never to see a face but Mr. Johnson’s. Oh, what a life that is! and how truly do I abhor it! At noon however I saw my Girls and thought Susan vastly improved. At evening I saw my Boys and liked them very well too. How much is there always to thank God for! But I dare not enjoy poor Streatham lest I should be forced to quit it.
I value this little volume highly, as who, interested in the lady, would not? It is an unaffected record of a journey, of interesting people who met interesting people wherever they went, and its publication by Broadley was a pious act. But that the Broadley volume, published a few years ago, gets its chief value from the sympathetic introduction by Thomas Seccombe, must, I think, be admitted.
It is no longer the fashion to “blush as well as weep for Mrs. Thrale.” This silly phrase is Macaulay’s. Rather, as Sir Walter Raleigh remarked to me in going over some of her papers in my library, “What a dear, delightful person she was! I have always wanted to meet her.” In the future, what may be written of Mrs. Thrale will be written in better taste. At this time of day why should she be attacked because she married a man who did not speak English as his mother tongue, and who was a musician rather than a brewer? One may be an enthusiastic admirer of Dr. Johnson—I confess I am—and yet keep a warm place in one’s heart for the kindly and charming little woman. Admit that she was not the scholar she thought she was, that she was “inaccurate in narration”: what matters it? She was a woman of character, too. She was not overpowered by Dr. Johnson, as was Fanny Burney, to such a degree that at last she came to write like him, only more so. Mrs. Thrale, by her own crisp, vigorous English, influenced the Doctor finally to write as he talked, naturally, without that undue elaboration which was characteristic of his earlier style.
If Johnson mellowed under the benign influence of the lady, she was the gainer in knowledge, especially in such knowledge as comes from books. It was Mrs. Thrale rather than her husband who formed the Streatham library. Her taste was robust, she baulked at no foreign language, but set about to study it. I have never seen a book from her library—and I have seen many—which was not filled with notes written in her clear and beautiful hand. These volumes, like the books which Lamb lent Coleridge, and which he returned with annotations tripling their value, are occasionally offered for sale in those old book-shops where our resolutions not to be tempted are writ in so much water; or they turn up at auction sales and astonish the uninitiated by the prices they bring.