DR. JOHNSON’S HOUSE. GOUGH SQUARE.
You may stand in the Square to-night, after twelve at night, when all the windows of all the other houses are dark, as they were in that night of 1752, and look up at the window in which the solitary light burned then, whilst, within, the grief-stricken Johnson sat alone in his study writing down that humble, mournful aspiration, and as you look the same light kindles there and glimmers desolately again for all who have eyes to see it. Nor was this the only record of his sorrow that was written in that room, for you find these notes in his journal a year later:—
“March 28, 1753. I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty’s death, with prayers and tears in the morning. In the evening I prayed for her conditionally, if it were lawful.”
“April 23, 1753. I know not whether I do not too much indulge the vain longings of affection; but I hope they intenerate my heart, and that when I die like my Tetty, this affection will be acknowledged in a happy interview, and that in the meantime I am incited by it to piety. I will, however, not deviate too much from common and received methods of devotion.”
Boswell tells us that he preserved her wedding-ring reverently as long as he lived, keeping it in “a little round wooden box, in the inside of which he pasted a slip of paper, thus inscribed by him in fair characters, as follows:—
‘Eheu!
Eliz. Johnson,
Nupta Jul. 9º, 1736,
Mortua, eheu!
Mart. 17º, 1752.’”
Some thought of her, indeed, rises again and again thereafter in those Prayers and Meditations of his, and so makes this house peculiarly reminiscent of her. Before Mrs. Johnson’s death, Mrs. Anna Williams had become a constant visitor at the house here. She was a poetess in a small way, daughter of a Welsh physician, and was in London having both her eyes treated for cataract. After his wife’s death, Johnson gave Mrs. Williams accommodation in Gough Square whilst her eyes were operated upon; and, the operation failing and complete blindness following it, with his usual big-hearted humanity he allowed her an apartment in this and each of his subsequent homes; and you remember Boswell’s complaint of how his fastidious susceptibilities were outraged by the way in which she felt round the edges of the cups to see if they were full, when she presided over the tea-table. In the same spirit, Johnson gave house-room here also, and elsewhere, to that simplest and most kindly of medical practitioners, Dr. Robert Levett, on whose death, several years later, he wrote the best of his shorter poems.
You get a good idea of his general manner of life in Gough Square from the note that Boswell obtained from Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant, who wrote that on his wife’s death Johnson was “in great affliction. Mrs. Williams was then living in his house, which was in Gough Square. He was busy with the Dictionary. Mr. Shiels and some others of the gentlemen who had formerly written for him used to come about the house. He had then little for himself, but frequently sent money to Mr. Shiels when in distress. The friends who visited him at that time were chiefly Dr. Bathurst, and Mr. Diamond, an apothecary in Cork Street, Burlington Gardens, with whom he and Mrs. Williams generally dined every Sunday. There were also Mr. Cave; Dr. Hawkesworth; Mr. Rydal, merchant on Tower Hill; Mrs. Masters, the poetess, who lived with Mr. Cave; Mrs. Carter; and sometimes Mrs. Macaulay; also Mrs. Gardiner, wife of a tallow-chandler on Snow Hill, not in the learned way, but a worthy good woman; Mr. (now Sir Joshua) Reynolds; Mr. Miller; Mr. Dodsley; Mr. Bouquet; Mr. Payne, of Paternoster Row, bookseller; Mr. Strachan the printer; the Earl of Orrery; Lord Southwell; Mr. Garrick.”