Fenton House.
In or about 1793 Fenton House was the residence of Philip Robertson Fenton, Esq., formerly an eminent Riga merchant, the son of Thomas Fenton and Elizabeth his wife, of Hunslet, near Leeds. She was the daughter of Sir Charles Hogton, of Hogton Tower, in Lancashire, where the slab above his grave tells us her son ‘was born on the night of the 19th of November, 1731, O.S.,’ she being on a visit to her brother. Mr. Philip Fenton resided at Hampstead for fifteen years, and died there in the seventy-second year of his age. Park, though a contemporary during the latter years of his life, gives us no personal particulars of this gentleman, but we find in the list of subscribers to the ‘History of Hampstead’ the name of C. R. Fenton, Esq., of the India House; and in 1829, at a meeting of copyholders held at the Holly Bush in the July of that year, to take measures to preserve the Heath from further encroachments, a Mr. Fenton presided.
It is therefore probable that some of the family continued to reside at Hampstead.
No doubt Fenton House[84] had had some other name previous to the retired Riga merchant’s occupation of it. Some time in the summer of 1746 Johnson (he was not yet Doctor) had lodgings in Frognal. Park,[85] and subsequently Brewer, who copied him, assure us that the house ‘so dignified’ was the last in Frognal southward—then, in 1813-15, in the occupancy of Benjᵉ Charles Stephenson, Esq., F.S.A., ‘where the greater part, if not the whole, of the “Vanity of Human Wishes,” in imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal, was written.’[86]
I cannot help thinking that the Doctor’s literary reputation, rather than a review of his pecuniary circumstances at this time, led to this assumption, and believe that a much humbler dwelling sufficed for Mrs. Johnson’s summer lodging than that which the well-known and well-to-do architect would choose for his suburban residence; and I ground my belief on the statement of Dr. Johnson himself, who says: ‘I wrote the first seventy lines in the “Vanity of Human Wishes” in that small house beyond the church, Hampstead; the whole number were composed before I threw a single couplet upon paper’—under pressure, probably, of fair, frivolous, pretty Mrs. Johnson’s requirements, real or imaginary, who, with her perpetual ailments and perpetual opium, was always craving for country air—a craving sometimes gratified at great inconvenience to her husband. At the period in question he was so poor that, in order to afford his wife a change of air, he was obliged to dispense with a town lodging for himself; and for want of means to pay the coach fare to Hampstead, the roads to which were dangerous after dark, had nothing left to him but to walk about till daylight, or, as in the old times with Savage, to sleep on a bulk. Under the circumstances, we have to judge whether the expression ‘that small house beyond the church’ could apply to the ‘last house in Frognal southward.’
This reference to the Doctor is as eloquent as a volume in exemplifying the exigeant selfishness of his wife’s character, and the self-sacrificing kindness of his own, for with all his roughness and ‘bear-like growl,’ as Northcote calls it, there was a fine strain of compassionate tenderness in his nature. I am afraid he found material for the ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’ not far from home, for notwithstanding his generous indulgence of his wife’s love of Hampstead air, ‘nice living and unsuitable expense,’ Mrs. Desmoulins[87] tells us that she did not ‘always treat him with becoming complacency.’