although my admiration was moderated a little when I came across the statement of one Brother that Johnson’s proposal for an edition of Shakspere “came to nothing”; and the statement of another that “Goldsmith’s failings were almost as great and as ridiculous as Boswell’s;” while my bibliographical ire was awakened by the extraordinary declaration in an article on “Dr. Johnson’s Library,” that a first folio edition of Shakspere might have realized £250 in the year 1785. Still, I recognize the talent that illuminated the Club in those closing years of the last century. Happily for us, who love good comradeship, most of the giants of those days are still in evidence with their polished armour and formidable spears.
What can I possibly say that has not already been said by one or other of the Brethren? Well, I have put together these few remarks in the hopes that no one of you has seen two books that are in my hands, the first, The Reades of Blackwood Hill, with Some Account of Dr. Johnson’s Ancestry, by Aleyn Lyell Reade; the other, The Life and Letters of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, by his daughter Mrs. Crump. The first of these
is privately printed, although it may be bought by any one of the Brethren for a couple of guineas. As far as I am able to learn, Brother Augustine Birrell is the only one of the Brethren who has as yet purchased a copy. The other book, our Brother Birkbeck Hill’s biography, is to be issued next week by Mr. Edward Arnold, who has kindly placed an early copy at my disposal. In both these volumes there is much food for reflection for all good Johnsonians. Dr. Johnson’s ancestry, it may be, makes little appeal to the crowd, but it will to the Brethren. There is no more favourite subject for satire than the tendency to minute study of an author and his antecedents. But the lover of that author knows the fascination of the topic. He can forgive any amount of zeal. I confess that personally I stand amazed at the variety and interest of Mr. Reade’s researches. Let me take a sample case of his method before coming to the main issue. In the opening pages of Boswell’s Johnson there is some account of Mr. Michael Johnson, the father. The most picturesque anecdote told of Johnson Senior is that concerning a young woman of Leek in Staffordshire, who
while he served his apprenticeship there conceived a passion for him, which he did not return. She followed him to Lichfield, where she took lodgings opposite to the house in which he lived, and indulged her hopeless flame. Ultimately she died of love and was buried in the Cathedral at Lichfield, when Michael Johnson put a stone over her grave. This pathetic romance has gone unchallenged by all Boswell’s editors, even including our prince of editors, Dr. Birkbeck Hill. Mr. Reade, it seems to me, has completely shattered the story, which, as all Johnsonian students know, was obtained by Boswell from Miss Anna Seward. Mr. Reade is able to show that Michael Johnson had been settled in Lichfield for at least eleven years before the death of Elizabeth Blaney, that for five years she had been the much appreciated domestic in a household in that city. Her will indicates moreover a great affection for her mistress and for that mistress’s son; she leaves the boy a gold watch and his mother the rest of her belongings. The only connexion that Michael Johnson would seem to have had with the woman was that he and his brother were
called in after her decease to make an inventory of her little property. I think that these little facts about Mistress Blaney, her five years’ residence at Lichfield apparently in a most comfortable position, her omission of Michael Johnson from her will, and the fact that he had been in Lichfield at least six months before she arrived, are conclusive.
There is another picturesque fact about Michael Johnson that Mr. Reade has brought to light. It would seem that twenty years before his marriage to Sarah Ford, he had been on the eve of marriage to a young woman at Derby, Mary Neyld; but the marriage did not take place, although the marriage bond was drawn out. Mary was the daughter of Luke Neyld, a prominent tradesman of Derby; she was twenty-three years of age at the time and Michael twenty-nine. Even Mr. Reade’s industry has not been able to discover for us why at the very last moment the marriage was broken off. It explains, however, why Michael Johnson married late in life and his melancholia. The human romance that Mr. Reade has unveiled has surely a certain interest for Johnsonians, for had Michael
Johnson brought his first love affair to a happy conclusion, we should not have had the man described twenty years later as “possessed of a vile melancholy,” who, when his wife’s tongue wagged too much, got upon his horse and rode away. There would have been no Samuel Johnson, and there would have been no Johnson Club—a catastrophe which the human mind finds it hard to conceive of. Two years after the breaking off of her engagement with Michael Johnson, I may add, Mary Neyld married one James Warner.
Mr. Reade also calls in question another statement of Boswell’s, that Michael Johnson was really apprenticed at Leek in Staffordshire; our only authority for this also is the excellent Anna Seward. Further, it is sufficiently curious that the names of two Samuel Johnsons are recorded as being buried in one of the churches at Lichfield, one before our Samuel came into the world, the other three years later: of these, one died in 1654, the other in 1712. But these points, although of a certain interest, have nothing to do with Dr. Johnson’s ancestry. Now before we left our homes this evening,
each member of the Johnson Brotherhood, as is his custom, turned up Brother Birkbeck Hill’s invaluable index to see what Johnson had to say upon the subject of ancestry. We know that the Doctor was very keen upon the founding of a family; that when Mr. Thrale lost his only son Johnson’s sympathies went out to him in a double way, and perhaps in the greater degree because as he said to Boswell, “Sir, don’t you know how you yourself think? Sir, he wished to propagate his name.” Johnson himself, Boswell tells us, had no pretensions to blood. “I here may say,” he said, “that I have great merit in being zealous for subordination and the honours of birth; for I can hardly tell who was my grandfather.” Johnson further informed Mrs. Thrale that he did not delight in talking much of his family: “There is little pleasure,” he says, “in relating the anecdotes of beggary.” He constantly deprecated his origin. According to Miss Seward, he told his wife before he married her that he was of mean extraction; but the letter in which Miss Seward gives her version of Johnson’s courtship is worth recalling, although I do not believe a single word of it:—
The rustic prettiness and artless manners of her daughter, the present Mrs. Lucy Porter, had won Johnson’s youthful heart, when she was upon a visit at my grandfather’s in Johnson’s school-days. Disgusted by his unsightly form, she had a personal aversion to him, nor could the beautiful verses he addressed to her teach her to endure him. The nymph at length returned to her parents at Birmingham, and was soon forgotten. Business taking Johnson to Birmingham on the death of his own father, and calling upon his coy mistress there, he found her father dying. He passed all his leisure hours at Mr. Porter’s, attending his sick bed, and in a few months after his death, asked Mrs. Johnson’s consent to marry the old widow. After expressing her surprise at a request so extraordinary—“No, Sam, my willing consent you will never have to so preposterous a union. You are not twenty-five, and she is turned fifty. If she had any prudence, this request had never been made to me. Where are your means of subsistence? Porter has died poor, in consequence of his wife’s expensive habits. You have great talents, but, as yet, have turned them into no profitable channel.” “Mother, I have not deceived Mrs. Porter: I have told her the worst of me; that I am of mean extraction; that I have no money, and that I have had an uncle hanged. She replied, that she valued no one more or less for his descent; that she had no more money than myself; and that, although she had not had a relation hanged, she had fifty who deserved hanging.”