But I must pass on to the other branch: the family of Dr. Johnson’s mother. Here Dr. Johnson did himself a great injustice, for he had a genuine right to count his mother’s “an old family,” although the term is in any case relative. At any rate he could carry his pedigree back to 1620. “In the morning,” says Boswell, “we had talked of old families, and the respect due to them. Johnson said—
“‘Sir, you have a right to that kind of respect, and are arguing for yourself. I am for supporting the principle, and I am disinterested in doing it, as I have no such right.’”
Nevertheless, Boswell, in this opening chapter, refers to the mother as “Sarah Ford, descended of an ancient race of substantial yeomanry in Warwickshire,” and Johnson’s epitaph upon his mother’s tomb describes her as “of the ancient family of Ford.” Thus one is considerably bewildered in attempting to reconcile Johnson’s attitude. The only one of his family for whom he seems to have had a good word was Cornelius Harrison, of whom, writing to Mrs. Thrale, he said that he was “perhaps the only one of my relations who ever rose in fortune
above penury or in character above neglect.” This Cornelius was the son of John Harrison, who had married Johnson’s aunt, Phœbe Ford. Johnson’s account of Uncle John in his Annals is not flattering, but he was the son of a Rector of Pilborough, whose father was Sir Richard Harrison, one of the gentlemen of the King’s Bedchamber, and a personality of a kind. Cornelius, the reputable cousin, died in 1748, but his descendants seem to have been a poor lot, whatever his ancestors may have been. Mr. Reade traces their history with all the relentlessness of the genealogist.
Johnson’s great-grandfather was one Henry Ford, a yeoman in Birmingham. One of his sons, Henry, Johnson’s grand-uncle, was born in 1628. He owned property at West Bromwich and elsewhere, and was a fellow of Clifford’s Inn, London. Then we come to Cornelius Ford—“Cornelius Ford, gentleman,” he is styled in his marriage settlement. Cornelius died four months before Samuel Johnson was born. Cornelius had a sister Mary, who married one Jesson, and their only son, I may mention incidentally, entered at Pembroke College in 1666,
sixty years before his second-cousin, our Samuel, entered the same college. Another cousin by marriage was a Mrs. Harriots, to whom Johnson refers in his Annals, and also in his Prayers and Meditations. The only one of Cornelius Ford’s family referred to in the biographies is Joseph Ford, the father of the notorious Parson Ford, Johnson’s cousin, of whom he several times speaks. Joseph was a physician of eminence who settled at Stourbridge. He married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Hickman. He was a witness to the marriage of his sister Sarah to Michael Johnson. There can be no doubt but that the presence of Dr. Ford and his family at Stourbridge accounts for Johnson being sent there to school in 1725. He stayed in the house of his cousin Cornelius Ford, not as Boswell says his uncle Cornelius, at Pedmore, about a mile from Stourbridge. He walked in every day to the Grammar School. A connexion of the boy, Gregory Hickman, was residing next to the Grammar School. A kinsman of Johnson and a descendant of Hickman, Dr. Freer, still lives in the house. I met him at Lichfield recently, and he has sent me a photograph of the very house, which stands to-day much
as it did when Johnson visited it, and wrote at twenty-two, a sonnet to Dorothy Hickman “playing at the Spinet.” Dorothy was one of Johnson’s three early loves, with Ann Hector and Olivia Lloyd. Dorothy married Dr. John Turtin and had an only child, Dr. Turtin, the celebrated physician who attended Goldsmith in his last illness.
I have not time to go through the record of all Dr. Johnson’s uncles on the maternal side, and do full justice to Mr. Reade’s industry and mastery of detail. I may, however, mention incidentally that the uncle who was hanged, if one was, must have been one of his father’s brothers, for to the Fords that distinction does not seem to have belonged. Much that is entertaining is related of the cousin Parson Ford, who, after sharing with the famous Earl of Chesterfield in many of his profligacies, received from his lordship the Rectory of South Luffenham. There is no evidence, however, that Chesterfield ever knew that his at one time chaplain and boon companion was cousin of the man who wrote him the most famous of letters.
The mother of Cornelius Ford was a Crowley,
and this brings Johnson into relationship with London city worthies, for Mrs. Ford’s brother was Sir Ambrose Crowley, Kt., Alderman, of London, the original of Addison’s Jack Anvil. One of Sir Ambrose Crowley’s daughters married Humphrey Parsons, sometime M.P. for London and twice Lord Mayor. Thus we see that during the very years of Johnson’s most painful struggle in London one of his distant cousins or connexions was Chief Magistrate of this City. Another connexion, Elizabeth Crowley, was married in 1724 at Westminster Abbey to John, tenth Lord St. John of Bletsoe. “Here are ancestors for you, Mistress,” Dr. Johnson might have said to Mrs. Thrale if he had only known—if he had had a genealogist at his elbow as well as a pushful biographer.