Mr. Reade prints the whole of the marriage settlement upon the union of Johnson’s mother and father. It is a very elaborate document, and suggests the undoubted prosperity of the parties at the time. The husband was fifty, the bride thirty-seven. Samuel was not born until three years and three months after the marriage. The pair frequently in early married
life received assistance by convenient deaths as the following extracts from wills indicate:—
Cornelius Ford of Packwood in the Co. of Warwick.
I give and bequeath unto my son-in-law Michaell Johnson the sum of five pounds, and to his wife my daughter five and twenty pounds.
Proved May 1, 1709.
Jane Ford of Old Turnford, widow of Joseph Ford.
I do will and appoint that my son Cornelius Ford do and shall pay to my brother-in-law, Mr. Michael Johnson and his wife and their trustees, the sum of 200 pounds which is directed by his late father’s Will to be paid to me and in lieu of so much moneys which my said late husband received in trust for my said brother Johnson and his wife.
Proved at Worcester, October 2, 1722.
Then “good cousin Harriotts” does not forget them:—
I give and bequeath to my cousin Sarah the wife of Michael Johnson the like sum of 40 pounds for her own separate use, and one pair of my best flaxen sheets and pillow coats, a large pewter dish and a dozen of pewter plates, provided that her husband doth at the same time give the like bond to my executor to permit his wife to dispose of the same at her will and pleasure.
Elizabeth Harriotts of Trysall in Staff.,
October 23, 1726.
But I must leave this fascinating volume. I cannot find time to tell you all it has to say about the Porter family. Mr. Reade is as informative when treating of the Porters, of Mrs. Johnson and her daughter Lucy, as he is with the family trees of which I have spoken.
I hasten on to Dr. Hill’s Life, with which I am only concerned here at the point where it is affected by Mr. Reade’s book. The reflection inevitably arises that it is well-nigh impossible efficiently to do work involving research unless one has an income derived from other sources. Your historian in proportion to the value of his work must be a rich man, and so must the biographer. Good as Brother Birkbeck Hill’s work was, it would have been better if he had had more money. He might have had many of these wills and other documents copied, upon the securing of which Mr. Reade must have expended such very large sums. Dr. Hill was fully alive to this. “If I had not some private means,” he wrote to a friend in 1897, “I could never edit Johnson and Boswell; but I do not get so well paid as a carpenter.” As a matter of fact, I find that he lost exactly £3
by publishing Dr. Johnson: his Friends and his Critics. He made £320 by the first four years’ sale of the “Boswell.” This £320, including American rights, made the bulk of his payments for his many years’ work, and the book has not yet gone into a second edition. I think 2,000 were printed. There were between 40,000 and 50,000 copies of Croker’s editions sold, so that we must not be too boastful as to the improved taste of the present age. £320 is a mere bagatelle to numbers of our present writers of utterly foolish fiction. Several of them have been known to spend double that sum on a single motor-car. In connexion with this matter I cannot refrain from giving one passage from a letter of Brother Hill’s:—
My old friend D--- lamented that the two new volumes (of my Johnson Miscellanies) are so dear as to be above his reach. The net price is a guinea. On Sunday he had eight glasses of hollands and seltzer—a shilling each, a pint of stout and some cider, besides half a dozen cigars or so. Two days’ abstinence from cigars and liquor would have paid for my book.
Mrs. Crump, who writes her father’s life, has expressed regret to me that there is so little in