A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

It will strike a good many modern readers of the account of this and other transactions that if it was Perkins who saved the brewery for Mr. Thrale, it was Mrs. Thrale who saved Perkins for the brewery. Possibly it was her prompt gift of the silver plate to Mrs. Perkins that induced this splendid manager to pocket the insult of the beggarly two hundred guineas given to him by Mrs. Thrale—though this was double the amount authorised by the “master.” Thrale never sufficiently valued the services of Perkins. If he had had any gratitude in his composition he would never have made Johnson one of his executors. What a trial it must have been to the competent man of business to see Johnson lumbering about the place with a pen behind his ear and an ink-pot suspended from a button of his coat, getting in the way of everybody, and yet feeling himself quite equal to any business emergency that might crop up. He felt himself equal to anything—even to improve upon the auctioneer's style in appraising the value of the whole concern. “Beyond the dreams of avarice” remains as the sole classic phrase born beneath the shadow of a brew-house.

In the matter of the premium to Perkins, Thrale should have felt that he had a treasure in his wife, to say nothing of all that she had done for him upon another occasion, involving a terrible sacrifice. A quarrel had broken out among the clerks at the brewery, which even the generalship of Perkins was unable to mollify. Had Mrs. Thrale been an ordinary woman she would not have jeopardised her own life and the life of her child—her thirteenth—in her husband's interests. As it was, however, she felt that the duty was imposed on her to settle the difficulties in the counting-house, and she did so; but only after many sleepless nights and the sacrifice of her child. “The men were reconciled,” she wrote, “and my danger accelerated their reconcilement.”

If Henry Thrale was deficient in the best characteristics of a business man, his qualifications to shine socially can scarcely be regarded as abundant. There were stories of his having been a gay dog in his youth, but assuredly he and gaiety had long been strangers when he married his wife, and upon no occasion afterwards could he be so described even by the most indulgent of his friends; so that one rather inclines to the belief that the dull dog must have been a dull puppy. We know what his eldest daughter was, and we are convinced that the nature of that priggish, dignified, and eminently disagreeable young lady was inherited from her father. In Miss Thrale as a girl one feels that one is looking at Henry Thrale as a boy. The only story that survives of those mythical gay days with which he was accredited is that relating to the arrival of the Gunnings to take London by storm. It was said that he and Murphy thought to make these exquisite creatures the laughing-stock of the town by introducing them to a vulgar hanger-on of Murphy, in the character of a wealthy man of title and distinction. Possibly the two young men were put up to play this disgraceful prank upon the Gunnings by some jealous female associate; but however this may be, it not only failed most ignominiously, it recoiled upon the jesters themselves, for Mrs. Gunning, herself the sister of a nobleman, and destined to become the mother-in-law of two dukes and the grandmother of two more—the parent of a peeress in her own right, and an uncommonly shrewd Irishwoman into the bargain—“smoaked,” as the slang of the period had it, the trick, and her footman bundled the trio into the street.

The story may be true; but as both the Gunning girls were married in 1752, and Thrale did not meet Hester Lynch Salusbury till 1763, it was an old story then, and it was not remembered against him except by the Duchess of Hamilton. If it represents the standard of his adolescent wildness, we cannot but think that his youth was less meteoric than his wife believed it to be. At any rate, we do not know much about his early life, but we do know a great deal about his latter years, and it is impossible to believe that his nature underwent a radical change within a year or two of his marriage.

He became the host of a large number of the most notable people of that brilliant period at which he lived, and we perceive from the copious accounts that survive of the Streatham gatherings that he was greatly respected by all his visitors. He never said anything that was worth recording, and he never did anything memorable beyond stopping Johnson when the latter was becoming more than usually offensive to his fellow-guests. He had no ear for music any more than Johnson had, and it does not appear that he cared any more for painting, although he became a splendid patron of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he commissioned to paint several portraits of his distinguished friends for the decoration of the library at Streatham. To his munificence in this respect the world owes its finest portraits of Goldsmith, Burke, Garrick, the painter himself, and Mrs. Thrale.

The debt which we feel we owe to Thrale on this account is, however, somewhat discounted when we learn that this enthusiastic patron of art never paid the painter for his work. He left the pictures and the obligation to pay for them as a legacy to his widow—and to pay for them at more than the current rate for each into the bargain. Sir Joshua Reynolds was as good a man of business as Thrale was an indifferent one. At the time of his painting the portraits his price for a three-quarter-length picture was £35, but in the course of a year or two he felt it necessary to charge £50 for the same size, and this was the price which the unfortunate widow had to pay for her husband's pose as the munificent patron of the Arts.

Men of the stamp of Thrale usually have no vices.

They are highly respected. If they had a vice or two they would be beloved. He had a solitary failing, but it did not win for him the affection of any one: it was gluttony. For years of his life he gave himself up to the coarsest form of indulgence. He was not a gourmet: he did not aim at the refinements of the table or at those daintinesses of cuisine which in the days of intemperate eaters and drinkers proved so fatally fascinating to men of many virtues; no, his was the vice of the trough. He ate for the sake of eating, unmindful of the nature of the dish so long as it was plentiful enough to keep him employed for an hour or two.

The dinner-table of the famous Streatham Park must have been a spectacle for some of the philosophers who sat round it. We know what was the food that Johnson's soul loved, and we know how he was accustomed to partake of it. He rioted in pork, and in veal baked with raisins, and when he sat down to some such dainty he fed like a wild animal. He used his fingers as though they were claws, tearing the flesh from the bone in his teeth, and swallowing it not wholly without sound. It is not surprising to learn that his exertions caused the veins in his forehead to swell and the beads of perspiration to drop from his scholarly brow, nor can any one who has survived this account of his muscular feat at the dinner-table reasonably be amazed to hear that when so engaged, he devoted himself to the work before him to the exclusion of every other interest in life. He was oblivious of anything that was going on around him. He was deaf to any remark made by a neighbour, and for himself articulation was suspended. Doubtless the feeble folk on whom he had been trampling in the drawing-room felt that his peculiarities of feeding, though revolting to the squeamish, were not without a bright side. They had a chance of making a remark at such intervals without being gored—“gored,” it will be remembered, was the word employed by Boswell in playful allusion to the effect of his argumentative powers.

Thanks to the careful habits of some of the guests at this famous house we know what fare was placed before the Gargantuan geniuses at one of these dinners. Here is the carte du jour, “sufficient for twelve,” as the cookery book says: