Women of History: Selected from the Writings of Standard Authors

by Various

ESTHER JOHNSON.

[BORN 1684. DIED 1728.]
JEFFREY.

STHER Johnson, better known to the reader of Swift's works by the name of Stella, was the child of a London merchant, who died in her infancy, when she went with her mother, who was a friend of Sir William Temple's sister, to reside at Moorpark, where Swift was then domesticated. Some part of the charge of her education devolved upon him, and, though he was twenty years her senior, the interest with which he regarded her appears to have ripened into something as much like affection as could find a place in his selfish bosom. Soon after Sir William Temple's death he got his Irish livings, besides a considerable legacy; and as she had a small independence of her own, it is obvious that there was nothing to prevent their honourable and immediate union. Some cold-blooded vanity or ambition, however, or some politic anticipation of his own possible inconstancy, deterred him from this outward and open course, and led him to an arrangement which was dishonourable and absurd in the beginning, and in the end productive of the most accumulated misery.

He prevailed upon her to remove her residence from the bosom of her own family in England to his immediate neighbourhood in Ireland, where she took lodgings with an elderly companion of the name of Mrs Dingley—avowedly for the sake of his society and protection, and on a footing of intimacy so very strange and unprecedented, that, whenever he left his parsonage-house for England or Dublin, these ladies immediately took possession and occupied it till he came back. A situation so extraordinary and undefined was liable, of course, to a thousand misconstructions, and must have been felt as degrading by any woman of spirit and delicacy; and, accordingly, though the master of this Platonic seraglio seems to have used all manner of paltry and insulting practices to protect a reputation which he had no right to bring into question,—by never seeing her except in the presence of Mrs Dingley, and never sleeping under the same roof with her,—it is certain both that the connection was regarded as indecorous by persons of her own sex, and that she herself felt it to be humiliating and improper.

Accordingly, within two years after her settlement in Ireland, it appears that she encouraged the addresses of a clergyman of the name of Tisdal, between whom and Swift there was a considerable intimacy, and that she would have married him, and thus sacrificed her earliest attachment to her freedom and her honour, had she not been prevented by the private dissuasions of that false friend who did not choose to give up his own claims to her, although he had not the heart or the honour to make her lawfully his own. She was then a blooming beauty of little more than twenty, with fine black hair, delicate features, and a playful and affectionate character. It seems doubtful to us whether she originally felt for Swift anything that could properly be called love; and her willingness to marry another in the first days of their connection, seems almost decisive on the subject; but the ascendancy he had acquired over her mind, and her long habit of submitting her own judgment and inclinations to his, gave him at last an equal power over her, and moulded her pliant affections into too deep and exclusive a devotion.

Even before his appointment to the deanery of St Patrick's, it is utterly impossible to devise any apology for his not marrying her, or allowing her to marry another; the only one he ever appears to have stated himself, viz., the want of a sufficient fortune to sustain the expenses of matrimony, being palpably absurd in the mouth of a man born to nothing, and already more wealthy than nine-tenths of his order; but after he obtained that additional preferment, and was thus ranked among the well-beneficed dignitaries of the Establishment, it was plainly an insult upon common sense to pretend that it was the want of money that prevented him from fulfilling his engagement. Stella was then twenty-six, and he near forty-five, and both had hitherto lived very far within an income that was now more than doubled. That she now expected to be made his wife appears from the care he took in the Journal indirectly to destroy that expectation; and though the awe in which he continually kept her probably prevented her either from complaining or inquiring into the cause, it is now certain that a new attachment, as heartless, as unprincipled, and as fatal in its consequences as either of the others, was at the bottom of this cruel and unpardonable proceeding.

During his residence in London, from 1710 to 1712, regardless of the ties that bound him to Stella, he allowed himself to be engaged by the amiable qualities of Miss Esther Vanhomrigh; and, without explaining the nature of those ties to his new idol, strove by his assiduities to obtain a return of affection, while he studiously concealed from the unhappy Stella the wrong he was consciously doing her. [The consequences of this double connection form one of the most tragic stories in our language—the formal ceremony by which he made Stella his wife, under the cloud of secrecy, and still keeping her from the enjoyment of her rights; the death of Miss Vanhomrigh of a broken heart, and the miserable fate of Stella.] Vanessa (so he called Miss Vanhomrigh) was now dead. The grave had heaped its tranquillising mould on her agitated heart, and given her tormentor assurance that he should no more suffer from her reproaches on earth; and yet, though with her the last pretext was extinguished for refusing to acknowledge the wife he had so infamously abused, we find him, with this dreadful example before his eyes, persisting to withhold from his remaining victim that late and imperfect justice to which her claim was so apparent, and from the denial of which she was sinking before his eyes in sickness and sorrow to the grave. For the sake of avoiding some small awkwardness or inconvenience to himself,—to be secured from the idle talking of those who might wonder why, since they were to marry, they did not marry before, or perhaps merely to retain the object of his regard in more complete subjection and dependence,—he could bear to see her pining year after year in solitude and degradation, and sinking at last to an untimely grave, prepared by his hard and unrelenting refusal to clear her honour to the world even at her dying hour.