Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

The governors of Solihull, seven miles outside Birmingham, sent this reply to Gilbert Walmsley’s recommendation of Johnson for the vacant headmastership in 1735: ‘… all agree that he is an excellent scholar, and upon that account deserves much better than to be schoolmaster of Solihull. But then he has the character of being a very haughty, ill-natured gent., and that he has such a way of distorting his face (which though he can’t help) the gent, think it may affect some young lads; for these two reasons he is not approved on …’

(#litres_trial_promo) Boswell did not know of this report, or at any rate did not quote it.

A similar rejection came from the headmaster of Brewood Grammar School, fifteen miles west of Lichfield, in 1736. Johnson was refused the post of assistant master, ‘from an apprehension that the paralytick affection … might become the object of imitation or of ridicule, among his pupils’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Boswell did have this report in his archives, but omitted it from his account of young Johnson, including it only as a retrospective footnote to his moving description of Johnson’s death in 1784.

Less than a dozen letters have survived from this Lichfield period of Johnson’s life, and so it has always remained obscure. But something of that ‘haughty, ill-natured’ manner appears in his earliest attempt to find a professional opening in London. Writing to Edward Cave of the Gentleman’s Magazine in November 1734, he confidently recommends himself – an unknown, unemployed schoolmaster from Stafford – for the post of literary correspondent: ‘Sir: As You appear no less sensible than Your Readers of the defects of your Poetical Article, You will not be displeased, if, in order to the improvement of it, I communicate to You the sentiments of a person, who will undertake on reasonable terms sometimes to fill a column.’

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We particularly catch young Johnson’s voice in his bullish, and splendidly tactless, summary: ‘By this method your Literary Article, for so it might be called, will, he thinks, be better recommended to the Publick, than by low Jests, awkward Buffoonery, or the dull scurrilities of either Party.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The application met with a polite refusal.

Haughtiness covered not merely provincial gaucherie, but desperate loneliness and uncertainty. Johnson’s frustrated intellectual brilliance hid extraordinary emotional immaturity. This, Boswell never seems to have grasped. For him, Johnson was a sage from boyhood, a wise owl from the egg. Yet the truth seems to be that, barricaded in his large monstrous body, Johnson had the tender, awkward emotions of an overgrown child.

He depended on his friends, and needed almost to be mothered by them. In 1735, he wrote one of his few revealing letters to Richard Congreve, a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate then at Oxford. Congreve had known him briefly at Lichfield and had written a summer letter vaguely suggesting a renewal of their ‘old acquaintance’. Johnson, then twenty-six, replied with an awkward but surprisingly romantic enthusiasm. He imagines their friendship as a kind of Arcadia, from which he can flee from the hostile world.

Our former familiarity which you show in so agreeable a Light was embarrassed with no forms, and we were content to love without complimenting each other. It was such as well became our rural Retreats, shades unpolluted by Flattery and falsehood, thickets where interest and artifice never lay concealed! To such an acquaintance I again invite you …

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The way young Johnson already idealises friendship is striking. His instinct is to treat it as poetic and aphoristic ‘He may be justly said to be alone,’ he tells Congreve, ‘who has none to whom he imparts his thoughts.’ Something intensely personal emerges in the description of the true friend: one with whom a man may converse ‘without suspicion of being ridicul’d or betray’d’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This secret longing for companionship prepares us for Savage’s tremendous impact on his life.

The actual news that Johnson conveys to Congreve is oddly muted: ‘little has happened to me recently’, he remarks, and he will not dwell on ‘past disappointments’. The only thing worthy of note is the Edial scheme, ‘a private boarding-school for Young Gentlemen whom I shall endeavour to instruct in a method more rational than those commonly practised’. It is what he fails to tell his Arcadian friend that is most remarkable: that in less than a fortnight he is due to be married. Indeed his future wife, Elizabeth Porter, gets no mention at all. Johnson appears too embarrassed, too uncertain of himself, to mention his strongest feelings.

Yet these strong feelings certainly existed, especially in sexual matters. Johnson’s profound emotional frustration throughout the early part of his life, both in Lichfield and in London, forms a part of his literary personality that has rarely been recognised. Just as it is difficult to imagine Johnson young, so it seems impossible to imagine Johnson in love. Thanks largely to Boswell, the very phrase sounds faintly ludicrous. But Boswell, whose Journals reveal how fascinated, amused and tortured by sex he was all his own life, could never really bear to envisage his sage in equivalent throes of lust or passion. Having first met Johnson at the age of fifty-four (Boswell then being a mere twenty-three), he always projected a venerable father-figure, a moral counsellor, detached from passion. So, perhaps understandably, he could never really accept the vulnerable, tender and romantic side of ‘the Great Cham’, in his far-distant youth. This has subtly affected our view of Johnson’s whole biography ever since.

Boswell always deflects the question of Johnson’s sexual feelings by treating them whimsically, if not farcically. He admits that Johnson was attracted by women: ‘Johnson had, from his early youth, been sensible to the influence of female charms’; but he typically diffuses this by archly remarking on the ‘facility and elegance’ with which Johnson could ‘warble the amorous lay’.

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This deflating humour is deployed whenever he writes about the women who, throughout Johnson’s life, were the serious objects of his interests, hopes and passions. There were more than is usually thought: apart from his wife Elizabeth Porter, there was the adored Molly Aston; Hill Boothby (intended as Johnson’s second wife); Hester Thrale (the confidante who replaced a second wife); the understanding Elizabeth Desmoulins (the young widowed daughter of his doctor); the admired Elizabeth Carter; and half-a-dozen young women writers and actresses, whom Boswell often simply omits from his account.’

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His treatment of Johnson’s strange, passionate and deeply unhappy marriage to Elizabeth Porter as a sentimental farce of ‘connubial felicity’ is wholly characteristic.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nowhere does he seriously consider the impact of Johnson’s sexual frustrations on his beginnings as a writer and poet. Modern biographers tend to take the same line. Even James Clifford writes: ‘Johnson could never give himself up wholeheartedly to romance, whether in life or in literature.’

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Yet the women who knew young Johnson best, either directly or through family gossip and reminiscence, take a very different attitude. Among them are Lucy Porter (Johnson’s stepdaughter), Anna Seward and Hester Thrale: almost invariably cited by Boswell as ‘unreliable’ witnesses.

Anna Seward (1747–1809), who became the poet known as ‘the Swan of Lichfield’, was not born when Johnson left for London. But she became an invaluable source for local memories and hearsay about him, especially through her grandfather (who had taught Johnson), her mother (who knew Elizabeth Porter) and the Walmsley family, about all of whom she wrote extensively. Boswell delights in disproving her stories on innumerable points. Yet Anna frequently throws revealing light on young Johnson’s emotions. One of her most suggestive formulations is this: ‘Johnson was always fancying himself in love with some princess or other.’

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Johnson first fell in love some time in his middle teens. His princess was Ann Hector, the sister of his school-friend, Edmund Hector, at Stourbridge. It is probably for her that he wrote his first poem: ‘On a Daffodil: The First Flower that the Author had seen that Year’, which refers to a smiling nymph, Cleora. A distinguished modern biographer, Walter Jackson Bate, remarks that ‘when we think of the later Johnson, the very title is hilarious’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet this seems a curiously revealing admission. For the poem does not appear particularly absurd for a sixteen-year-old:

But while I sing, the nimble moments fly,

See! Sol’s bright chariot seeks the western main,

And ah! behold the shriveling blossoms die,

So late admir’d and prais’d, alas! in vain!

With grief this emblem of mankind I see,

Like one awaken’d from a pleasing dream,

Cleora’s self, fair flower, shall fade like thee,

Alike must fall the Poet and his theme.

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When Boswell discovered this romance, he used another characteristic form of deflection: he omitted it from the Lichfield years, and retold it retrospectively as a reminiscence of Johnson’s in his sixty-seventh year. It was displaced, and thus disarmed. Yet what Johnson says is moving and significant. ‘She was the first woman with whom I was in love. It dropt out of my head imperceptibly; but she and I shall always have a kindness for each other.’ When he talked of Ann Hector that night, ‘he seemed to have had his affection revived; for he said, “If I had married her, it might have been as happy for me.”’

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Later at Stourbridge, just before going up to Oxford, he fell more seriously in love with Olivia Lloyd, the beautiful and well-educated daughter of a rich Quaker family of ironmasters and philanthropists. Olivia was two years older than him, well-read in Greek and Latin classics (which she later taught to her nephews), amusing and quick, and renowned for her looks. She was known locally as ‘the pretty Birmingham Quakeress’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Johnson fantasised about her throughout his university years, and she was one of the dreams he had to abandon bitterly along with his degree.

Olivia was the first in a line of pretty, vivacious bluestockings whom Johnson quietly worshipped (and also helped professionally) in London. Boswell takes a single sentence to describe the affair ‘he was much enamoured of Olivia Lloyd … to whom he wrote a copy of verses, which I have not been able to recover.’

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Edmund Hector recalled acting as a go-between in this situation: ‘some Young Ladies in Lichfield had a mind to act The Distressed Mother, for whom [Johnson] wrote the Epilogue and gave it me to convey privately to them.’ Johnson’s agonies of self-consciousness about his monstrous appearance are glimpsed in that ‘privately’.

Other poems possibly connected with Olivia Lloyd include a series of translations from Horace, normally the most urbane, ironic and detached of poets. But Johnson selects passages that are surprisingly moody, bleak and romantic:

But being counsell’d to go home

And see my mistress face no more

Confus’d about the streets I roam

And stop’d unwilling at her door.

Then to the inclement skies expos’d I sat