Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

Once Johnson had used up the bulk of Elizabeth’s £600 dowry on the failed school at Edial, he contrived to live apart from her for steadily increasing periods of time. Edial failed in the autumn of 1736, and Johnson left for London the following March, remaining away for six or even eight months, much longer than a professional reconnaissance of the capital could possibly have required.

This was the first significant absence, but others soon followed. Having brought Elizabeth back to London at the end of 1737, he established her in relatively comfortable West End lodgings at Castle Street, off Cavendish Square. But by winter 1738 Johnson was again drifting away, using separate rooms off Fleet Street, or at least spending many nights away. Boswell denies this, but Hawkins seems definite on the point and speaks of a ‘temporary separation’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Modern biographers concur ‘Everything we can piece together about Johnson’s own way of living, at least by the winter of 1738—39, indicates not merely that he was living elsewhere, probably in or near Fleet Street, but also that he sometimes even roamed the streets without settled lodging.’

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This separation coincides with his greatest period of intimacy with Savage. It is also the first time that Johnson began to earn an independent income from his literary work: editorial wages from the Gentleman’s Magazine, ten guineas for the publication of his poem London (May 1738), and £49.7s.0d. for a translation of Sarpi’s Council of Trent, paid in instalments up till April 1739.

(#litres_trial_promo) Johnson, always the most generous of men, probably used most of this money to support Elizabeth at Castle Street and, if there was spare, to help Savage who was renowned for his relentless borrowing from any friend in sight.

Johnson was now suspended between unhappy, dutiful domesticity and the roving, bohemian poet’s life in the city, allowing him the freedom which he craved. Curious glimpses of this life of garrets, taverns, journalists and prostitutes appeared years later, and only mildly disguised, in his Rambler essays.

(#litres_trial_promo) Hawkins comments severely on the decline of his ‘domestic virtues’, and on the effect of Savage’s loose morals and his acquaintance with ‘the vices of the town’, during these hectic months. He remarks that Johnson’s reflections on this time later gave him great ‘uneasiness’.

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When Savage finally left London, after the tearful parting of July 1739, Johnson almost immediately left the city too. He abandoned Elizabeth in Castle Street. Though his official reason was a possible schoolmaster-ship in Appleby, Leicestershire, this third separation also lasted about six months, until April 1740. ‘Abandon’ does not seem too strong a word. During this time Johnson fell in love with a woman of his own age, the dashing, high-spirited Molly Aston.

Molly was the second daughter of Sir Thomas Aston, and Johnson had admired her from afar at Lichfield ever since his return from Oxford. He called her ‘a beauty and a scholar, a wit and a whig’; she was probably the most entrancing of all his princesses. When Mrs Thrale once asked him what had been the happiest period of his whole life, he replied without hesitation that it had been a single evening spent with Molly. ‘That indeed (said he) was not happiness, it was rapture; but the thoughts of it sweetened the whole year.’

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Molly was just three years older than him: tall, elegant, well-read and brilliantly amusing. She was rich, clever and slightly daunting; many men were frightened of her and women tended to be jealous. Anna Seward, who confirms Johnson’s passion for her, called her ‘handsome but haughty’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She had a high, slighdy beaky profile; an impatient mass of auburn hair that she brushed back hard; and she did not suffer fools gladly.

Johnson loved her for all this, and respected her opinions. Her remarks on Pope and Gray appeared, years later, in his Lives of the Poets, a sort of delayed lover’s tribute from him. He once deferred to her on a question of economics.

(#litres_trial_promo) When he had heard her one evening speaking in a whiggish way about political freedom (an attitude he normally detested), he gallantly deflected his disagreement into a Latin epigram about her beauty, ‘Pulchra Maria’. Her beauty allowed him no freedom, since he was her slave. It was translated, long after, by Mrs Thrale (who had become his confidante in all these matters of the heart):

Persuasions to freedom fall oddly from you,

If freedom we seek, fair Maria, Adieu!

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Another cycle of six poems, ‘To Stella’, which Johnson finally published anonymously (perhaps because of his wife) in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1747, also seems to be associated with Molly Aston. One of Molly’s sisters had married George Walmsley and another sister Johnson’s rumbustious friend Henry Hervey Aston. Johnson visited Molly at both their houses in Lichfield, and perhaps also at Hervey’s town house in London. It was Harry Hervey who transcribed the ‘Stella’ group in their original form, during the period of their greatest intimacy, between 1737 and 1743.

(#litres_trial_promo) It has been cautiously suggested that Johnson wrote them for Harry himself to send to some unnamed ‘attractive girl in her teens’; perhaps even the Aston sister whom Harry married. But even if this were so, Johnson’s private inspiration still seems to have been Molly herself.

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The titles of the poems trace a delicate, oblique, drawing-room romance: ‘To Miss – On her Playing Upon the Harpsichord’; ‘To Miss – On her Giving the Autho. a Gold and Silk Net-Work Purse’; ‘Stella in Mourning’; ‘An Evening Ode: To Stella’; and, above all, ‘The Winter’s Walk’, winch obviously relates to that difficult winter of 1739-40, when Johnson’s heart was balanced – as he puts it in the poem – between ‘rapture’ and ‘despair’.

If it seems strange to imagine Johnson in such romantic throes, yet the poems have a more than drawing-room passion, and indeed strike a recognisably Johnsonian note of pain and longing. This is especially true of the close of ‘The Winter’s Walk’. Beginning with a bleak, rather Thomson-like description of the chill Staffordshire landscape, ‘the naked hill, the leafless grove’, it moves inwards to the ‘stern winter’ in the poet’s own heart:

Enliv’ning hope, and fond desire,

Resign the heart to spleen and care,

Scarce frighted love maintains his fire,

And rapture saddens to despair.

In groundless hope, and causeless fear,

Unhappy man! behold thy doom,

Still changing with the changeful year,

The slave of sunshine and of gloom.

Tir’d with vain joys, and false alarms,

With mental and corporeal strife,

Snatch me, my Stella, to thy arms,

And screen me from the ills of life.

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How far can we really take these verses as an expression of personal emotion? Perhaps the very fact that they exist (and are so rarely quoted) itself suggests something not usually recognised about Johnson’s sensibility: his gloomy longings for physical tenderness in a world of ‘ills’. Hawkins did not believe him ‘susceptible of amorous emotion’, but accepts there was one ‘romantic passion’ in his early youth; and admits that Molly Aston was the one ‘danger’ and that Johnson always spoke of her with ‘rapture’.

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Boswell mockingly dismisses the ‘Stella’ poems as a serious expression of Johnson’s feelings.

(#litres_trial_promo) He argues that since in old age Johnson could ‘condescend to trifle in namby-pamby rhymes, to please Mrs Thrale and her daughter’, so in earlier years he may have jokingly composed such pieces.

(#litres_trial_promo) But this reveals Boswell’s own limitations of portraiture. It is precisely to Mrs Thrale, and not to Boswell, that Johnson spoke openly about Molly Aston.

Hester Thrale gives us a penetrating female view of Johnson’s psychology. From the time she met him in 1765, she entered more deeply into his confidence than any other woman in his life. Her Anecdotes (1786) provide a continual revelation into the hidden side of his emotional nature: his tears, his guilts, his regrets, and his sudden storms of feeling. Such glimpses appear in numerous tiny incidents, like the time that Johnson came fretfully back from seeing Hester’s son to school, suddenly immersed in memories of his own adolescence. ‘“Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered my heart was communicated in a dream.” “What was it, Sir?” said I. “Do not ask me,” replied he, with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation.’

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Mrs Thrale knew about the tensions in Johnson’s marriage, and affirms Elizabeth’s knowledge and jealousy of Molly Aston. Johnson’s own romantic feelings are lightly, but clearly indicated in a story he told Mrs Thrale of meeting a Gypsy fortune-teller while out walking in the country with his wife. The Gypsy read his palm, and in so doing reduced Elizabeth to tears. ‘Your heart is divided, Sir, between a Betty and a Molly: Betty loves you best, but you take most delight in Molly’s company: when I turned about to laugh, I saw my wife was crying.’ Johnson added gallantly, ‘Pretty charmer! she had no reason.’ But the significant thing is that he told such a story to Mrs Thrale at all. He was admitting deep and divided feelings, even long afterwards.

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It was only Elizabeth’s sudden injury (a torn tendon), and financial desperation, which finally brought him back to London and his marriage in 1740. There was also a chance to get Irene staged. These considerations shape the rest of the much-tested relationship: Elizabeth confined more and more to bed, drinking, reading and taking opium pain-killers; Johnson working hard, supporting and indulging her like an invalid, but emotionally withdrawn. The bedroom is no longer shared.

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The tone of the letter written at the end of January 1740, in which Johnson promises to return to Elizabeth, expresses a great deal. He is penitent, affectionate and guilty: ‘You have already suffered more than I can bear to reflect upon, and I hope more than either of us shall suffer again. One part at least I have often flattered myself we shall avoid for the future our troubles will surely never separate us more.’

He continues contritely: ‘I still promise myself many happy years from your tenderness and affection, which I sometimes hope our misfortunes have not yet deprived me of.’