HOMES AND HAUNTS OF JOHNSON AND BOSWELL

If we were not quite such a business people, and had not so fully satisfied ourselves that the making of money is the chief end of existence, we should put up a statue to Dr. Johnson in Fleet Street, even if we had to knock down a house or two to find room for it. The statue by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald that has been erected in St. Clement Danes Churchyard, in the Strand, is better than nothing, but it is too insignificant in appearance, and stands in the wrong place. Johnson is still so far removed from death that he is more alive to-day than when he was living, and Fleet Street, and the courts and alleys opening out of Fleet Street, are his proper kingdom. Other great spirits haunt the same ground, but he overshadows them all.

At one time or another during the later forty-seven years of his life Johnson had sixteen different addresses in London, and six of them were in Fleet Street byways. On his first visit to town, in 1737, he had lodgings at Exeter Street, Strand, and made some short stay at Greenwich, whence he wrote to Cave, the publisher, offering to contribute to his Gentleman’s Magazine. Next year he and his wife finally removed from Lichfield, and lodged first in Woodstock Street, Hanover Square, and then in Castle Street, Cavendish Square. Presently he flitted to the Strand; to Bow Street; to Holborn; to Fetter Lane; to Holborn again; then to Gough Square, at the top of Wine Office Court, where he lived for ten years; then to Staple Inn; to Gray’s Inn; to No. 1 Inner Temple Lane; to No. 7 Johnson’s Court (so named before his time, as Boswell Court was before Boswell’s); and thence to Bolt Court, where, in 1784, he died.

Of all these homes of Johnson’s, only two are now surviving—that in Staple Inn, which cannot be identified (we know only that it was one of the houses in the square); and that in Gough Square, which, next to the Bolt Court house, was the most interesting of his sixteen residences—and one is grateful that, mainly owing to the good offices of Mr. Cecil Harmsworth, it has been saved from demolition, and is now opened as a Johnson museum.

Johnson was still a bookseller’s hack and a comparatively unknown man when, in 1747, at the age of thirty-eight, he started work on his Dictionary. He was then living in Holborn; but next year he moved into Gough Square, and it was here that most of this colossal work was done. And to-day, when you visit that house, you find that all the teeming life of the last hundred and sixty years has drained out of it completely, and nothing remains in the old rooms but memories of Johnson and his friends. He works there for ever now in the study that used to be his, poring short-sightedly over books and papers; and in the queer, sloping-ceilinged garret above are his six assistants, copying, hunting out references for the Dictionary, and busy with all the mechanical part of the undertaking. You have only to stand there and think of it, and, if you have read Boswell and Hawkins, the life of the household as it was in those ten years long past refashions itself around you in the magic, old-world atmosphere of the place.

ENTRANCE TO STAPLE INN.Five publishers joined in commissioning Johnson to compile the Dictionary, and arranged to pay him a sum of £1575, out of which he had to engage his assistants. “For the mechanical part,” writes Boswell, “he employed six amanuenses; and let it be remembered by the natives of North Britain, to whom he is supposed to have been so hostile, that five of them were of that country. There were two Messieurs Macbean; Mr. Shiels; Mr. Stewart, son of Mr. George Stewart, bookseller at Edinburgh; and a Mr. Maitland. The sixth of these humble assistants was Mr. Peyton, who, I believe, taught French, and published some elementary tracts.” That upper room in Gough Square was fitted up like a counting-house, and each of the six workers in it was allotted his separate task. Boswell goes on to describe Johnson’s method: “The words, partly taken from other dictionaries and partly supplied by himself, having been first written down with spaces left between them, he delivered in writing their etymologies, definitions, and various significations. The authorities were copied from the books themselves, in which he had marked the passages with a black-lead pencil, the traces of which could easily be effaced. I have seen several of them in which that trouble had not been taken, so that they were just as when used by the copyists. It is remarkable that he was so attentive in the choice of the passages in which words were authorised that one may read page after page of his Dictionary with improvement and pleasure; and it should not pass unobserved that he has quoted no author whose writings had a tendency to hurt sound religion and morality.... He is now to be considered as ‘tugging at his oar,’ as engaged in a steady, continued course of occupation, sufficient to employ all his time for some years, and which was the best preventive of that constitutional melancholy which was ever lurking about him, ready to trouble his quiet.”

In after years, with his natural, large kindness of disposition, Johnson retained a sympathetic interest in those six assistants of his. The elder of the two Macbeans fell at length into great poverty, and Johnson helped him by writing a preface to his System of Ancient Geography, and afterwards influenced Lord Thurlow in getting him admitted as a Poor Brother of the Charterhouse. He had Shiel, who was dying of consumption, to help him with his Lives of the Poets; and when Peyton died almost destitute, it was Johnson who paid his funeral expenses.

Whilst he was “tugging at his oar” and making steady headway with the Dictionary, Johnson sought recreation in founding one of his many literary clubs—an informal little club that met of evenings in Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, and numbered among its members Hawkesworth, who succeeded Johnson as compiler of Parliamentary debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine, and later edited and wrote most of a bi-weekly, The Adventurer; Dr. Bathurst, who with Johnson and Warton contributed to that Adventurer; and Hawkins, who in due course became one of Johnson’s executors and biographers. He had published his satire, London, eleven years before this; but it was whilst he was living in Gough Square, with the Dictionary in full progress, that he wrote and published his only other great satire, The Vanity of Human Wishes, with its references to the hope deferred, the hardships of his own life, and the obscurity and poverty from which he was but now gradually beginning to emerge:—

Had the Gough Square house been memorable only as the birthplace of the Dictionary, it would have been enough to have given it immortality; for, as Carlyle says (and Carlyle once went reverently over these rooms, and wrote a record of his visit), “Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight, and successful method, it may be called the best of all dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great, solid, square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete; you judge that a true builder did it.” But, still while the Dictionary was going on, shortly after the publication of The Vanity of Human Wishes, which yielded him £15, Garrick produced his tragedy of Irene at Drury Lane. It was a failure on the stage; the audience shrieked “Murder! murder!” when the bowstring was placed round the heroine’s neck; but Johnson, feeling that a dramatic author should be more gaily dressed than it was his wont to appear, sat in a box on the first night in a scarlet waistcoat, with rich gold lace, and a gold-laced hat, and accepted his failure with unruffled calmness; and Dodsley paid him £100 for the right to publish the play as a book.

Still while he was in the thick of the Dictionary, he set himself, in 1750, to start The Rambler, and you may take it that he was sitting in his Gough Square study one night when he wrote that prayer before publishing his first number:—

“Almighty God, the giver of all good things, without whose help all labour is ineffectual, and without whose grace all wisdom is folly; grant, I beseech Thee, that in this undertaking Thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, but that I may promote Thy glory, and the salvation of myself and others. Grant this, O Lord, for the sake of Thy Son Jesus Christ. Amen.”

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

His first number was printed on the 20th March 1750, and he issued it every Saturday and Tuesday afterwards for two years. “This,” as Boswell has it, “is a strong confirmation of the truth of a remark of his, that ‘a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it’; for, notwithstanding his constitutional indolence, his depression of spirits, and his labour in carrying on his Dictionary, he answered the stated calls of the press twice a week, from the stores of his mind, during all that time; having received no assistance, except four billets in No. 10, by Miss Mulso, now Mrs. Chapone; No. 30, by Miss Catherine Talbot; No. 97, by Mr. Samuel Richardson; and Nos. 44 and 100, by Mrs. Elizabeth Carter.” He was so pressed for time that he wrote a good many of the essays in such haste that he had no opportunity even to read them through again before they were printed. One thing that particularly gratified Johnson in connection with the Rambler was that his wife said to him, after she had read a few numbers, “I thought very well of you before, but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this.”

Gough Square is hallowed, too, with sadder memories of Johnson’s wife, for she died here in March 1752; and to the end of his days he never forgot her or ceased to sorrow for her. She was a plain-featured woman some years older than himself, but he always spoke of her with a wonderful tenderness and love, and as of one who had been beautiful to look upon. How deeply he felt her loss is evident not merely from some of his sayings, but from his letters, and from those Prayers and Meditations, in which he set down his most intimate thoughts and feelings. After his death, this written prayer was found among his papers, dated in the month after her passing:—

DR. JOHNSON’S HOUSE. GOUGH SQUARE.

You may stand in the Square to-night, after twelve at night, when all the windows of all the other houses are dark, as they were in that night of 1752, and look up at the window in which the solitary light burned then, whilst, within, the grief-stricken Johnson sat alone in his study writing down that humble, mournful aspiration, and as you look the same light kindles there and glimmers desolately again for all who have eyes to see it. Nor was this the only record of his sorrow that was written in that room, for you find these notes in his journal a year later:—

“March 28, 1753. I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty’s death, with prayers and tears in the morning. In the evening I prayed for her conditionally, if it were lawful.”

“April 23, 1753. I know not whether I do not too much indulge the vain longings of affection; but I hope they intenerate my heart, and that when I die like my Tetty, this affection will be acknowledged in a happy interview, and that in the meantime I am incited by it to piety. I will, however, not deviate too much from common and received methods of devotion.”

Boswell tells us that he preserved her wedding-ring reverently as long as he lived, keeping it in “a little round wooden box, in the inside of which he pasted a slip of paper, thus inscribed by him in fair characters, as follows:—

‘Eheu!
Eliz. Johnson,
Nupta Jul. 9º, 1736,
Mortua, eheu!
Mart. 17º, 1752.’”

Some thought of her, indeed, rises again and again thereafter in those Prayers and Meditations of his, and so makes this house peculiarly reminiscent of her. Before Mrs. Johnson’s death, Mrs. Anna Williams had become a constant visitor at the house here. She was a poetess in a small way, daughter of a Welsh physician, and was in London having both her eyes treated for cataract. After his wife’s death, Johnson gave Mrs. Williams accommodation in Gough Square whilst her eyes were operated upon; and, the operation failing and complete blindness following it, with his usual big-hearted humanity he allowed her an apartment in this and each of his subsequent homes; and you remember Boswell’s complaint of how his fastidious susceptibilities were outraged by the way in which she felt round the edges of the cups to see if they were full, when she presided over the tea-table. In the same spirit, Johnson gave house-room here also, and elsewhere, to that simplest and most kindly of medical practitioners, Dr. Robert Levett, on whose death, several years later, he wrote the best of his shorter poems.

You get a good idea of his general manner of life in Gough Square from the note that Boswell obtained from Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant, who wrote that on his wife’s death Johnson was “in great affliction. Mrs. Williams was then living in his house, which was in Gough Square. He was busy with the Dictionary. Mr. Shiels and some others of the gentlemen who had formerly written for him used to come about the house. He had then little for himself, but frequently sent money to Mr. Shiels when in distress. The friends who visited him at that time were chiefly Dr. Bathurst, and Mr. Diamond, an apothecary in Cork Street, Burlington Gardens, with whom he and Mrs. Williams generally dined every Sunday. There were also Mr. Cave; Dr. Hawkesworth; Mr. Rydal, merchant on Tower Hill; Mrs. Masters, the poetess, who lived with Mr. Cave; Mrs. Carter; and sometimes Mrs. Macaulay; also Mrs. Gardiner, wife of a tallow-chandler on Snow Hill, not in the learned way, but a worthy good woman; Mr. (now Sir Joshua) Reynolds; Mr. Miller; Mr. Dodsley; Mr. Bouquet; Mr. Payne, of Paternoster Row, bookseller; Mr. Strachan the printer; the Earl of Orrery; Lord Southwell; Mr. Garrick.”

JAMES BOSWELL

It was shortly after the conclusion of The Rambler that Johnson first made the acquaintance of Bennet Langton. He had taken lodgings in a house that was frequently visited by Dr. Levett; and, with Johnson’s permission, Levett one day brought Langton to Gough Square, and, says Boswell:—

“Mr. Langton was exceedingly surprised when the sage first appeared. He had not received the smallest intimation of his figure, dress, or manner. From perusing his writings, he fancied he should see a decent, well-dressed—in short, a remarkably decorous philosopher. Instead of which, down from his bed-chamber, about noon, came, as newly risen, a huge uncouth figure, with a little dark wig which scarcely covered his head, and his clothes hanging loose about him. But his conversation was so rich, so animated, and so forcible, and his religious and political notions so congenial with those in which Langton had been educated, that he conceived for him that veneration and attachment which he ever preserved.”

In 1753 Johnson “relieved the drudgery of his Dictionary” by writing essays for Hawkesworth’s Adventurer, and in this and the next two years did a lot of reviewing and varied hack-work for the magazines and miscellanies of his time; and in February 1775 he wrote that nobly scathing and touching letter to Lord Chesterfield, that is too well known to need reprinting, but must needs be reprinted here, because it was written from Gough Square, and would make any house from which it was written an honoured and sacred place to all who value the dignity of literature and glory in the emancipation of the literary man from the condescending benevolence of the private patron:—

“My Lord,—I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of The World, that two papers in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public were written by your lordship. To be so distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.

“When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre—that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the whole world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.

“Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on with my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before.

“The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.

“Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

“Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I shall conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation,

“My lord, your lordship’s most humble,
“Most obedient servant,
“Sam. Johnson.”