A full account of the twenty years' friendship of Johnson and the Thrales would fill a book much larger than this; and in such a volume there would often occur the name of Fanny Burney.

Dr Burney was a musician who had come to London in 1760. He was a member of the Club, and became an intimate friend of Johnson. Frances, who had lived with her father, while her sisters went to school in France, had had a passion for writing since the age of 10, and was eager to meet the great man. She first saw him in 1777 at one of her father's parties, where her sisters were playing a duet. In the midst of their performance Dr Johnson was announced.

"He is very ill-favoured ..." she wrote to a friend "his body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down.... He is shockingly near-sighted, and did not, till she held out her hand to him, even know Mrs Thrale. He poked his nose over the keys of the harpsichord, till the duet was finished, and then my father introduced Hetty to him as an old acquaintance, and he kissed her! When she was a little girl, he had made her a present of The Idler. His attention, however, was not to be diverted five minutes from the books, as we were in the library; he pored over them, almost touching the backs of them with his eye-lashes, as he read their titles. At last, having fixed upon one, he began, without further ceremony, to read, all the time standing at a distance from the company. We were all very much provoked, as we perfectly languished to hear him talk."

At last Dr Burney dragged him into the conversation, which happened to be about one of Bach's concerts:

"The Doctor ... good-naturedly put away his book, and said very drolly, 'And pray, Sir, who is Bach? is he a piper?'"

Fanny's greatest achievement was her novel, Evelina, or a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. She planned it when she was fifteen and wrote it some years later. She had "an odd inclination" to see her work in print and, without putting any name to the manuscript or letting her secret be known outside her own family, she offered her story to the booksellers and eventually received twenty pounds for it.

When it was published, it took the town by storm. Johnson "got it by heart" and, as soon as the author was revealed, introduced Fanny to the circle at Streatham and made her one of his closest friends. He called her his "dear little Burney" and was always making pretty speeches to her:

"Miss Burney, calling on him the next morning, offered to make his tea. He had given her his own large arm-chair which was too heavy for her to move to the table. 'Sir' quoth she 'I am in the wrong chair.' 'It is so difficult,' cried he with quickness, 'for anything to be wrong that belongs to you, that it can only be I that am in the wrong chair to keep you from the right one.'"

They were guests together of Mrs Thrale at Brighton and one night "to the universal amazement" Johnson went to a ball:

"He said he had found it so dull being quite alone the preceding evening, that he determined upon going with us; 'for,' said he, 'it cannot be worse than being alone.'"

He liked to treat Fanny, his "little character-monger," as a fellow-author:

"A shilling was now wanted for some purpose or other, and none of them happened to have one; I begged that I might lend one. 'Ay, do' said the Doctor 'I will borrow of you; authors are like privateers, always fair game for one another.'"

In his last illness Johnson received Fanny into his house as long as he could. But on 25 November 1784, though his faculties were bright, the machine that contained them was "alarmingly giving away":

"I saw him growing worse, and offered to go, which, for the first time I ever remember, he did not oppose; but most kindly pressing both my hands, 'Be not' he said, in a voice of even tenderness 'be not longer in coming again for my letting you go now.' I assured him I would be the sooner, and was running off, but he called me back in a solemn voice, and in a manner the most energetic, said:—'Remember me in your prayers.'"

Two days before his death, when Dr Burney saw him, his message was the same:

"He was up and very composed. He took his hand very kindly, asked after all his family, and then in particular how Fanny did. 'I hope,' he said 'Fanny did not take it amiss that I did not see her. I was very bad. Tell Fanny to pray for me.'"

On the 20th December, when the "ever-honoured, ever-lamented" Dr Johnson was committed to the earth, Fanny could not keep her eyes dry all day.