A paper read before the members of the Johnson Club of London at Simpson’s Restaurant in the Strand.

There is, I believe, a definite understanding among our members that we, the Brethren of the Johnson Club, have each and all of us read every line about Dr. Johnson that is in print, to say nothing of his works. It is particularly accepted that the thirteen volumes in which our late brother, Dr. Birkbeck Hill, enshrined his own appreciation of our Great Man, are as familiar to us all as are the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. For my part, with a deep sense of the responsibility that must belong to any one who has rashly undertaken to read a paper before the Club, I admit to having supplemented these thirteen volumes by a reperusal of the little book entitled Johnson Club Papers, by Various Hands, issued in 1899 by Brother Fisher Unwin. I feel as I reread these addresses that there were indeed giants in those days, although my admiration was moderated a little when I came across the statement of one Brother that Johnson’s proposal for an edition of Shakspere “came to nothing”; and the statement of another that “Goldsmith’s failings were almost as great and as ridiculous as Boswell’s;” while my bibliographical ire was awakened by the extraordinary declaration in an article on “Dr. Johnson’s Library,” that a first folio edition of Shakspere might have realized £250 in the year 1785. Still, I recognize the talent that illuminated the Club in those closing years of the last century. Happily for us, who love good comradeship, most of the giants of those days are still in evidence with their polished armour and formidable spears.

What can I possibly say that has not already been said by one or other of the Brethren? Well, I have put together these few remarks in the hopes that no one of you has seen two books that are in my hands, the first, The Reades of Blackwood Hill, with Some Account of Dr. Johnson’s Ancestry, by Aleyn Lyell Reade; the other, The Life and Letters of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, by his daughter Mrs. Crump. The first of these is privately printed, although it may be bought by any one of the Brethren for a couple of guineas. As far as I am able to learn, Brother Augustine Birrell is the only one of the Brethren who has as yet purchased a copy. The other book, our Brother Birkbeck Hill’s biography, is to be issued next week by Mr. Edward Arnold, who has kindly placed an early copy at my disposal. In both these volumes there is much food for reflection for all good Johnsonians. Dr. Johnson’s ancestry, it may be, makes little appeal to the crowd, but it will to the Brethren. There is no more favourite subject for satire than the tendency to minute study of an author and his antecedents. But the lover of that author knows the fascination of the topic. He can forgive any amount of zeal. I confess that personally I stand amazed at the variety and interest of Mr. Reade’s researches. Let me take a sample case of his method before coming to the main issue. In the opening pages of Boswell’s Johnson there is some account of Mr. Michael Johnson, the father. The most picturesque anecdote told of Johnson Senior is that concerning a young woman of Leek in Staffordshire, who while he served his apprenticeship there conceived a passion for him, which he did not return. She followed him to Lichfield, where she took lodgings opposite to the house in which he lived, and indulged her hopeless flame. Ultimately she died of love and was buried in the Cathedral at Lichfield, when Michael Johnson put a stone over her grave. This pathetic romance has gone unchallenged by all Boswell’s editors, even including our prince of editors, Dr. Birkbeck Hill. Mr. Reade, it seems to me, has completely shattered the story, which, as all Johnsonian students know, was obtained by Boswell from Miss Anna Seward. Mr. Reade is able to show that Michael Johnson had been settled in Lichfield for at least eleven years before the death of Elizabeth Blaney, that for five years she had been the much appreciated domestic in a household in that city. Her will indicates moreover a great affection for her mistress and for that mistress’s son; she leaves the boy a gold watch and his mother the rest of her belongings. The only connexion that Michael Johnson would seem to have had with the woman was that he and his brother were called in after her decease to make an inventory of her little property. I think that these little facts about Mistress Blaney, her five years’ residence at Lichfield apparently in a most comfortable position, her omission of Michael Johnson from her will, and the fact that he had been in Lichfield at least six months before she arrived, are conclusive.

There is another picturesque fact about Michael Johnson that Mr. Reade has brought to light. It would seem that twenty years before his marriage to Sarah Ford, he had been on the eve of marriage to a young woman at Derby, Mary Neyld; but the marriage did not take place, although the marriage bond was drawn out. Mary was the daughter of Luke Neyld, a prominent tradesman of Derby; she was twenty-three years of age at the time and Michael twenty-nine. Even Mr. Reade’s industry has not been able to discover for us why at the very last moment the marriage was broken off. It explains, however, why Michael Johnson married late in life and his melancholia. The human romance that Mr. Reade has unveiled has surely a certain interest for Johnsonians, for had Michael Johnson brought his first love affair to a happy conclusion, we should not have had the man described twenty years later as “possessed of a vile melancholy,” who, when his wife’s tongue wagged too much, got upon his horse and rode away. There would have been no Samuel Johnson, and there would have been no Johnson Club—a catastrophe which the human mind finds it hard to conceive of. Two years after the breaking off of her engagement with Michael Johnson, I may add, Mary Neyld married one James Warner.

Mr. Reade also calls in question another statement of Boswell’s, that Michael Johnson was really apprenticed at Leek in Staffordshire; our only authority for this also is the excellent Anna Seward. Further, it is sufficiently curious that the names of two Samuel Johnsons are recorded as being buried in one of the churches at Lichfield, one before our Samuel came into the world, the other three years later: of these, one died in 1654, the other in 1712. But these points, although of a certain interest, have nothing to do with Dr. Johnson’s ancestry. Now before we left our homes this evening, each member of the Johnson Brotherhood, as is his custom, turned up Brother Birkbeck Hill’s invaluable index to see what Johnson had to say upon the subject of ancestry. We know that the Doctor was very keen upon the founding of a family; that when Mr. Thrale lost his only son Johnson’s sympathies went out to him in a double way, and perhaps in the greater degree because as he said to Boswell, “Sir, don’t you know how you yourself think? Sir, he wished to propagate his name.” Johnson himself, Boswell tells us, had no pretensions to blood. “I here may say,” he said, “that I have great merit in being zealous for subordination and the honours of birth; for I can hardly tell who was my grandfather.” Johnson further informed Mrs. Thrale that he did not delight in talking much of his family: “There is little pleasure,” he says, “in relating the anecdotes of beggary.” He constantly deprecated his origin. According to Miss Seward, he told his wife before he married her that he was of mean extraction; but the letter in which Miss Seward gives her version of Johnson’s courtship is worth recalling, although I do not believe a single word of it:—

The rustic prettiness and artless manners of her daughter, the present Mrs. Lucy Porter, had won Johnson’s youthful heart, when she was upon a visit at my grandfather’s in Johnson’s school-days. Disgusted by his unsightly form, she had a personal aversion to him, nor could the beautiful verses he addressed to her teach her to endure him. The nymph at length returned to her parents at Birmingham, and was soon forgotten. Business taking Johnson to Birmingham on the death of his own father, and calling upon his coy mistress there, he found her father dying. He passed all his leisure hours at Mr. Porter’s, attending his sick bed, and in a few months after his death, asked Mrs. Johnson’s consent to marry the old widow. After expressing her surprise at a request so extraordinary—“No, Sam, my willing consent you will never have to so preposterous a union. You are not twenty-five, and she is turned fifty. If she had any prudence, this request had never been made to me. Where are your means of subsistence? Porter has died poor, in consequence of his wife’s expensive habits. You have great talents, but, as yet, have turned them into no profitable channel.” “Mother, I have not deceived Mrs. Porter: I have told her the worst of me; that I am of mean extraction; that I have no money, and that I have had an uncle hanged. She replied, that she valued no one more or less for his descent; that she had no more money than myself; and that, although she had not had a relation hanged, she had fifty who deserved hanging.”

Now why did Dr. Johnson take this attitude about his ancestry, so contrary to the spirit that guided him where other people’s genealogical trees were concerned? It was certainly not indifference to family ties, because Brother Birkbeck Hill publishes many interesting letters written by Johnson in old age, when finding that he had a certain sum of money to bequeath, he looked around to see if there were any of his own kin living. The number of letters the old man wrote, inquiring for this or that kinsman, are quite pathetic. It seems to me that it was really due to an ignorant vagueness as to his family history. During his early years his family had passed from affluence to penury. They were of a type very common in England, but very rare in Scotland and Ireland, that take no interest whatever in pedigrees, and never discuss any but their immediate relations, with whom, in the case of the Johnsons, very friendly terms did not prevail. I think we should be astonished if we were to go into some shops in London of sturdy prosperous tradesmen in quite as good a position as old Michael Johnson, and were to try and draw out one or other individual upon his ancestry. We should promptly come against a blank wall.

What then do we know of Johnson’s father from the ordinary sources? That he was a bookseller at Lichfield, and that he was Sheriff of that city in the year that his son Samuel was born; that he feasted the citizens, as Johnson tells us, in his Annals, with “uncommon magnificence.” He is described by Johnson as “a foolish old man,” because he talked with too fond a pride of his children and their precocious ways. He was a zealous High Churchman and Jacobite. We are told by Boswell further, on the authority of Mr. Hector of Birmingham, that he opened a bookstall once a week in that city, but lost money by setting up as a maker of parchment. “A pious and most worthy man,” Mrs. Piozzi tells us of him, “but wrong-headed, positive and affected with melancholia.” “I inherited a vile melancholy from my father,” Johnson tells us, “which has made me mad all my life.” When he died in 1731 his effects were estimated at £20. “My mother had no value for his relations,” Johnson tells us. “Those we knew were much lower than hers.” Of Michael Johnson’s brother, Andrew, Johnson’s uncle, we know still less. From the various Johnson books we only cull the story mentioned in Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes. She relates that Johnson, after telling her of the prowess of his uncle, Cornelius Ford, at jumping, went on to say that he had another uncle, Andrew—“my father’s brother, who kept the ring at Smithfield for a whole year, and was never thrown or conquered. Here are uncles for you, Mistress, if that is the way to your heart.” Mr. Reade has supplemented this by showing us that not only was Andrew Johnson a skilful wrestler, but that he was a very good bookseller. For a time he assisted his brother in the conduct of the business at Lichfield. Later, however, he settled as a bookseller at Birmingham, which was to be his home until his death over thirty years later. Here he published some interesting books; the title-pages of some of these are given by Mr. Reade, who reproduces of course his will. He had a son named Thomas who fell on evil days. You will find certain letters to Thomas in Birkbeck Hill’s edition; Dr. Johnson frequently helped him with money.

Of more interest, however, than Andrew Johnson was Catherine, the one sister of Michael and Andrew, an aunt of Samuel’s, who was evidently for some unknown reason ignored by her two brothers. Here we are not on absolutely firm ground, but it seems to me clear that Catherine Johnson married into a position far above her brothers. A fortnight before his death Dr. Johnson wrote to the Rev. William Vyse, Rector of Lambeth; a letter in which he asked him to find out “whether Charles Skrymsher”—he misspelt it “Scrimshaw”—“of Woodseaves”—he misspelt it “Woodease”—“in your neighbourhood, be now alive,” and whether he could be found without delay. He added that “it will be an act of great kindness to me,” Charles Skrymsher being “very nearly related.” Charles Skrymsher was not found, and Johnson told Dr. Vyse that he was disappointed in the inquiries that he had made for his relations. This particular relation, indeed, had been twenty-two years dead when Dr. Johnson, probably with the desire of leaving him something in his will, made these inquiries. His mother, Mrs. Gerald Skrymsher, was Michael Johnson’s sister. One of her daughters became the wife of Thomas Boothby. Boothby was twice married, and his two wives were cousins, the first, Elizabeth, being the daughter of one Sir Charles Skrymsher, the second, Hester, as I have said, of Gerald Skrymsher, Dr. Johnson’s uncle. Hence Johnson had a cousin by marriage who was a potentate in his day, for it is told of Thomas Boothby of Tooley Park, grand-nephew of a powerful and wealthy baronet, that he was one of the fathers of English sport. An issue of The Field newspaper for 1875 contains an engraving of a hunting horn then in the possession of the late Master of the Cheshire Hounds, and upon the horn is the inscription: “Thomas Boothby, Esq., Tooley Park, Leicester. With this horn he hunted the first pack of fox hounds then in England fifty-five years.” He died in 1752. His eldest son took the maternal name of Skrymsher, and under the title of Thomas Boothby Skrymsher became M.P. for Leicester, and an important person in his day. His wife was Anne, daughter of Sir Hugh Clopton of New Place, Stratford-on-Avon. Admirers of Mrs. Gaskell will remember the Clopton legend told by her in Howett’s Visits to Remarkable Places.

I wish that I had time to follow Mr. Reade through all the ramifications of an interesting family history, but I venture to think that there is something pathetic in Dr. Johnson’s inquiries a fortnight before his death as to cousins of whose life story he knew nothing, whose well-known family home of Woodseaves he—the great Lexicographer—could not spell correctly, and of whose very name he was imperfectly informed. Yet he, the lover of family trees and of ancestral associations, was all his life in ignorance of these wealthy connexions and their many substantial intermarriages.

Before Mr. Reade it was known that Johnson’s father was a manufacturer of parchment as well as a bookseller; but it was supposed that only in his last few years or so of life did he undertake this occupation which ruined him. Mr. Reade shows that he had been for thirty years engaged in this trade in parchment. Brother Birkbeck Hill quotes Croker, who hinted that Johnson’s famous definition of Excise as “a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the Common Judge of Property but by wretches hired by those to whom Excise is paid,” was inspired by recollections of his father’s constant disputes with the Excise officers. Mr. Reade has unearthed documents concerning the crisis of this quarrel, when Michael Johnson in 1718 was indicted “for useing ye Trade of a Tanner.” The indictment, which is here printed in full, charges him, “one Michael Johnson, bookseller,” “that he did in the third year of the reign of our Lord George by the Grace of God now King of Great Britain, for his own proper gain, get up, use and exercise the art, mystery or manual occupation of a Byrseus, in English a Tanner, in which art, mystery or manual occupation of a Tanner the said Michael Johnson was not brought up or apprenticed for the space of seven years, an evil example of all others offending in such like case.” Michael’s defence was that he was “tanned for” and did not tan himself, he being only “a merchant in skins tradeing to Ireland, Scotland and the furthermost parts of England.” The only known example of Michael Johnson’s handwriting is this defence. Michael was committed for trial but acquitted. It is probable, however, that this prosecution laid the foundation of his ruin.

But I must pass on to the other branch: the family of Dr. Johnson’s mother. Here Dr. Johnson did himself a great injustice, for he had a genuine right to count his mother’s “an old family,” although the term is in any case relative. At any rate he could carry his pedigree back to 1620. “In the morning,” says Boswell, “we had talked of old families, and the respect due to them. Johnson said—

“‘Sir, you have a right to that kind of respect, and are arguing for yourself. I am for supporting the principle, and I am disinterested in doing it, as I have no such right.’”

Nevertheless, Boswell, in this opening chapter, refers to the mother as “Sarah Ford, descended of an ancient race of substantial yeomanry in Warwickshire,” and Johnson’s epitaph upon his mother’s tomb describes her as “of the ancient family of Ford.” Thus one is considerably bewildered in attempting to reconcile Johnson’s attitude. The only one of his family for whom he seems to have had a good word was Cornelius Harrison, of whom, writing to Mrs. Thrale, he said that he was “perhaps the only one of my relations who ever rose in fortune above penury or in character above neglect.” This Cornelius was the son of John Harrison, who had married Johnson’s aunt, Phoebe Ford. Johnson’s account of Uncle John in his Annals is not flattering, but he was the son of a Rector of Pilborough, whose father was Sir Richard Harrison, one of the gentlemen of the King’s Bedchamber, and a personality of a kind. Cornelius, the reputable cousin, died in 1748, but his descendants seem to have been a poor lot, whatever his ancestors may have been. Mr. Reade traces their history with all the relentlessness of the genealogist.

Johnson’s great-grandfather was one Henry Ford, a yeoman in Birmingham. One of his sons, Henry, Johnson’s grand-uncle, was born in 1628. He owned property at West Bromwich and elsewhere, and was a fellow of Clifford’s Inn, London. Then we come to Cornelius Ford—“Cornelius Ford, gentleman,” he is styled in his marriage settlement. Cornelius died four months before Samuel Johnson was born. Cornelius had a sister Mary, who married one Jesson, and their only son, I may mention incidentally, entered at Pembroke College in 1666, sixty years before his second-cousin, our Samuel, entered the same college. Another cousin by marriage was a Mrs. Harriots, to whom Johnson refers in his Annals, and also in his Prayers and Meditations. The only one of Cornelius Ford’s family referred to in the biographies is Joseph Ford, the father of the notorious Parson Ford, Johnson’s cousin, of whom he several times speaks. Joseph was a physician of eminence who settled at Stourbridge. He married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Hickman. He was a witness to the marriage of his sister Sarah to Michael Johnson. There can be no doubt but that the presence of Dr. Ford and his family at Stourbridge accounts for Johnson being sent there to school in 1725. He stayed in the house of his cousin Cornelius Ford, not as Boswell says his uncle Cornelius, at Pedmore, about a mile from Stourbridge. He walked in every day to the Grammar School. A connexion of the boy, Gregory Hickman, was residing next to the Grammar School. A kinsman of Johnson and a descendant of Hickman, Dr. Freer, still lives in the house. I met him at Lichfield recently, and he has sent me a photograph of the very house, which stands to-day much as it did when Johnson visited it, and wrote at twenty-two, a sonnet to Dorothy Hickman “playing at the Spinet.” Dorothy was one of Johnson’s three early loves, with Ann Hector and Olivia Lloyd. Dorothy married Dr. John Turtin and had an only child, Dr. Turtin, the celebrated physician who attended Goldsmith in his last illness.

I have not time to go through the record of all Dr. Johnson’s uncles on the maternal side, and do full justice to Mr. Reade’s industry and mastery of detail. I may, however, mention incidentally that the uncle who was hanged, if one was, must have been one of his father’s brothers, for to the Fords that distinction does not seem to have belonged. Much that is entertaining is related of the cousin Parson Ford, who, after sharing with the famous Earl of Chesterfield in many of his profligacies, received from his lordship the Rectory of South Luffenham. There is no evidence, however, that Chesterfield ever knew that his at one time chaplain and boon companion was cousin of the man who wrote him the most famous of letters.

The mother of Cornelius Ford was a Crowley, and this brings Johnson into relationship with London city worthies, for Mrs. Ford’s brother was Sir Ambrose Crowley, Kt., Alderman, of London, the original of Addison’s Jack Anvil. One of Sir Ambrose Crowley’s daughters married Humphrey Parsons, sometime M.P. for London and twice Lord Mayor. Thus we see that during the very years of Johnson’s most painful struggle in London one of his distant cousins or connexions was Chief Magistrate of this City. Another connexion, Elizabeth Crowley, was married in 1724 at Westminster Abbey to John, tenth Lord St. John of Bletsoe. “Here are ancestors for you, Mistress,” Dr. Johnson might have said to Mrs. Thrale if he had only known—if he had had a genealogist at his elbow as well as a pushful biographer.

Mr. Reade prints the whole of the marriage settlement upon the union of Johnson’s mother and father. It is a very elaborate document, and suggests the undoubted prosperity of the parties at the time. The husband was fifty, the bride thirty-seven. Samuel was not born until three years and three months after the marriage. The pair frequently in early married life received assistance by convenient deaths as the following extracts from wills indicate:—

Cornelius Ford of Packwood in the Co. of Warwick.

I give and bequeath unto my son-in-law Michaell Johnson the sum of five pounds, and to his wife my daughter five and twenty pounds.

Proved May 1, 1709.

Jane Ford of Old Turnford, widow of Joseph Ford.

I do will and appoint that my son Cornelius Ford do and shall pay to my brother-in-law, Mr. Michael Johnson and his wife and their trustees, the sum of 200 pounds which is directed by his late father’s Will to be paid to me and in lieu of so much moneys which my said late husband received in trust for my said brother Johnson and his wife.

Proved at Worcester, October 2, 1722.

Then “good cousin Harriotts” does not forget them:—

I give and bequeath to my cousin Sarah the wife of Michael Johnson the like sum of 40 pounds for her own separate use, and one pair of my best flaxen sheets and pillow coats, a large pewter dish and a dozen of pewter plates, provided that her husband doth at the same time give the like bond to my executor to permit his wife to dispose of the same at her will and pleasure.

Elizabeth Harriotts of Trysall in Staff.,
October 23, 1726.

But I must leave this fascinating volume. I cannot find time to tell you all it has to say about the Porter family. Mr. Reade is as informative when treating of the Porters, of Mrs. Johnson and her daughter Lucy, as he is with the family trees of which I have spoken.

I hasten on to Dr. Hill’s Life, with which I am only concerned here at the point where it is affected by Mr. Reade’s book. The reflection inevitably arises that it is well-nigh impossible efficiently to do work involving research unless one has an income derived from other sources. Your historian in proportion to the value of his work must be a rich man, and so must the biographer. Good as Brother Birkbeck Hill’s work was, it would have been better if he had had more money. He might have had many of these wills and other documents copied, upon the securing of which Mr. Reade must have expended such very large sums. Dr. Hill was fully alive to this. “If I had not some private means,” he wrote to a friend in 1897, “I could never edit Johnson and Boswell; but I do not get so well paid as a carpenter.” As a matter of fact, I find that he lost exactly £3 by publishing Dr. Johnson: his Friends and his Critics. He made £320 by the first four years’ sale of the “Boswell.” This £320, including American rights, made the bulk of his payments for his many years’ work, and the book has not yet gone into a second edition. I think 2,000 were printed. There were between 40,000 and 50,000 copies of Croker’s editions sold, so that we must not be too boastful as to the improved taste of the present age. £320 is a mere bagatelle to numbers of our present writers of utterly foolish fiction. Several of them have been known to spend double that sum on a single motor-car. In connexion with this matter I cannot refrain from giving one passage from a letter of Brother Hill’s:—

My old friend D--- lamented that the two new volumes (of my Johnson Miscellanies) are so dear as to be above his reach. The net price is a guinea. On Sunday he had eight glasses of hollands and seltzer—a shilling each, a pint of stout and some cider, besides half a dozen cigars or so. Two days’ abstinence from cigars and liquor would have paid for my book.

Mrs. Crump, who writes her father’s life, has expressed regret to me that there is so little in the book concerning the Johnson Club to which Brother Hill was so devoted. She had asked me for letters, but I felt that all in my possession were unsuited for publication, dealing rather freely with living persons. Brother Hill was impatient of the mere bookmaker—the literary charlatan who wrote without reading sufficiently. There are two pleasant glimpses of our Club in the volume; I quote one. It was of the night that we discussed Dr. Johnson as a Radical:—

I wish that you and Lucy could have been present last night and witnessed my scene of triumph. I was indeed most nobly welcomed. The scribe told me with sympathetic pride that the correspondent of the New York Herald had asked leave to attend, as he wished to telegraph my paper out to America!!! as well as the discussion. There were some very good speeches made in the discussion that followed, especially by a Mr. Whale, a solicitor, who spoke remarkably well and with great knowledge of his Boswell. He said that he preferred to call it, not Johnson’s radical side, but his humanitarian side. Mr. Birrell, the Obiter Dicta man, also spoke very well. He is a clever fellow. He was equally complimentary. He maintained in opposition to Mr. Whale that radical was the right term, and in fact that radicalism and humanitarianism were the same. Many of them said what a light the paper had thrown on Johnson’s character. One gentleman came up and congratulated me on the very delicate way in which I had handled so difficult a subject, and had not given offence to the Liberal Unionists and Tories present. Edmund Gosse, by whom I sat, was most friendly, and called the paper a wonderful tour de force, referring to the way in which I had linked Johnson’s sayings. He asked me to visit him some day at Trinity College, Cambridge, and assured me of a hearty welcome. It is no wonder that what with the supper and the smoke I did not get to sleep till after two. Among the guests was the great Bonner, the Australian cricketer, whose health had been drunk with that of the other visitors, and his praise sounded at having hit some balls over the pavilion at Lord’s. With great simplicity he said that after seeing the way in which Johnson’s memory was revered, he would much rather have been such a man than have gained his own greatest triumphs at cricket. He did not say it jocularly at all.

Another letter from Dr. Hill describes how he found himself at Ashbourne in Derbyshire with the Club, or rather with a fragment of it. He wrote from the Green Man there concerning his adventures.

I have far exceeded my time, but I would like in conclusion to say how admirably his daughter has written this book on our Brother Birkbeck Hill. What a pleasant picture it presents of a genuine lover of literature. His was not an analytical mind nor was he a great critic. His views on Dante and Newman will not be shared by any of us. But, what is far more important than analysis or criticism, he had an entirely lovable personality and was a most clubbable man. He was moreover the ideal editor of Boswell. What more could be said in praise of a beloved Brother of the Johnson Club!