In Johnson’s Footsteps

‘We’re thinking of moving,’ announced our son one evening last year. ‘To Lichfield.’ Lichfield! The name was music to my ears. I have long had a soft spot for that little gem of a cathedral city, once the ecclesiastical capital of Mercia, now a delightful Staffordshire market town. I would be more than happy to follow the son, daughter-in-law and three of the grandchildren to Lichfield (and my wife, less familiar with Lichfield, would follow them wherever they went anyway).

They went, we followed, and now here we are, settling into life in a place very different from the south London suburb that was our previous home. Why was I so keen to move here? The cathedral of course, with its three graceful spires rising over the waters of the Minster Pool, and the streets of Georgian brick and stone interspersed with half-timbering, the wonderful parks and open spaces, the gentle pace of life, the friendly openness of the people . . . And one very special reason: the evident pride the town takes in its most famous native son – Samuel Johnson. For years I have enjoyed Johnson’s writings – the Rambler essays, his life of Richard Savage, The Vanity of Human Wishes, even the great Dictionary – and, thanks to James Boswell’s extraordinary Life, surely the most rounded and affectionate biography ever written, I have also loved him as a man, for all his faults. He could be overbearing, pompous and opinionated, yet he was also tender-hearted, affectionate, sympathetic and well aware of his own shortcomings. To live in the town where he was born and spent his formative years was a pleasing prospect, especially as he is still so very present there. Johnson, who once opined that ‘Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place’, would be gratified to see that he still appears very considerable in Lichfield, where he was born in 1709. The city signs proudly declare Lichfield the ‘Birthplace of Samuel Johnson’, his statue stands in the marketplace and, remarkably, his birthplace, which was his father’s bookshop, survives, and is now a Johnson museum – and bookshop. There is even a Samuel Johnson Community Hospital – which would have pleased him, as he took a lively interest in ‘physic’ and his father had a sideline in selling patent medicines. The Johnson statue looms large in the marketplace. Atop a tall plinth decorated with scenes from his Lichfield years, Johnson sits brooding, chin on fist, in a throne-like chair. When the statue was unveiled in 1838, it was regarded by some as insufficiently heroic in style, but it conveys the introspective, melancholic aspect of Johnson’s personality rather well. Anyway, it is nicely offset by the statue at the other end of the marketplace – a jaunty figure, on a smaller scale, of (who else but?) Boswell. The birthplace museum, also on the marketplace, is a pleasing mix of original and reconstructed interiors, with steep narrow staircases and small rooms with creaking floors, displaying various items of Johnsoniana, including the famous Nollekens bust, many books and pictures, and some of Johnson’s furniture and effects. And the second-hand bookshop downstairs is excellent. One of the rooms of the museum is the one in which Johnson was born. ‘My mother had a very difficult and dangerous labour,’ he wrote in a posthumously published memoir. ‘I was born almost dead, and could not cry for some time. When [the male midwife] had me in his arms, he said, “Here is a brave boy.”’ Johnson’s father was that year Sheriff of Lichfield, and due to ride the Circuit of the County, a ceremonial occasion of great pomp. To celebrate his son’s birth, ‘he feasted the citizens with uncommon magnificence’. Soon after this, the baby Samuel was, ‘by my father’s persuasion’, put out to a wet-nurse. Clearly his mother was not happy with this arrangement:

My mother visited me every day, and used to go different ways, that her assiduity might not expose her to ridicule; and often left her fan or glove behind her, that she might have a pretence to come back unexpected; but she never discovered any token of neglect. Dr Swinfen [a young doctor lodging with the Johnsons at the time of Samuel’s birth] told me, that the scrofulous sores which afflicted me proceeded from the bad humours of the nurse, whose son had the same distemper, and was likewise short-sighted, but in a less degree. My mother thought my diseases derived from her family. In ten weeks I was taken home, a poor, diseased infant, almost blind.

As well as the scrofula detected by Dr Swinfen – which left Johnson scarred and visually impaired for life – he later developed an alarming range of tics and twitches that might well have been a form of Tourette’s. He was also, from his youth, dogged by what we would now call depression. His was not a promising start in life, and his family circumstances were far from ideal. Johnson senior was a hopeless businessman who never thought to keep any kind of accounts, and as a result was perpetually in chronic financial difficulty. When asked in later life why he said little about his early years, Johnson replied, ‘One has so little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary’ – an exaggeration, but certainly the young Johnson lived in straitened circumstances. Although he was a brilliant scholar, the star pupil of Lichfield Grammar School, he was only able to take up a place at Pembroke College, Oxford, because of a timely bequest by an aunt. And even then, he had to return home after a little over a year, the money having run out. Several unhappy years followed, in which Johnson, trying to find a way ahead, became a schoolteacher, a job for which he was woefully unsuited. His great good fortune was to find love with Elizabeth Porter, the widow of a friend, who, though twenty-one years his senior, was happy to marry this impoverished young man, and was to be the love of his life, his ‘Tetty’, whose loss (she died in 1752) grieved him for the rest of his days. Elizabeth was a woman of property, and with the help of her capital, she and Johnson set up a school at Edial Hall, near Lichfield. Sadly it was a failure, never attracting more than a handful of pupils, but one of them was David Garrick, also an alumnus of Lichfield Grammar School, and later to be the most celebrated actor of his day. He and Johnson became firm friends and, when the school failed in 1737, they decided their best course would be to make their way to London in search of fame and fortune. Elizabeth would follow in due course, when Johnson had found his feet. It was a struggle, in the course of which Johnson saw much of the seamy side of London life and the lower depths of the literary world, the Grub Street of desperate hacks and dubious dealings – but his talent, as poet, essayist, biographer and novelist (Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia), won through, and he was soon embarked on what was to be a brilliant, if arduous, career. His future was clearly going to be in London, not Lichfield, where the literary scene was very much more limited. There, only one star shone brightly – Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and himself a pioneer of evolutionary theory. Erasmus Darwin was a polymath – physician, naturalist, philosopher, inventor and poet – who presented his scientific findings to the world in (rather bad) verse, and was a leading light of the Lunar Society, an affiliation of scientists, philosophers, writers, engineers and businessmen that was at the heart of what we now call the Midlands Enlightenment. But that is another story (for which see Jenny Uglow’s excellent The Lunar Men) and one in which Johnson, as only an occasional visitor to Lichfield, played little or no part. On the few occasions when Johnson and Darwin, men of equally huge physique and presence, met, ‘mutual and strong dislike subsisted between them’, according to Anna Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield’, poetess and queen bee of the city’s literati. The touchy Seward declared that she could not forgive Johnson his ‘many hints of Lichfield’s intellectual barrenness’. But did he really make such remarks, or did the Swan of Lichfield resent the great man’s pardonable reluctance to meet her, despite Boswell’s efforts to bring such a meeting about? At other times Johnson was certainly happy to sing the virtues of his native city, describing it as ‘a city of philosophers’, and on one occasion relating how ‘I lately took my friend Boswell and showed him genuine civilized life in an English provincial town.’ Lichfield is even honoured with a mention in Johnson’s Dictionary, under his definition of ‘lich’ (‘a dead carcase’): ‘Lichfield, the field of the dead, a city in Staffordshire, so named from martyred Christians. Salve magna parens [Hail, great parent].’ Towards the end of his life, Johnson ensured that his parents were remembered with a suitably dignified stone slab, inscribed with a long Latin epitaph written by their son, in the floor of St Michael’s church in Lichfield (where another pair of literary parents – Philip Larkin’s – are buried in the graveyard). Johnson certainly loved London and he could hardly have pursued his particular career anywhere else but it is clear, too, that the city of his birth always had a place in his heart, and Lichfield, happily, seems to feel much the same way about him. Johnson famously said that ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ I would update that to ‘When a man is tired of London [as increasing numbers are], he should seriously consider moving to Lichfield.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 78 © Nigel Andrew 2023