At Home With Mrs Thrale

For those of us who cannot get enough of the Georgians, Hester Lynch Salusbury, who became Mrs Thrale and later Mrs Piozzi, is indispensable. At a time when Samuel Johnson was the greatest planet in the emerging literary firmament, she was one of his most important satellites, in fact more than that: a prop and stay without whom he might well have foundered. When they came to characterize themselves however, they were less portentous: Johnson was an elephant to Mrs Thrale’s rattlesnake. With his trunk he could ‘lift up a buffalo or pick up a pin’, she said, while he claimed, ‘Many have felt your venom, few have escaped your attractions and all the world knows you have the rattle.’ This last is a reference to her delight in conversation and her skill at maintaining its flow, what Johnson called her ‘stream of sentiment enlightened by gaiety’.

Hers was a failing branch of a family of Welsh gentry, so much effort was put into making her an attractive heiress to her rich uncles and improving her chances in the marriage market by giving her an education. She was tutored in Latin, Greek and Philosophy, learnt Spanish, French and Italian, all the while churning out verses and translations. The uncles never came up to scratch, but she did get married in 1763, when she was 22, to Henry Thrale, aged 35, one of the bigger London brewers. It was no love match and she claimed never to have ‘passed five whole minutes tête à tête with him till the evening of my wedding day . . . I soon saw that I was married from prudential motives as a passive tho’ well born and educated girl, who would be contented to live in the Borough [Southwark, where the brewery was] which other women had refused to do.’ Thrale had been at Oxford and on a Grand Tour of the Continent, was ‘unaffectedly civil and decorous’, slow to take offence; he loved money but was liberal in spending it. To his wife, he was, ‘tho’ little tender to her person, very partial to her understanding’, as shown by the pleasure he got listening to her combative conversation. But she was allowed no control over kitchen or household, was forbidden to ride and often had to live at the brewery in noisome, unfashionable Southwark, near where Shakespeare’s Globe stood and its replica now stands. Thrale also had a hunting box and pack of hounds near Croydon, and a house at Brighton, yet to be made fashionable by the Prince of Wales. And there was the country house, Streatham Park, well into the Surrey countryside, which made tolerable her unceasing round of pregnancy and childbirth through eighteen years of marriage. (She had ten daughters and two sons, of whom five daughters survived, as well as several miscarriages.) Johnson had been introduced to the pair in 1765 and soon became a regular guest at their table. But he was increasingly overcome by fits of despair, fearing that he might succumb to madness, as had his father. The Thrales, concerned when he ceased coming to dinner, started calling on him in 1766 and one day found him on his knees before a clergyman, ‘beseeching God to continue to him the use of his understanding’. They took him back to Streatham where he was effectively absorbed into their family, spending as much as five days a week with them. His life was transformed, but so too was theirs. Johnson’s unmatched flow of opinion and provocation now mixed with the rattle from the small (less than five foot), birdlike, quick-witted woman, attracting all those who had been his audience before: Oliver Goldsmith, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Joseph Baretti, Charles Burney, James Boswell, Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton. The Thrales’ unstinting hospitality was repaid by an enrichment of their social life. Thrale basked in reflected glory, commissioned portraits of his new guests, got Johnson to change his shirt more often and bought him silver buckles for his shoes and a new wig to replace the one singed when he held his book too close to the candle while reading. Johnson looked up to him and let Thrale call him to order if he became too dogmatic. He was even prepared to go out with Thrale’s hounds, although he regarded hunting as a contemptible sport. One day, after they had ridden fifty miles, Mrs Thrale provoked the two men to show they could jump over one of her high stools – which they both did, still in their boots. Conversation was omnivorous and Boswell remembered it ranging one day from Scottish gardens to history, light verse and Methodist preaching. Apart from the stimulus he brought to their lives, there were occasions when Johnson was able to help in practical ways. In 1771 Thrale allowed a friend to involve him in the buying of bad hops and then in failed attempts to brew without malt, and a scheme to make timber resistant to marine worms. The joint efforts of Johnson and Mrs Thrale saved the firm: ‘money was raised, the beer was mended’, customers were placated, employees were reassured ‘and we grew prosperous and loved each other’. The death in 1776 of the Thrales’ surviving son and heir set Henry at odds again, manifested in low spirits, venereal disease, over-eating and an infatuation with Sophia Streatfield, called by Mrs Thrale ‘a white fricassée or piece of pea-green satin . . . [who] hangs about him, dances round him, squeezes his hand with her eyes full of tears’. The brewery was in trouble again in 1778, until Johnson’s scheme for restricting production to 80,000 barrels a year was adopted. Thrale’s first stroke in 1779 meant their concerns for the business continued and in 1780 the brewery narrowly escaped being seized by the mob, fresh from sacking Newgate Prison, during the Gordon Riots. Fanny Burney, daughter of the Thrales’ friend Charles Burney, had found fame with her novel Evelina in 1778, and was also now held ‘in a fond and firm affection’ by Mrs Thrale, though having only a short while before been ranked ‘a saucy, spirited little puss, to be sure’. This promotion was perhaps what encouraged Mrs Thrale to let off steam to her from Brighton, a place she never liked, in July 1780:

I write now from Brown’s shop . . . And here comes in one man hopping, and asks for Russell on Seawater – another tripping, and begs to have the last new novel sent him home tonight; one lady tumbles the ballads about, and fingers the harpsichord which stands here at every blockhead’s mercy; and another looks over the Lilliputian library, and purchases Polly Sugarcake for her long-legged misery.

By 1781 it was clear that Thrale had not long to live. As Johnson said of his gluttony, ‘Sir, such eating is little better than suicide.’ He died in April and Mrs Thrale set about selling the brewery. Johnson relished his involvement in the deal since, as Mrs Thrale observed, he ‘desires above all other good the accumulation of new ideas [and so] is but too happy with his present employment’. However, another development was shortly to bring anything but happiness to him, even though it brought a measure of ease and contentment, indeed her first true love, to Mrs Thrale. In 1780 she had bumped into the musician Gabriel Piozzi in Brighton, having encountered him once before in 1778, and swiftly decided he was the person to give her eldest daughter Queeney singing lessons. He was 40, the same age as herself, from an Italian family of the middling sort, and had come to England in 1776. Soon he was ‘a prodigious favourite’ with her, and before long her feelings had advanced well beyond that. As the situation was revealed, the chorus of disapproval – from Queeney and her sisters, from society in general, from Fanny Burney – became deafening. Fanny listed the reasons why: ‘Children, Religion, Situation, Country, and Character’. How could she fall for a foreigner, a Catholic, a mere music master? After she told Johnson in 1782 of her plans for a long visit to Italy, with Piozzi, she wrote that he ‘thought well of the project’ and ‘seemed even less concerned at parting with me than I wished him’. She was piqued by his apparent indifference, unwilling to take it for what it was, a show of selflessness on his part – her guilt over the way their relationship had already started cooling once Thrale was dead led her to nurse her grievance. In 1783 she gave way to the pressure upon her from all sides and Piozzi went back to Italy; she lost a 4-year-old daughter to smallpox; Johnson had a stroke. He wrote, ‘You will perhaps pass over [this news] now with the careless glance of indifference.’ But it was not until 1784, when he heard that at last she and Piozzi were to wed and go abroad, that he really let his bitterness flow, writing to her of an ignominious marriage, of children and religion abandoned, fame and country forfeited. He immediately wrote a retraction, but this was the end of a most intimate friendship, which for him had brought a ‘kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched’, and for her a huge stimulus and enrichment. By Christmas he was dead, buried in Westminster Abbey. Mrs Thrale loved her three years on the Continent that followed, claiming she could think of nothing in England to make amends for the pleasures of Milan and Venice, ‘excepting a muffin in the morning and Mrs Siddons at night’. She was particularly taken by relations within Italian households: ‘Certainty of distance between high and low here makes them live so easily together . . . ’Tis impossible to imagine with what familiarity these proudest of all mortals live with their servants.’ Her travel book, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey . . . , came out in 1789, but her more famous Anecdotes of the Late Doctor Johnson had appeared in 1786, both under her new name of Mrs Piozzi. The latter has its merits, with some very entertaining stories, like Johnson writing his essay on procrastination while the printer’s man waited to ‘carry it to the press’. It sold very well, but the magic of Boswell’s Life (1791), with its developing scenes and recreated conversations and the thrust-and-parry between the great man and those around him, is absent. Boswell assembled a mass of raw material on which to draw, while Mrs Thrale’s anecdotes were what she had collected in her commonplace books, diaries and notebooks, kept since 1776 and which she called her ‘Thraliana’. To find the good ore there, much dross must be skipped – her own verses and translations, and those of others; the gravest suspicions about Catholic plotting and influence; biblical prophesies coming to pass; prices; observations on the weather; endless squabbles about money with her daughters’ trustees, and complaints of the daughters’ behaviour towards her. But this unwieldy bran tub has all sorts of prizes waiting to be found by those who dip in. The Piozzis moved from Streatham to North Wales in 1795 and Gabriel died in 1809. Hester then made one of his nephews her heir before she died in 1821. But her biggest bequest had to wait until 1942, when Thraliana was finally published in two volumes, running to 1,100 pages.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Roger Hudson 2025