Johnson of London 1 James Boswell

JOHNSON OF LONDON

SAMUEL JOHNSON              

TETTY JOHNSON                  It was an unusual match.  She stood by Johnson in the difficult years when he was slowly becoming known.

JAMES BOSWELL                  He first met Johnson in 1763 when he was 22 and Johnson 53, and he became Johnson’s friend and companion. Most importantly for us he wrote “A Life of Samuel Johnson”. This book is impossible to put down and many readers go back to it year after year. Like Africa, it always provides something new.      

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS      He was the most famous portrait painter of the age.  He painted Johnson three times. With Johnson, he founded  The Club, about which more later.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH           His play “She Stoops to Conquer” has been acted, read and enjoyed from his time to ours.  He was also a novelist and a poet.  A member of The Club.

ROBERT LEVET                    A hard-working doctor living in

Johnson’s house.  Read Johnson’s tribute ‘On the death of Dr Robert

Levet’.  Read it.  It won’t take you long. This is how an elegy should be

written.

MISS WILLIAMS                     Like Levet, one of Johnson’s permanent

lodgers.  One evening Goldsmith told Boswell, “I go to tea with Miss

Williams” to show that with this honour he was part of Johnson’s inner

circle of friends.

HENRY THRALE                    A wealthy brewery owner.  Johnson often stayed at his house in Streatham.  

HESTER THRALE                  Henry Thrale's wife.  A good friend to Johnson, and her house in Streatham became for him a retreat of calm and comfortable living.

BENNET LANGTON               Though much younger than Johnson, Langton became a close friend. In 1752 he and Beauclerk knocked loudly on the door of Johnson’s house at 3 o’clock in the morning. “What is it you, you dogs? I’ll have a frisk with you!” shouted Johnson from his bedroom window, and thus began a night of carousing in Covent Garden and the neighbouring taverns.  They carried on well into the next day.

TOPHAM BEAUCLERK         He became a friend of Johnson through

Bennet Langton.  As Langton, he was an original member of The Club.

JOHN TAYLOR                      He was at with Johnson at Pembroke

College. He remained a friend for the rest of Johnson’s life.

TOM DAVIES                         A bookseller and friend of Johnson.  On

May 16 1763 at his bookshop in Russell Street, Covent Garden, Boswell

met Johnson for the first time. 

Not too much must be made of Johnson’s nervous tics or there is the danger that he will be reduced to little more than a comic figure.  Admittedly he had odd mannerisms, such as not walking on the cracks of the pavement or not going out of a door on a certain foot.  These are common symptoms of various types of neurosis, and Johnson was not the first, nor will be the last to suffer from them.

What does matter is his continuous struggle against mental imbalance, physical ill health and poverty.  He made a success of life by the sheer strength of his perseverance against the odds.

JAMES BOSWELL

Boswell, sitting on the side of the stage, is writing at a small, round table.  On the table is a lighted candle, a bottle of red wine and a glass, which Boswell refills frequently.

BOSWELL  (finishing a letter)

I remain,

Your humble servant,

James Boswell

(Repeats, self-satisfied, to himself)

Yes, James Boswell. I think that people will remember James Boswell.  Because of Johnson, I shall go down in history!

(To audience).  I know this is Johnson’s story but you can’t keep me out of it for long.  My profession is hanging on to great people, and I’m really very good at it.  I am also a lawyer in Scotland, but that’s by the bye.  I met Voltaire in France in 1763.  Over 20 years ago now.  I met Jean-Jacques Rousseau, yes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in 1764 and I brought his mistress, Therese, back here to London.  Yes, I am a great meeter!  I met the Corsican patriot, Pasquale Paoli, the year after, in 1765, and I wrote a book about him.  But now I am back here, in London.  London!  “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life!” I didn’t say that, he did.  No, not Rousseau or Pasquale Paoli but Johnson.  “The full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross!”  That’s Johnson again.  He says these things and I just write them down.  I’m just a scribe really, but still without me how much of his conversation would have been lost!

He is a great man., the greatest of my great men.  A pity you never heard him!  You’ve heard of him probably.  Have you?  Be honest!  But you never heard him talk.  I remember seeing him in his room at midday.  He hadn’t been up long, his clothes needed sewing here and there, they didn’t seem to fit quite right, his wig was awry but when he started to talk, none of that mattered! Yes, you never heard him talk. That’s what comes of not living in the 18^th century! You’ve missed it all by coming later. How strange are the things that happened before we were born.  We accept them and we know they happened, but they really don’t mean much to us.  We can’t feel them, can we! Yes, it’s a pity but you missed out on the 18^th century! Not that you could help it!  We can’t choose our entrances any more than we can choose our exits. But you are unlucky not to have coincided with Johnson.

Still, you have me!  I’m doing my best!  I’m writing it all down.  I’m writing his life, you see and it’s taking me a lot longer than I thought it would.  It’s a promise I made to myself and, in a way, to him too.  It’s getting a lot longer than I intended but I think it will be worthwhile.  The world ought to know what he was like.  Yes, I think I’ll be leaving something worthwhile behind when I finish this.

Where are we?  (Finding his place in his writing)  Yes, that’s it. (He writes) May 27^th 1768.  Anno aetatis suae 59.  “Anno aetatis suae”, the year of his age, how old he is.  Latin!  How Latin has declined since then!  If you had lived in the 18^th century, you would have had to do something about your Latin.  Every educated person knew Latin then.  When Johnson wanted to tell his doctor in Lichfield about the state of his mind he analysed his own case and sent the doctor the details of the symptoms in Latin!   

Now nobody understands Latin!  Alas!  O tempora, o mores!  What times we live in, what…! Oh, never mind! Forget it!

Where was I?  Ah yes, May 27^th 1768. Friday.  He is now the Johnson of history.  Famous.  He has produced his great dictionary.  He has written his one-man periodical, ‘The Rambler’.  He has written ‘Rasselas’. Everyone recognizes him as he lurches down Fleet Street, as he sits in the coffee houses, and as he drinks in the Mitre Tavern but it wasn’t always like that.  It was a long hard climb, a very long and very hard climb indeed.

Now, to put you in the picture, but I promise I won’t bore you with all the details. They’re in the book anyway.  He was born in Lichfield.  That’s the city with the cathedral with three spires. It’s worth a visit. So, like Shakespeare, he was from the Midlands, and like Shakespeare he gravitated to the magnet of London when he was young. His parents were… but you aren’t interested in all that.  I’m not interested in all that.  I put it all here in the book but I didn’t spend long on it.  I want to get on with the later part, the part where I come in. So we can skip a little.  (He turns over the early pages of what he has written).  Oh, this bit is important, Oxford!