time), and a down-at-the-heels doctor to the
poor, who shared Johnson’s habit of sleeping late
and would join his patron for a noon breakfast
in similar dishabille. The late breakfasts with Dr.
Levit and the late-night teas with Anna Williams were brief respites from continual squabbling; nearly every one of Johnson’s lodgers resented at least one of the others. Frank Barber,
the emancipated slave and no favorite of Miss
Williams, eventually left home and enlisted on a
ship, little knowing what awaited him there and
gaining his release only after Johnson’s tireless
intercessions. This episode was the occasion for
Johnson’s remark that being on a ship was like
being in a jail with the risk of being drowned
thrown in, and that one’s company in jail was
frequently of a better quality than the sort to be
found on a ship. his household can appear to
us as a typical ship’s company appeared to him,
though like a ship his household helped him
stay emotionally afloat.
he had often wanted for affection in his life,
even in the bosom of more traditional family arrangements. his father was given to melancholy
and his mother no match for her intellectually
precocious son. (When she scolded him as “a
puppy” once, he replied by asking if she knew
what a puppy’s mother was called.) his own marriage to a woman almost twenty years his elder,
though not without love on both sides, seems to
have been unhappy, marked by long periods of
absence on his part and marred in its last years by
his wife’s addictions. They had no children.
Later on, while still maintaining his house-
hold of dependents, he took refuge with a well-
to-do younger couple by the name of Thrale.
hester Thrale became Johnson’s confidant, his
first biographer, and perhaps (as suggested by
some letters) his closet dominatrix. Even if
the last of these was not literally so, it was true
enough figuratively in that Johnson seems to
have exchanged the patron’s role he played with
Barber and Williams for that of hester’s needy
dependent. The Johnson we love best, if we love
him, is in his house drinking tea with Williams
and Levit; the Johnson we love least is begging
a widowed hester Thrale not to throw her life
away by marrying her daughter’s Italian sing-
ing teacher—which is to say, forbidding her to
have the tender regard that her philandering
first husband had denied her and that Johnson
himself had longed for all his life.
Children begin by loving their parents; after
a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they
forgive them. —Oscar Wilde, 1893
in the free-market sense we think of now (he
distrusted the mercantile “Whig dogs”), but
in the older sense of someone who believes
that humanity does not evolve so much as it
endures, that while monarchy has many pains,
republicanism might prove to have no pleasures. I suspect that some of this conservatism
came from his experience of family, from the
intractability of its givens no matter how experimental its forms. And if his conservatism
goes soft on certain issues (he hated slavery and
upheld the right of the people to cut off a tyrant’s head), that may have come from the same
experience. Tradition be damned—we must get
poor Frank off of that miserable ship.
Till we have built Jerusalem
not least of all because I have a daughter who
must live in it for a while after I’m gone, I
worry about the world. Because of her, I worry
more than I otherwise might; on the other
hand, because of her I also worry less. The old
parental paradox: I see so many forces arrayed
against her, but I also see her as a potent force
for good.
