I have said that Captain Marryat was an East Anglian, and have we not a right to be proud of Marryat"s breezy stories of the sea? Our youth has found such plentiful stimulus in _Peter Simple_, _Frank Mildmay_, and _Mr. Midshipman Easy_; generations of boys have read them with delight, generations of boys will read them. And not only boys, but men. One recalls that Carlyle, in one of his deepest fits of depression, took refuge in Marryat"s novels with infinite advantage to his peace of mind.
Speaking of Captain Marryat and books for boys, a quite minor kind of literature perhaps some of you may think, I must recall that an earlier and still more famous story for children had an East Anglian origin. Did not The Babes in the Wood come out of Norfolk? Was it not their estate in that county that, as we learn from Percy"s _Reliques_, their wicked uncle coveted, and were not the last hours of those unfortunate children, in this most picturesque and pathetic of stories, solaced by East Anglian robins and their poor bodies covered by East Anglian vegetation?
Let me pa.s.s, however, to what may be counted more serious literature.
What can one say of Sir Thomas Browne unless indeed one has an hour in which to say it. Every page of that great writer"s _Religio Medici_ and _Urn Burial_ is quotable--full of worldly wisdom and of an inspiration that is not of the world. Browne was born in London, and not until he was thirty-two years of age did he settle in Norwich, where he was "much resorted to for his skill in physic," and where he lived for forty-five years, when the fine church of St. Peter Mancroft, received his ashes--a church in which, let me add, with pardonable pride, my own grandfather and grandmother were married. I am glad that Norwich is shortly to commemorate by a fitting monument not the least great of her sons, one who has been aptly called "the English Montaigne." {138}
Perhaps there are those who would dispute my claim for Marryat and for Sir Thomas Browne that they were East Anglians--both were only East Anglians by adoption. There are even those who dispute the claim for one whom I must count well-nigh the greatest of East Anglian men of letters--George Borrow. Borrow, I maintain, was an East Anglian if ever there was one, although this has been questioned by Mr. Theodore Watts- Dunton. Now I have the greatest possible regard for Mr. Watts-Dunton. He is distinguished alike as a critic, a poet, and a romancer. But I must join issue with him here, and you, I know, will forgive me for taking up your time with the matter; for if Mr. Watts-Dunton were right, one of the chief glories would be shorn from our East Anglian traditions. He denies in the Introduction to a new edition of _The Romany Rye_, just published, the claim of Borrow to be an East Anglian, although Borrow himself insisted that he was one.
One might as well call Charlotte Bronte a Yorkshire woman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman. His father was a Cornishman and his mother of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow"s father, and very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow"s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the egotism of Borrow that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe.
Well, I am not prepared to question the suggestion that East Anglia is the hub of the universe, only to question Mr. Watts-Dunton"s position.
There is virtue in that qualification of his that there was "very little"
East Anglian blood in the veins of Borrow"s mother, and that she was "mainly" French. As a matter of fact she was, of course, partly East Anglian; that is to say, she must have had two or three generations of East Anglian blood in her, seeing that it was her great-grandfather who settled in Norfolk from France, and he and his children and grandchildren intermarried with the race. But I do not pin my claim for Borrow upon that fact--the fact of three generations of his mother"s family at Dumpling Green--or even on the fact that he was born near East Dereham.
There is nothing more certain than that we are all of us influenced greatly by our environment, and that it is this, quite as much as birth or ancestry, that gives us what characteristics we possess. It is the custom, for example, to call Swift an Irishman, whereas Swift came of English parentage and lived for many of his most impressionable years in England. Nevertheless, he may be justly claimed by the sister-island, for during a long sojourn in that country he became permeated with the subtle influence of the Irish race, and in many things he thought and felt as an Irishman. It is the custom to speak of Maria Edgeworth as an Irish novelist, yet Miss Edgeworth was born in England of English parentage. Nevertheless, she was quite as much an Irish novelist as Charles Lever and Samuel Lover, for all her life was spent in direct communion with the Irish race, and her books were Irish books. It is, on the other hand, quite unreasonable to deny that Charlotte Bronte was a Yorkshire woman. Only once at the end of her life did she visit Ireland for a few weeks. Her Irish father and her Cornish mother doubtless influenced her nature in many ways, but not less certain was the influence of those wonderful moors around Haworth, and the people among whom she lived. Neither Ireland nor Cornwall has as much right to claim her as Yorkshire. I am the last to disclaim the influence of what is sometimes called "Celticism" upon English literature; upon this point I am certain that Matthew Arnold has said almost the last word. The Celts--not necessarily the Irish, as there are three or four races of Celts in addition to the Irish--have in the main given English literature its fine imaginative quality, and even where he cannot trace a Celtic origin to an English writer we may fairly a.s.sume that there is Celtic blood somewhere in an earlier generation.
Nevertheless, the impressions, as I have said, derived from environment are of the utmost vitality, and a.s.suredly Borrow was an East Anglian, as Sir Thomas Browne was an East Anglian. In each writer you can trace the influence of our soil in a peculiar degree, and particularly in Borrow.
Borrow was proud of being an East Anglian, and we are proud of him. In _Lavengro_, I venture to a.s.sert, we have the greatest example of prose style in our modern literature, and I rejoice to see a growing Borrow cult, a cult that is based not on an acceptance of the narrower side of Borrow--his furious ultra-Protestantism, for example--as was the popularity that he once enjoyed, but upon the fact that he was a magnificent artist in words. No artist in words but is influenced by environment. Charles Kingsley, for example, who came from quite different surroundings, was profoundly influenced by the East Anglian fen- country:--
"They have a beauty of their own, those great fens," he said, "a beauty of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Overhead the arch of heaven spreads more ample than elsewhere, and that vastness gives such cloud-lands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles."
But I must hasten on, although I would fain tarry long over George Borrow and his works. I have said that East Anglia is the country of great letter writers. First, there was Margaret Paston. There is no such contribution to a remote period of English history as that contained in the _Paston Letters_, and I think we must a.s.sociate them with the name of a woman--Margaret Paston. Margaret"s husband, John Paston; her son, Sir John Paston; and her second son, who, strangely enough, was also a John, and called himself "John Paston the Youngest," come frequently before us in the correspondence, but Margaret Paston is the central figure.
It may not be without interest to some of my hearers who are married to recall that Margaret Paston addresses her husband not as "Dear John," or "My dear John," as I imagine a wife of to-day would do, but as "Right Reverend and Worshipful Husband." Nowhere is there such a vivid picture of a bygone age as that contained in these _Paston Letters_. We who sit quietly by the hearth in the reign of King Edward VII may read what it meant to live by the hearth in the reign of King Edward IV. It is curious that the most humane doc.u.ments of far-off times in our history should all come from East Anglia, not only those _Paston Letters_, brimful of the most vital interest concerning the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV, but also an even earlier period--the life, or at least the monastic life in the time of the first Richard and of King John is in a most extraordinarily human fashion mirrored for us in that Chronicle of St. Edmund"s Bury Monastery known as the Jocelyn Chronicle, published by the Camden Society, which Carlyle has vitalized so superbly for us in _Past and Present_.
But I was speaking of the great letter writers, commencing with Margaret Paston. Who are our greatest letter writers? Undoubtedly they are Horace Walpole, William Cowper and Edward FitzGerald. You know what a superb picture of eighteenth century life has been presented to us in the nine volumes of correspondence we have by Horace Walpole. {144} Walpole was to all practical purposes an East Anglian, although he happened to be born in London. His father, the great Sir Robert Walpole, was a notable East Anglian, and he had the closest ties of birth and a.s.sociation with East Anglia. Many of his letters were written from the family mansion of Houghton. {145}
Next in order comes William Cowper. I believe that more than one literary historian has claimed Cowper as a Norfolk man. Cowper was born in Hertfordshire; he lived for a very great deal of his life in Olney, in Buckinghamshire, in London and in Huntingdon, but if ever there was a man who took on the texture of East Anglian scenery and East Anglian life it was Cowper. That beautiful river, the Ouse, which empties itself into the Wash, was a peculiar inspiration to Cowper, and those who know the scenery of Olney know that it has conditions exactly a.n.a.logous in every way to those of East Anglia. One of Cowper"s most beautiful poems is ent.i.tled "On Receipt of my Mother"s Portrait out of Norfolk," and he himself, as I have said, found his last resting-place on East Anglian soil--at East Dereham.
If there may be some doubt about Cowper, there can be none whatever about Edward FitzGerald, the greatest letter-writer of recent times. In mentioning the name of FitzGerald I am a little diffident. It is like introducing "King Charles"s head" into this gathering; for was he not the author of the poem known to all of us as the _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, and there is no small tendency to smile to-day whenever the name of Omar Khayyam is mentioned and to call the cult a "lunacy." It is perhaps unfortunate that FitzGerald gave that somewhat formidable t.i.tle to his paraphrase, or translation, of the old Persian poet. It is not the fault of those who admire that poem exceedingly that it gives them a suspicion of affecting a scholarship that they do not in most cases possess. What many of us admire is not Omar Khayyam the Persian, nor have we any desire to see or to know any other translation of that poet. We simply admit to an honest appreciation of the poem by Edward FitzGerald, the Suffolk squire, the poem that Tennyson describes as "the one thing done divinely well." That poem by FitzGerald will live as long as the English language, and let it never be forgotten that it is the work of an East Anglian, an East Anglian who, like Borrow, possessed a marked Celtic quality, the outcome of a famous Irish ancestry, nevertheless of an East Anglian who loved its soil, its rivers and its sea.
Then I come to another phase of East Anglian literary traditions. It is astonishing what a zest for learning its women have displayed; I might give you quite a long list of distinguished women who have come out of East Anglia. Crabbe must have had one in mind when he wrote of Arabella in one of his _Tales_:--
This reasoning maid, above her s.e.x"s dread Had dared to read, and dared to say she read, Not the last novel, not the new born play, Not the mere trash and scandal of the day; But (though her young companions felt the shock) She studied Berkeley, Bacon, Hobbes and Locke.
The one who perhaps made herself most notorious was Harriet Martineau, and in spite of her disagreeable egotism it is still a pleasure to read some of her less controversial writings. Her _Feats on the Fiord_, for example, is really a cla.s.sic. But I can never quite forgive Harriet Martineau in that she spoke contemptuously of East Anglian scenery, scenery which in its way has charms as great as any part of Europe can offer. No, in this roll of famous women, the two I am most inclined to praise are Sarah Austin and f.a.n.n.y Burney. Mrs. Austin was, you will remember, one of the Taylors of Norwich, married to John Austin, the famous jurist. She was one of the first to demonstrate that her s.e.x might have other gifts than a gift for writing fiction, and that it was possible to be a good, quiet, domestic woman, and at the same time an exceedingly learned one. Even before Carlyle she gave a vogue to the study of German literature in this country; she wrote many books, many articles, and made some translations, notably what is still the best translation of von Ranke"s _History of the Popes_. In the muster-roll of East Anglian worthies let us never forget this singularly good woman, this correspondent of all the most famous men of her day, of Guizot, of Grote, of Gladstone, and one who also, as a letter-writer, showed that she possessed the faculty that seems, as I have said, to be peculiar to the soil of East Anglia. Still less must we forget f.a.n.n.y Burney, who, born in King"s Lynn, lived to delight her own generation by _Evelina_ and by the fascinating _Diary_ that gives so pleasant a picture of Dr.
Johnson and many another of her contemporaries. _Evelina_ and the _Diary_ are two of my favourite books, but I practise self-restraint and will say no more of them here.
I now come to my ninth, and last, name among those East Anglian worthies whom I feel that we have a particular right to canonize--George Crabbe--"though Nature"s sternest painter yet the best," as Byron described him. Now it may be frankly admitted that few of us read Crabbe to-day. He has an acknowledged place in the history of literature, but there pretty well even well-read people are content to leave him. "What have our literary critics been about that they have suffered such a writer to drop into neglect and oblivion?" asks a recent Quarterly Reviewer. He does not live as Cowper does by a few lyrics and ballads and by incomparable letters. Scarcely a line of Crabbe survives in current conversation. If you turn to one of those handy volumes of reference--Dictionaries of Quotation, as they are called--from which we who are journalists are supposed to obtain most of the literary knowledge that we are able to display on occasion, you will scarcely find a dozen lines of Crabbe. And yet I venture to affirm that Crabbe has a great and permanent place in literature, and that as he has been a favourite in the past, he will become a favourite in the future. Crabbe can never lose his place in the history of literature, a place as the forerunner of Wordsworth and even of Cowper, but it would be a tragedy were he to drop out of the category of poets that are read. A dainty little edition in eight volumes is among my most treasured possessions. I have read it not as we read some so-called literature, from a sense of duty, but with unqualified interest. We have had much pure realism in these latter days; why not let us return to the most realistic of the poets. He was beloved by all the greatest among his contemporaries. Scott and Wordsworth were devoted to his work, and so also was Jane Austen. At a later date Tennyson praised him. We have heard quite recently the story of Mr. James Russell Lowell in his last illness finding comfort in reading Scott"s _Rob Roy_. Let us turn to Scott"s own last illness and see what was the book he most enjoyed, almost on his deathbed:--
"Read me some amusing thing," said Sir Walter, "read me a bit of Crabbe." "I brought out the first volumes of his old favourite that I could lay hand on," says Lockhart, "and turned to what I remembered was one of his favourite pa.s.sages in it. He listened with great interest. Every now and then he exclaimed, "Capital, excellent, excellent, very good."
Cardinal Newman and Edward FitzGerald at the opposite poles, as it were, of religious impressions, agree in a devotion to Crabbe"s poetry.
Cardinal Newman speaks of _Tales of the Hall_ as "a poem whether in conception or in execution one of the most touching in our language," and in a footnote to his _Idea of a University_ he tells us that he had read the poem thirty years earlier with extreme delight, "and have never lost my love of it," and he goes on to plead that it is an absolute _cla.s.sic_.
Not to have read Crabbe, therefore, is not to know one of the most individual in the glorious muster-roll of English poets, and Crabbe was pre-eminently an East Anglian, born and bred in East Anglia, and taking in a peculiar degree the whole character of his environment, as only Shakspere, Cowper and Wordsworth among our great poets, have done.
In conclusion, let me recapitulate that the names of Marryat, Sir Thomas Browne, George Borrow, Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole, Sarah Austin, f.a.n.n.y Burney, Edward FitzGerald, and George Crabbe are those that I prefer to a.s.sociate with East Anglian Literature. We are well aware that literature is but an aspect of our many claims on the grat.i.tude of those Englishmen who have not the good fortune to be East Anglians. We have given to the Empire a great scholar in Porson, a great statesman in Sir Robert Walpole, a great lawyer in Sir Edward c.o.ke, great ecclesiastics in Cardinal Wolsey and Archbishop Parker, great artists in Gainsborough, Constable and Crome, and perhaps above all great sailors in Sir Cloudesley Shovel and the ever memorable Lord Nelson. Personally I admire a certain rebel, Kett the Tanner, as much as any of those I have named.
Of all these East Anglian worthies the praise has often been sung, but let me be pardoned if, on an occasion like this, I have dwelt rather at length on the less familiar a.s.sociation of East Anglia with letters. That I have but touched the fringe of the subject is obvious. What might not be said, for example, concerning Norwich as a literary centre under Bishop Stanley--the Norwich of the Taylors and the Gurneys, possessed of as much real intellectual life as London can boast of to-day. What, again, might not be said of the influence upon writers from afar. Read Kingsley"s _Hereward the Wake_, Mr. Swinburne"s _Midsummer Holiday_, Charles d.i.c.kens" description of Yarmouth and Goldsmith"s poetical description in his _Deserted Village_, where clearly Houghton was intended. {153} These, and a host of other memories touch the heart of all good East Anglians, but that East Anglians do not forget the living in doing honour to the dead is indicated by this gathering to-night. We are grateful to Dr. Augustus Jessopp, to Mr. Walter Rye, to Mr. Edward Clodd, and to our guest of this evening, Mr. William Dutt, for keeping alive the folk-lore, the literary history, the historical tradition of that portion of the British Isles to which we feel the most profound attachment by ties of residence or of kinship.
VI. DR. JOHNSON"S ANCESTRY
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 ent.i.tled _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 pounds 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 st.u.r.dy 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 pounds.
"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 a.s.sisted 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 t.i.tle- 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sociations, 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 doc.u.ments 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.s 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 att.i.tude. 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.