Sam Johnson, Married and Widowed

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Sam Johnson got married in 1735 to Elizabeth Porter. He was 25 and she was 46; in addition, they had met only about a year or so before and she had been widowed just over 10 months when the wedding took place. Sam was a bit younger than the average age at the time for a man to get married, which was 29. As for Tetty, she was one of only about 8 percent of widows to get remarried during that era (see Sally Holloway’s great book, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture). This was a very narrow possibility-window

from the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, Lichfield, England

for Sam and Tetty then. She was unlikely to get married again at all, and she was also marrying a man who was both 21 years younger than her but also 4 years younger than the average man getting married at all. And the dollop on top was that the families on both sides vehemently opposed it.

Hey, perhaps, all the theories aside, they were in love. Imagine that.

They remained married for 17 years, until she died in 1752. It would be fascinating to read in detail about only that period in both their lives. I may be wrong, but as far as I know there is no full published book which focuses on the marriage only. It is written about in all the biographies of Sam, of course, and it was a good and bad journey. They disagreed and had arguments as all couples do, but they also spent frequent and long periods not even living in the same city. She was home and Sam was a working writer in London, which is basically where he lived from 1737 — less than two years after their marriage — until his own death in 1784. Sam is often remembered for his famous quip about getting remarried as “the triumph of hope over experience,” but his other expressed thoughts about marriage were often more positive and practical.

Sam was bereft and inconsolable at the death of Tetty. He couldn’t even attend her funeral. Instead, he wrote prayers over the course of four days in late April and early May 1752 which demonstrate the extent of his grief. As was usual for him in prayers of many kinds, he prostrates himself at the mercy of the God he believed in, and asks for strength in getting through it all.

I have to say that his characterizing her death in the first prayer as “the affliction which it has pleased Thee to bring upon me” is more deference than I would have been able to muster to a putatively benevolent God. It ends with Sam imagining his own death (“when it shall please Thee to call me from this mortal state”) and hoping to “finally obtain mercy and everlasting happiness.” The “finally” is very telling, of course, as it betrays his anticipation that he won’t be able to be happy while he’s still alive.

The last of this series of prayers, on May 6, is in effect his call to himself to get on with his life as a widower:

O Lord, our heavenly Father, without whom all purposes are frustrate, all efforts are vain, grant me the assistance of thy Holy Spirit, that I may not sorrow as one without hope, but may now return to the duties of my present state with humble confidence in thy protection … I used this service … as preparatory to my return to life to-morrow.

He did ultimately get on with life, of course, and published several significant works afterwards, as well as living well and fully. He continued with the habit of prayer, and many of his annual resolutions were written on the anniversary of Tetty’s death.

In this week’s 3 More Minutes about Sam, I’ll recite the first and last of those prayers. Please listen …

Clean Linen: Sam, Sheets, and Personal Hygiene in the 18th Century

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One of Sam’s more memorable quotes concerns the brilliant and eccentric poet Christopher Smart, who was born in 1722 and so was about 13 years younger than Sam himself. Smart showed early promise and in fact did well for himself, both literarily and financially, in the early part of his career. However, when he was about 33 he suffered “a fit” that set him on a destructive path. About a year and a half later he was confined to a mental asylum with the charming name of St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. It was always dubious whether he was mentally ill at all. He was bounced between different asylums but continued to write poetry during his confinements, and was finally released in 1763 after nearly six years of mental institutionalization.

Sam supported and defended him during the period, famously saying:

I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Womersley (Penguin, 2008), 273.

William Savage, whom I interviewed in 2019 about cleanliness and personal hygiene in the 18th century, says that “it’s a myth that people liked to go dirty.” (Savage, by the way, maintains an excellent and information-packed blog about the century called Pen and Pension, which I highly recommend.) As with many things in life, then and now, much depended on how much money you had/have. The rich were cleaner than the poor: “Generally speaking, people tried to be reasonably clean. Some people were more conscientious about it than others, but generally speaking they liked to be as clean as they could. If they were dirty, and by our standards they were dirty, it was by necessity … The poorer you were, the dirtier you got.”

The rich had options. It was a big job to wash clothes and bed linens, and so they employed “washing women” for the task:

You only [did] a wash every so often, because it was so difficult to wash and it was so difficult to dry things. So the washing women would come in and they’d spend probably two days washing everything and hanging it out to dry, etc., and then all of that would be available once again for the next month or the next six weeks or the same week or whatever it was … The clothes [were] steeped in a vat, a pot of urine to whiten them, and then the urine washed off. They would use ashes; that’s another source of cleaning agent … It was a very complicated business. Wash day was a major activity.

a clean shirt

Sam was not a “fashion plate” — do people still use that term?! — and one of his biographers says that he “refused to conform to the respectable norms of hygiene and dress, [and] looked like a tramp or a beggar … Johnson rarely had a clean shirt.*

He lacked similar finesse in his eating habits, sort of like Homer Simpson (if Homer had three honorary degrees, had compiled a dictionary, and edited Shakespeare’s plays). His famous biographer James Boswell said that he “never knew any man who relished good eating more than [Johnson] did.” He goes on to describe some of the mechanics — “his appetite … was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible” — but then, being the prim man of polite society that he was, says that for “those whose sensations were delicate, this could not but be disgusting; and it was doubtless not very suitable to the character of a philosopher, who should be distinguished by self-command.”** (Note that Boswell is likely using disgusting here in an 18th-century sense, equivalent to distasteful today.)

One of my favourite anecdotes about Sam concerns a meeting at a dinner that Boswell was trying to get Sam to attend, without telling him that Member of Parliament John Wilkes, whose political views Sam opposed, would also be there. He jumped at the opportunity (a free meal!) and said to his servant, “Frank, a clean shirt!” And in fact it turned out that the two men got along just fine at the dinner. That was Wednesday, May 15, 1776. Sam was 66 and a well-established writer by then.

Want to hear 3 more minutes about some other details about Sam’s eating and appearance … ?

* Jeffrey Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Basic Books, 2008), 74, 101.
** James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Womersley (Penguin, 2008), 308.

General: “Publick; Comprising the Whole”

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My biography of Sam Johnson is being written, as you know if you’ve followed this blog or looked at the website, for the general reader. The concept is simple. Most comprehensive and authoritative modern biographies of Johnson published, well, ever, are really aimed at scholars. They are written by scholars for scholars, and though that doesn’t mean that a general reader couldn’t understand them, it does mean that in various aspects of the book, from the style of the writing to the marketing of the final product, it’s not general readers who are viewed by the biographer as the people who will be excited by the publication of another hefty tome (or large Kindle file) that hits the shelves (or is delivered to the Kindle). I don’t mean to say that scholarly biographers or general readers are wrong or perverse in their tastes or habits — it’s just that there is often not much overlap between the two groups.

There are exceptions, as there are with any broad statement such as this. I, for example, am neither a scholar nor a general reader, but I love the scholarly biographies and I have read all of them. But I’m a writer who has abandoned fiction-writing, has already co-written one biography, and I’ve been following from my non-ivory tower the works that have been published about Johnson for the past 40 years or so. Some other non-scholars who might like nothing better than curling up with a scholarly bio with 37 pages of endnotes, a 15-page index, and a solid 357 pages of text might be:

  • readers who love biographies of all kinds
  • readers who got hooked on the ground-breaking style and narrative skill of James Boswell’s biography of the man he followed around for 21 years
  • readers who love the messy and noisy 18th century — a sort of transition from “older times” to more modern ones — and so want to read everything about it that they can get their hands on

Without giving away all my secrets and plans, I would say that these are the main things I keep in mind as I write, in order to have my book be something that a general reader would like to read:

  1. The writing style has to be clear and simple, almost conversational, so that it resembles any other well-written book that is published in 2022 (that’s the date I’m aiming for), except the subject matter is a man who has been dead for nearly 237 years, and not some current celebrity or a well-known public figure who has died relatively recently. My book won’t include (as one of the most recent bios of Sam does):
  • the words “impecuniosity” or “bibulous”
  • a sequence of sentences like: “Even Johnson nodded in deference to his lordship, an act which only hindsight suggests lacked conviction. Had Shakespeare had the benefit of such a dictionary, which would correctly signify the proper names of plants, he would not so erroneously have intermingled the woodbine with the honeysuckle, the Plan made clear; and an exact taxonomy of reptiles would certainly have prevented Milton from disposing ‘so improperly’ of the ellops and the scorpion. In settling these and many similar errors Johnson arrogated no authority to himself, but threw all such questions back upon the arbitration of Lord Chesterfield, on whose behalf he exercised only ‘a kind of vicarious jurisdiction’.”

    I’m not mocking (and in fact I really like the word bibulous), but this kind of elevated diction is something I plan to avoid. Plain language, dear sirs and madams!

2. It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that though my book won’t be scholarly, it will be authoritative. That is, it will rely mostly on secondary sources (books written by others) but facts will be checked and re-checked — and though I do plan to express my thoughts on various aspects of Sam’s life and personality, I won’t be just writing blithely and saying any old thing. If I may say, I have learned a few things and formed a few opinions during these past 40 years.

3. I plan to leave all the documentation at the end, notably (ahem) the notes, which will be endnotes — and endnotes not signalled in the text itself. By that I mean that, say, if I quote someone, there will be no superscript number (like this59) in the text indicating either a footnote or an endnote. My assumption is that most readers won’t want to know or verify the source and so it’s better not to clutter the page with such notation. Instead, I plan to use the format used by a biographer I really like, Sarah Bakewell, who does it like this in her How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer:

Notice that the quotation doesn’t have any superscript number indicating the source. There is no footnote, but the source is given in a block of endnotes at the end of the book for those hard-core readers who want to consult them. In the meantime, the general reader sees a nice uncluttered page. (The superscript “42” by the way doesn’t appear in the text. These are screenshots from the Kindle ebook version, and the number is necessary to allow the reader to easily go back and forth between the text and the note, if they want to.)

I have a few other things planned, too, which I’ll discuss in future blog posts — or will keep to myself (as a writer, there are some things I don’t want to talk about or reveal).

And so much for my writing, for now. If you have 3 more minutes, listen to a few things about Sam’s style and methods …


Sam’s Thoughts and Prayers

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I haven’t done writing so far this week for my Sam book, but I have come across a chapter in a book of selected essays about Sam — as well as a new selection from all of his writings, which I recently bought.

The essay is about the prayers and resolutions that Sam made various times during the year, often either berating himself, promising God to do better, asking for forgiveness, or generally praying for something or someone. I’ve read part of the essay: it’s well written and looks like something that will be useful for the book.

The book of Selected Works was published just this past January, and so it is a fresh look by scholars at what they consider either the best of Sam’s writing, or best representative, or what’s “important” enough that readers should be reading it. That must be a pretty daunting cull to make. There are thousands of individual works in all sorts of genres. What do you pick that will fit into about 800 medium-sized pages? It’s the scholarly equivalent of picking the best 100 films of a decade, or something like that. You’ll be kicked on both sides, for including a piece that someone thinks is minor, and for leaving out another piece that someone else considers essential. I haven’t started it yet but will restrain my kicking when I do.

In passing, the phrase “thoughts and prayers” has basically been ruined in our era. It’s a cliché now, a meaningless knee-jerk sentiment that people write or utter blithely and, ironically, without much thought given to it. When people are being proper, the phrase will be included in a sentence something like “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family, friends, and loved ones of the victim.” But I’ve also seen it stripped down to its most insulting minimal worst. Often it will be a comment online about a story or a post, and all the person writes is “thoughts and prayers.” Argh. Sometimes it’s better just to be silent.

The other offensive thing about the phrase is when it is spoken by a government representative about some tragedy or other. The savvy politician will be careful to actually omit the word “prayers,” out of respect for those of us who don’t believe in any gods. But many of them use the whole phrase, perhaps not even thinking about the words or the meaning or the images really. That’s how verbal clichés work: they’re part of an easily accessible repertoire you can choose from without much deliberation.

So.

More about Sam next week, but right now perhaps you have three more minutes to hear some of his prayers?