In the mid-1730s Sam’s basic situation was that he had applied for teaching jobs that he didn’t get, he and his wife had established their own school which didn’t attract enough students, and Sam had applied to be a writer for the Gentleman’s Magazine but wasn’t hired. He needs another plan and so in 1737 he and one of his former students, named David Garrick, leave Lichfield and head off to London to pursue their careers. Frankly, they both do exceptionally well for themselves: David wanted to act and he became one of the pre-eminent actors and theatre producers of the era; and of course Sam wanted to write, and he became the chief man of letters of that same era.

I talk about some of the details and the greater scope of their lives and careers in London in my podcast (see link at the end), so I thought I’d dedicate this blog post to showing you some images. Sometimes when someone talks about a time that was nearly 300 years ago, it can be hard to visualize what things were like and what people looked like.

There aren’t many portraits of Sam at this stage of his life (he was in his late 20s), but these are a couple of typical portraits of him during various stages:

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These are some of David Garrick:

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That third image of Garrick is of him playing Richard III, for which he was famous.

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As biographer John Wain points out, Tetty likely didn’t end up with the life that she imagined and hoped for. They spent long and frequent periods apart, and when she was in London with him, Sam was busy working.

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So, there you go. If you’d like to hear a bit more about Sam and Tetty and David, check out my podcast below. I still call it 3 More Minutes about Sam, but, er, they’re getting longer, because there’s more to say. Happy listening.

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This past Monday I attended three of the sessions that were offered by the Boswell Book Festival, an annual event for which people generally gather in one city to attend, but of course which was held by videoconference this year. All three sessions were in fact very good, which I say not just as a throwaway truism or to be falsely polite. Many conferences of any kind often have so little to offer, and sometimes what is offered is either presented poorly or is a little thin on content, that even a happy optimist sometimes despairs.

The ones I attended were:

• an interview of Andrew Marr about “Boswell the Man” (here)

• an interview of Jane Ridley on “How to Do Biography” (here)

• an interview of Ned Sedgewick on “Why & How to Become a Podcaster” (here)

I learned a little or a lot from each of them.

Boswell, for those who don’t know, was not the first and certainly not the last biographer of Sam Johnson, but his diligent following of his subject, and his writing up of detailed notes about Sam’s conversations and other activities — as well as a trip to the Scottish Hebrides they took together, lasting about three months — all that and more enabled Boswell to publish a stunning and even revolutionary biography in 1791. The book has its faults (what doesn’t?), it’s a bit on the longish side (hence the numerous modern abridged versions), but it’s generally a real pleasure to read. You learn almost as much about James and you do about Sam. Of the faults, some scholars have pointed out that Boswell only met Sam in 1763 when Sam was 53 years old. And you notice that in Boswell’s biography, the fifty-three years before their meeting taking up only about 20% of the book and the remaining twenty-one years taking up about 80%.

That first meeting itself is now famous in Johnson lore, as Boswell was nervous and Sam was his regular blunt and crusty self. They met in the back of Thomas Davies’s bookshop, and Boswell was anxious that Davies not tell Johnson where he came from, as Sam had a habit of joking about the Scottish (“The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!”). Alas, Davies let the Scot out of the bagpipe, so to speak, which led to this exchange:

Boswell: Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.

Johnson: That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.

Sam didn’t actively dislike the Scots. I think of it more, to put it in modern comedy terms, as a “running gag” he had, a good repeated “bit” that he could drag out any time he wanted to be outrageous in company — or, in this case, to tease and silence a young Scot who was (or had been 🙂 ) eager to meet him. I’m not the first person to point out that though he defines oats in his Dictionary as “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people,” yet all except one of the six men Sam hired as his assistants for that same dictionary were Scots.

That quip in the bookstore didn’t keep Boswell from his lifelong goal of writing Johnson’s biography, and nor did it keep the two men from becoming good friends. Sam was interested in Boswell’s life, and Boswell looked up to Johnson, depended on his wisdom, read his works for life advice. It’s a bit facile to put it this way, but Johnson filled in for the loving father which Boswell didn’t have. Boswell’s father was continually critical of and disappointed in his son (often with good reason), but Johnson always encouraged him.

The whole thing made me wonder about why biographers choose the subjects they do choose for their biographies. I explore that a little further in my podcast, if you’d like to hear 3 More Minutes about Sam.

I spent most of Wednesday afternoon with my friends Mary and Robert, socially distanced in the back yard but maskless because each of us has had the first shot of a COVID vaccine. It was wonderful — the first time I have done that for almost two years.

One of the things we talked about was my Sam Johnson biography, and specifically about the dissipation of Sam’s wife, Tetty, and their married life in general. I am writing the book in focused “chunks,” so even though I’ve written about their marriage, I haven’t gotten to writing the details of their life together (and apart) yet. As I mentioned in last week’s post, they were married in 1735 when he was 25 and she was 46, and the marriage lasted till her death in 1752.

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I know what Sam was up to for those 17 years, and I know the general sweep of Tetty’s life during the same period, but after my garden get-together I consulted some of the standard biographies to glean a preliminary sense of some of the details of what Tetty was doing.

A few facts about her to keep in mind:

1. Tetty and Sam lived apart in different cities and towns during the whole course of their marriage, even from early on. Nine months in 1737. Over a year between 1738 and 1740. Long periods during 1746-1752.

2. Tetty was born into wealth, her first husband had money, and she was used to a more genteel life than a struggling writer, and then an erratic icon, could offer her.

3. Speculation on my part, but I don’t think she liked to be alone. When she was away from Sam, she often lived with her daughter Lucy.

4. As much as one can determine 300 years later through the lenses (and covers) of others’ observations, and my own, I see her as a sincere and honest person. She wasn’t hesitant to give praise. She said of her young suitor Sam before they were married that he was “the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.” And her assessment of The Rambler, Sam’s twice-weekly essays published in the two years before her death, “I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this.”

5. As for the criticisms and mean-spirited assessments of her (many from men and many about her looks and body) … hey, everyone has their own taste, and sometimes what a body does at it ages is less and less out of our full control.

6. Sam called it a “love-marriage” on both sides, and other biographers have noted that both of them had healthy sexual appetites. That may not always lead to the best results long-term, but it’s a pretty good place to start a romantic partnership together.

One biographer, David Nokes, writes of their days living together in London: “We know little of how she filled her days while Johnson worked; she corresponded with her daughter Lucy in Lichfield and argued daily with the servant she considered absolutely essential. In the warmer months she sauntered the streets of the metropolis, gazing in shop windows, feeding her imagination with all the things she saw in newspapers that would soon be theirs, once Samuel’s play was the great success he promised.”

It was the draft of a play called Irene that he had in his pocket when he left Lichfield in 1737 for London, and it did ultimately get produced and staged in 1749 and was a commercial success (nine nights). But many scholars today view it as one of his weaker works, and, tellingly perhaps, he never wrote another one. A tragic circumstance is that Tetty was ill at the time and did not get to attend any performances of the play she had so much hoped to see from her husband.

It was during the 1740s that Tetty’s health began to slowly decline. She injured her tendon, which became the source of much pain and several letters of condolence from Sam. And it was also during this time that she started taking opium. As Nokes notes, opium “was available at a price and without criminal associations, for ills of every kind.” She may also have taken a combination of opium and alcohol called laudanum. But ultimately she was, frankly, taking opium and also drinking, and this whole combination of circumstances led to a much reduced (what we would call today) “quality of life” during her last few years. One doctor who was a friend of Sam put it pretty harshly to a mutual friend: she “was always drunk & reading Romances in her Bed, where she killed herself by taking Opium.”

Tetty died on March 17, 1752, at the age of 63.

For my 3 More Minutes about Sam podcast this week, I’ll recount some happier and funnier stories about Sam and Tetty. (One even involves sex.)

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.

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 … ?

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