Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
Johnson appears too embarrassed, too uncertain of himself, to mention his strongest feelings.
Yet these strong feelings certainly existed, especially in sexual matters. Johnson’s profound emotional frustration throughout the early part of his life, both in Lichfield and in London, forms a part of his literary personality that has rarely been recognised. Just as it is difficult to imagine Johnson young, so it seems impossible to imagine Johnson in love. Thanks largely to Boswell, the very phrase sounds faintly ludicrous. But Boswell, whose Journals reveal how fascinated, amused and tortured by sex he was all his own life, could never really bear to envisage his sage in equivalent throes of lust or passion. Having first met Johnson at the age of fifty-four (Boswell then being a mere twenty-three), he always projected a venerable father-figure, a moral counsellor, detached from passion. So, perhaps understandably, he could never really accept the vulnerable, tender and romantic side of ‘the Great Cham’, in his far-distant youth. This has subtly affected our view of Johnson’s whole biography ever since.
Boswell always deflects the question of Johnson’s sexual feelings by treating them whimsically, if not farcically. He admits that Johnson was attracted by women: ‘Johnson had, from his early youth, been sensible to the influence of female charms’; but he typically diffuses this by archly remarking on the ‘facility and elegance’ with which Johnson could ‘warble the amorous lay’.15
This deflating humour is deployed whenever he writes about the women who, throughout Johnson’s life, were the serious objects of his interests, hopes and passions. There were more than is usually thought: apart from his wife Elizabeth Porter, there was the adored Molly Aston; Hill Boothby (intended as Johnson’s second wife); Hester Thrale (the confidante who replaced a second wife); the understanding Elizabeth Desmoulins (the young widowed daughter of his doctor); the admired Elizabeth Carter; and half-a-dozen young women writers and actresses, whom Boswell often simply omits from his account.’16
His treatment of Johnson’s strange, passionate and deeply unhappy marriage to Elizabeth Porter as a sentimental farce of ‘connubial felicity’ is wholly characteristic.17 Nowhere does he seriously consider the impact of Johnson’s sexual frustrations on his beginnings as a writer and poet. Modern biographers tend to take the same line. Even James Clifford writes: ‘Johnson could never give himself up wholeheartedly to romance, whether in life or in literature.’18
Yet the women who knew young Johnson best, either directly or through family gossip and reminiscence, take a very different attitude. Among them are Lucy Porter (Johnson’s stepdaughter), Anna Seward and Hester Thrale: almost invariably cited by Boswell as ‘unreliable’ witnesses.
Anna Seward (1747–1809), who became the poet known as ‘the Swan of Lichfield’, was not born when Johnson left for London. But she became an invaluable source for local memories and hearsay about him, especially through her grandfather (who had taught Johnson), her mother (who knew Elizabeth Porter) and the Walmsley family, about all of whom she wrote extensively. Boswell delights in disproving her stories on innumerable points. Yet Anna frequently throws revealing light on young Johnson’s emotions. One of her most suggestive formulations is this: ‘Johnson was always fancying himself in love with some princess or other.’19
Johnson first fell in love some time in his middle teens. His princess was Ann Hector, the sister of his school-friend, Edmund Hector, at Stourbridge. It is probably for her that he wrote his first poem: ‘On a Daffodil: The First Flower that the Author had seen that Year’, which refers to a smiling nymph, Cleora. A distinguished modern biographer, Walter Jackson Bate, remarks that ‘when we think of the later Johnson, the very title is hilarious’.20 Yet this seems a curiously revealing admission. For the poem does not appear particularly absurd for a sixteen-year-old:
But while I sing, the nimble moments fly,
See! Sol’s bright chariot seeks the western main,
And ah! behold the shriveling blossoms die,
So late admir’d and prais’d, alas! in vain!
With grief this emblem of mankind I see,
Like one awaken’d from a pleasing dream,
Cleora’s self, fair flower, shall fade like thee,
Alike must fall the Poet and his theme.21
When Boswell discovered this romance, he used another characteristic form of deflection: he omitted it from the Lichfield years, and retold it retrospectively as a reminiscence of Johnson’s in his sixty-seventh year. It was displaced, and thus disarmed. Yet what Johnson says is moving and significant. ‘She was the first woman with whom I was in love. It dropt out of my head imperceptibly; but she and I shall always have a kindness for each other.’ When he talked of Ann Hector that night, ‘he seemed to have had his affection revived; for he said, “If I had married her, it might have been as happy for me.”’22
Later at Stourbridge, just before going up to Oxford, he fell more seriously in love with Olivia Lloyd, the beautiful and well-educated daughter of a rich Quaker family of ironmasters and philanthropists. Olivia was two years older than him, well-read in Greek and Latin classics (which she later taught to her nephews), amusing and quick, and renowned for her looks. She was known locally as ‘the pretty Birmingham Quakeress’.23 Johnson fantasised about her throughout his university years, and she was one of the dreams he had to abandon bitterly along with his degree.
Olivia was the first in a line of pretty, vivacious bluestockings whom Johnson quietly worshipped (and also helped professionally) in London. Boswell takes a single sentence to describe the affair ‘he was much enamoured of Olivia Lloyd … to whom he wrote a copy of verses, which I have not been able to recover.’24
Edmund Hector recalled acting as a go-between in this situation: ‘some Young Ladies in Lichfield had a mind to act The Distressed Mother, for whom [Johnson] wrote the Epilogue and gave it me to convey privately to them.’ Johnson’s agonies of self-consciousness about his monstrous appearance are glimpsed in that ‘privately’.
Other poems possibly connected with Olivia Lloyd include a series of translations from Horace, normally the most urbane, ironic and detached of poets. But Johnson selects passages that are surprisingly moody, bleak and romantic:
But being counsell’d to go home
And see my mistress face no more
Confus’d about the streets I roam
And stop’d unwilling at her door.
Then to the inclement skies expos’d I sat
And sigh’d and wept at her relentless gate.25
Johnson must have chosen these particular stanzas (from Horace’s Eleventh Epode) because they reflected something in his own situation, his eternal longings for la princesse lointaine. As a picture of the lover unrequited, the man shut out, the roamer through the dark windswept streets, they also prepared him for Savage.
There are several other love-poems and poetical flirtations (mostly collected by Edmund Hector) which date from this sad post-Oxford period: ‘To a Young Lady on her Birthday’, ‘An Ode on a Lady Leaving her Place of Abode’, and a verse to the eighteen-year-old Dorothy Hickman, ‘Playing on the Spinet’. Dorothy was the daughter of another friend at Stourbridge, George Hickman, and she married soon after in 1734.
The pattern of longing, frustration and self-laceration (however formalised in drawing-room ‘impromptus’) is common throughout these poems. As he wrote of Dorothy Hickman, ‘We bless the Tyrant, and we hug the Chain.’26
Young Johnson’s daydreams were not only confined to suitable girls. His princess might also be some tempting, racy actress. At about the time he first met Elizabeth Porter he also ‘was in love with’ a Junoesque young actress who visited Lichfield with a local repertory company, playing Flora, the romantic lead in Colley Cibber’s suggestive farce, Hob: or the Country Wake.27 David Garrick seems to have known something about this infatuation, and remarked that