Sam was stalked by reminders of Tetty. He kept her wedding ring in a small round wooden box, along with a piece of paper on which he wrote the dates of their marriage and her death, and it seems he sometimes consulted the box, almost as if to reactivate memories. The box can be interpreted as a means of compartmentalizing his sorrow, as a symbolic miniature coffin, or as a memento mori, an object of remorseful meditation. How often did he see it? How often did he seek it out? We don’t know. But I can picture his simultaneously wanting to look at it, maybe to hold it and ritually examine its contents, and wanting not to do this – his heart fit to burst, his soul riven with contradiction. One of the anomalies of grief is that our desolation at not being able to bring a loved one back from the dead is intruded on by the unworthy feeling that we don’t want to.
Nearly thirty years later he would write to a recently bereaved friend, Thomas Lawrence, ‘He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that had the same hopes and fears.’ As a result, ‘The continuity of being is lacerated’ and ‘life stands suspended and motionless till it is driven by external causes into a new channel’. He wraps up the letter’s weightiest paragraph with seven solemn words: ‘But the time of suspense is dreadful.’ This conjures an image of Sam, not as he is in 1780 but as he was in 1752 – alone at home and numb, as if Tetty’s death is his own.
Grief made him feel older than his forty-two years, and it revealed to him a part of himself he preferred not to see. Tetty’s death was a reminder of the fragility of existence – especially his own. When we grieve we are meant to witness the honour of the person we have lost, and to cherish our memories of them, but it’s normal at this time to think about ourselves, to feel guilty for thinking so much about ourselves, and then to plunge deeper into those very thoughts – to see the possibilities that our loss opens up, to notice the ways in which others’ views of us change as a result of our loss, even to exult in the status with which bereavement endows us (for now we are sad and serious and substantial). The most pious griever will still think ‘What now?’ While for some that’s an entirely unhappy thought, it’s frequently tinged with an awareness of what we can at last become.
Sam found that thoughts of other women crowded in on him, and for a while in 1753 he considered remarrying. A decade later he would pronounce that a second marriage was ‘the triumph of hope over experience’, but in the aftermath of Tetty’s death it promised to be something else: a coping mechanism, or an act of atonement. Among several candidates, the most likely was Hill Boothby, a learned woman he had met fourteen years earlier on a trip to Derby shire. But while he was contemplating a deeper kind of relationship with a woman he referred to as ‘my sweet angel’, she was busy looking after the household and six children of a recently deceased friend. Sam’s thoughts of a second wife faltered, and the exhausted Hill Boothby’s health deteriorated – she died in January 1756, aged forty-seven. In the weeks before her death he wrote to her repeatedly. In one letter he says that ‘It is again midnight, and I am again alone. With what meditation shall I amuse this waste hour of darkness and vacuity?’ (For as long as he spent on the letter, the action of composing it relieved the loneliness.) In another he proposes ‘a very probable remedy for indigestion and lubricity of the bowels’; it involved orange peel, which perhaps explains his odd habit of pocketing such scraps of it as he could. His final letter to her is short and intense: ‘I beg of you to endeavour to live . . . I am in great trouble, if you can write three words to me, be pleased to do it. I am afraid to say much, and cannot say nothing when my dearest is in danger.’ Imagine receiving this under any circumstances, let alone when dying. Here we see how intimate he believed their connection to be, and we sense his fear that once again he will be abandoned.
Two years after Tetty’s passing, in a letter to the literary scholar Thomas Warton, author of a poem on ‘The Pleasures of Melancholy’, he would reflect that her death had made him ‘a kind of solitary wanderer in the wild of life, without any certain direction’; he had become a ‘gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation’. That dissociation will make sense to anyone who has experienced bereavement: to grieve is to be adrift, to feel like an outsider, to have to learn afresh one’s relationship to the most customary features of daily life. In truth, Sam always thought of himself as an outsider – rambler, adventurer, idler. But in picturing himself as a ‘solitary wanderer in the wild of life’, he captures something important: in time of grief and mourning we feel the world’s wildness more keenly, and grasp how many conventions and comforts there are that ordinarily distract us from seeing ourselves as the empty eye of life’s tornado.
Yet in the aftermath of Tetty’s death Sam had plenty to occupy him. Lodgers roosted at 17 Gough Square; they paid nothing to be there, and the pleasures of their company, never exactly obvious to outsiders, were offset by the cost to his domestic tranquillity. Among the others who came by, adding to the discord, were the clerks who helped with work on the Dictionary. Now usually referred to as his amanuenses, these Grub Street habitués were capable rather than dependable; one of them, V. J. Peyton, seems to have been a particular cause of nuisance, and Sam’s friend Giuseppe Baretti, a linguist who knew a thing or two about low living, commented, ‘I never saw so nauseous a fellow.’ Nauseous or not, Sam’s helpers needed paying and must also have needed to be kept amused.
For most of the rest of his life, Sam would accommodate others whose condition he thought meaner than his own. Three of these stand out. The first is Anna Williams, who was three years his senior. She joined him after the death of her father Zachariah, a friend of Sam’s who had devoted a large chunk of his life to finding and promoting a method of measuring longitude at sea. Anna, who went blind in her early thirties, preferred to channel her energies into poetry and would shepherd Sam through some of his darker nights, sitting up to drink tea with him. Then there is Robert Levet, an unlicensed and unmannerly doctor who would briefly leave Sam to take up with a prostitute who operated out of a nearby coal shed. Whereas the attractions of Williams were just about fathomable – she was peevish but undeniably clever – Levet was a puzzle. As with Tetty, Sam’s friends couldn’t divine this deficient character’s appeal. When Levet eventually died, in 1782, Sam would mark their thirty-six years of friendship with a moving poem that testified to both his lack of refinement and his usefulness: he had been ‘obscurely wise, and coarsely kind’, a friend to those in distress, busily ministering to others without much thought of personal gain. Though Sam was thinking mainly of Levet’s work among the poor, the poem also pictures his role closer to home. It begins: ‘Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine, / As on we toil from day to day, / By sudden blasts, or slow decline, / Our social comforts drop away.’ The last of those four lines contains a heavily compressed statement about what Sam valued in Levet. As he had written in the Rambler, unhappiness is ‘interwoven with our being’ and ‘The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative’. Thankfully, there are people who, rather than feeling the need to try and solve our problems, can soothe us by their very presence. Levet was such a person, his power of giving comfort not easily explicable but quietly reliable.
A few weeks after Tetty died, the household acquired another remarkable member. This was ten-year-old Francis Barber, who arrived from Jamaica via a Yorkshire boarding school. Barber had spent his early years as a slave on a 2,600-acre sugar plantation that belonged to Colonel Richard Bathurst, the father of one of Sam’s friends (also called Richard Bathurst). The exact nature of his new role in London is unclear. To the various people who wrote about Sam’s life he was his ‘faithful negro servant’, a sort of usher, helpful and handsome but never much more than a footnote in their accounts.
Francis Barber’s biographer Michael Bundock believes that they were brought closer by others’ tendency to look on them as outlandish oddities. David Olusoga writes in Black and British: A Forgotten History of Sam’s being ‘a
n extremely liberal and accommodating employer’, and explains that while ‘black Georgians were everywhere, scattered across London’, they were still sufficiently rare to be ‘an exotic novelty, worthy of mention’. ‘For those clear-eyed enough to make the connection they were a reminder,’ says Olusoga, of ‘that vast empire of sugar, slavery and misery three thousand miles away across the Atlantic’, but other, less far-sighted observers entertained visions of ‘their nation brought to chaos by a large and rapidly expanding black community, whose unrestrained sexuality was contaminating the blood of the English’.2
Sam, who was accustomed to being treated as strange and barbarous, would have understood better than most what it felt like to be abused on account of one’s appearance. For some of his contemporaries, having a black servant was a fashion statement, but he had little use for a servant, especially one who was still a child. The truth may be that his friend Bathurst thought Francis would be a welcome distraction. If so, the plan worked. Their relationship was not always easy, especially when Francis volunteered for the navy. Sam’s feelings about that decision are apparent in his remark that ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ But despite their differences, the bond endured, and more than thirty years later Francis was one of two people present at Sam’s deathbed (the other being Elizabeth Desmoulins’s son John), as well as being the chief beneficiary of his will.
Because Francis Barber has tended to appear almost parenthetically in lives of Dr Johnson, we can make the mistake of thinking the connection a slight one, but from the moment of his arrival he brought out Sam’s latent paternalism. In letters, he refers to Francis as ‘my boy’ – an affectionate form of words, though of course it can also be read as possessive. At first, the presence of a child in his household created opportunities – even a need – for a playfulness and gamesome physicality that would otherwise have been absent. Then, as the bond deepened, he seems to have regarded Francis as a surrogate son. The relationship was a channel for emotional needs that his marriage had not fulfilled. Twenty-two years later, when Francis was married and had a son of his own, he and his wife Elizabeth chose to name him Samuel; the child died, but when they had another son they called him Samuel too. He had learned from his master that the emotional apparatus that enables us to vent our grief is also what makes it possible for us to transcend it.
‘Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul,’ Sam had written in the Rambler in August 1750, borrowing an image from a letter by the Roman philosopher Seneca, who believed that ‘Aerugo animi rubigo ingenii’ (roughly, ‘The rust of the soul is the erosion of genius’). Like Seneca, Sam thought that the antidote for sorrow was employing the mind to other ends: when we engage with a new idea, it scours the rust away, and by exerting our minds we ensure that grief doesn’t eat through us. A few weeks later, he found himself returning to the subject as he consoled James Elphinston, who was producing an edition of the Rambler for a Scottish audience and had recently lost his mother. ‘The business of life summons us away from useless grief,’ he wrote to Elphinston, ‘and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation.’ This is far from being his only reference to the ‘business of life’, and the word business had more complex associations for him than it usually does for us now. Before his time, it had been a synonym for anxiety or care, but in the Dictionary, where he identifies nine distinct senses, he emphasizes not so much the uneasiness of business as the necessity of paying it attention. It is ‘serious engagement’, ‘something to be examined or considered’, ‘something required to be done’. In Idler 72, written in the autumn of 1759, a couple of weeks before his fiftieth birthday, he offers the simple judgement that ‘The business of life is to go forwards.’ He makes this statement while discussing the tendency to dwell on unpleasant aspects of the past, and, although he is thinking here about the defects and discomforts of memory, those eight words summarize his view of how to respond to loss.
He was unimpressed by the tropes of consolation, which all too often amounted to nothing more than a frayed and faded rhetoric. Instead, as the editor of the standard edition of his letters explains, he applies a very different kind of formula: ‘first, a declaration of fellow feeling, based on shared or anticipated experience; second, a steady look at the hard facts of human mortality; third, an invocation . . . of shared beliefs; and finally, an injunction to activity’.3 When Hester Thrale was grieving for her recently deceased and much-loved uncle in the winter of 1773, Sam wrote with advice: she should not dwell on what she might have been able to do to prevent his death, for ‘You perhaps could not have done what you imagine, or might have done it without effect.’ He concluded, ‘Remit yourself solemnly into the hands of God, and then turn your mind upon the business and amusement which lie before you.’ It is easier to give this sort of advice to others than to put it into practice oneself, but Sam’s counsel was born of experience. He had put the matter more strongly in a letter to her earlier that year, when her mother was sick and looked likely to die. Pointing out that her need to mourn her mother should not outstrip her other obligations – chiefly to her children – he argued that ‘Grief is a species of idleness’. Attending to the present ‘preserves us . . . from being lacerated and devoured by sorrow for the past’.
‘Do not suffer life to stagnate,’ says Imlac, a philosophically minded poet Sam portrays in Rasselas. He is addressing people who believe that they may never again see a kidnapped friend, and tells them not to let the stream of time ‘grow muddy for want of motion’. Instead, he urges, ‘commit yourself again to the current of the world’. The mind needs stimulation. ‘Life,’ Sam told Hester Thrale, ‘must be always in progression; we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past’, and in the Rambler he declares that ‘To act is far easier than to suffer’, a sentiment one can imagine many other writers casting as the less encouraging ‘To suffer is far harder than to act.’ In the chasm of bereavement, we find a spur: as we think about death, we have the choice to think about how we live.
15
Containing some essential points of information on the life of reading, whereamong are the most fugacious mentions of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu and even Mr Stephen King
Though written against a backdrop of sorrow, the Dictionary is a triumph – one not of innovation, but of execution. True, there are mistakes: a dabchick is not ‘a chicken newly hatched’, a pastern not ‘the knee of an horse’. Some definitions are unhelpfully imprecise: archery is ‘the use of a bow’, and to worm is ‘to deprive a dog of something, nobody knows what, under his tongue, which is said to prevent him, nobody knows why, from running mad’. Sam omits words he had certainly come across in his reading, or even used himself: euphemism, irritable, literary, shibboleth, underdone. His spelling is occasionally inconsistent, and some of his etymologies are poor. As he would write to his friend Francesco Sastres, twenty-nine years after publication and a few months before his own death, ‘Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.’ Yet the entries are crisp and clear, and his definitions are confident. The ones that are well-known – such as ‘excise, A hateful tax levied upon commodities’ – are unrepresentative in being so opinionated, but many have a lovely succinctness: a thumb is ‘the short strong finger answering to the other four’, an embryo is ‘the offspring yet unfinished in the womb’, and a rant consists of ‘high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought’. Others raise a smile with their sheer briskness: a lizard is ‘an animal resembling a serpent, with legs added to it’, opera ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’, tree ‘a large vegetable rising, with one woody stem, to a considerable height’, and an orgasm simply ‘sudden vehemence’.
This is not to say that there are no innovations at all. Sam changed attitudes to the very idea of a dictionary: he made people think of it as a significant cul
tural object, and inspired others to compile new works of reference. He was the first lexicographer to make a creditable attempt to work on historical principles by exhibiting the development of words. His use of illustrative quotations to support his definitions was an inspired move. One of its effects was to make the Dictionary an encyclopedia of treasurable literary and historical nuggets, embodying a belief he set forth in its preface: ‘The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.’ Besides being educational, it is a work of literature, and by ‘showing how one author copied the thoughts and diction of another’, he created ‘a genealogy of sentiments’, which amounted to ‘a kind of intellectual history’.
The Dictionary was a triumph of reading, and it was reading of a persistent, dogged kind. ‘A man will turn over half a library to make one book,’ he told Boswell more than twenty years later, and this project bore out those words. The image is appropriately physical and unromantic; it makes me think of Sam rummaging his bookshelves or staggering across his garret room laden with chunky volumes. At their best books can be portable magic – the image, I believe, is Stephen King’s – but they’re not always very portable; sometimes the ones we need for work or some crazy self-imposed project possess not even a hint of occult charm, and instead of being succulent like a mango their contents are as tough as ashplant.
Sam’s was indeed a life of reading. A young person ‘should read five hours a day’, he would tell Boswell, and the prescription was one he often exceeded. He devoured books in his youth, as a student at Oxford, and constantly thereafter, though he was increasingly inclined to berate himself for not reading enough – a sure sign of someone who reads a great deal. The books he consumed were fuel for his writing; he wanted to comment or expand on them. Many were rousing or inspiring, but sometimes they affected his mind in ways less immediately positive: ‘Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of the sun, enables us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape unpleasing objects, by condemning himself to perpetual darkness?’
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 12
