653. London’s Golden Age: The Shadow of the Madhouse (Part 4)

21:48Tom Holland:days i'd be like what what's going on yeah i think that is what's going on and the fact that boswell has now realized that johnson would rather go swimming in brighton than attend a shakespeare festival in stratford kind of completely opens his eyes to mrs thrale's hold on johnson and so he feels well i haven't you know i need to make the best of a bad job i clearly can't really prize them apart. And Mrs. Thrail, to give her credit, I mean, she's pretty magnanimous. She's installed herself now as the new number one superfan, but she's very kind to Boswell. She doesn't kind of rub his nose in the fact that he's been slightly replaced.

22:23Tom Holland:So she's regularly inviting Boswell to threaten place, sometimes not even when Johnson's there. And on one occasion, when the three of them are having breakfast together, she leans forward and whispers in his ear there are many who admire and respect mr johnson but you and i love him and of course boswell records this yeah and so it's proof that you know he's happy happy to be told this i think

22:49Dominic Sandbrook:so to go to stick on boswell for a second mrs thrale is instrumental in johnson going to scolland isn't she she says to johnson you should go on this trip with boswell that's very magnanimous of her. It is magnanimous.

23:03Tom Holland:It's also a little bit weird. So he wrote that letter in the summer of 1773. So a few weeks before he leaves for Edinburgh and his tour with Boswell around the Highlands and the Hebrides. He is very miserable again at this point. This is partly because he's got a bad eye infection, but it's also because he feels himself neglected by Mrs. Thrail. And it's not unreasonable for Mrs. Thrail to be neglecting him because her mother is dying. Her husband has made an imprudent investment. And so Mrs. Thrail is pulling every string she can to try and stave off the bankruptcy of the brewery, which she is very successful in doing.

23:45Tom Holland:So the brewery actually turns out to be fine. And also, of course, she's got all these multitudes of children to look after. So she feels very harried. She doesn't have time to give Johnson the attention that she normally does. And so Johnson, finding himself neglected as he sees it, writes this letter that you quoted. And it's partly a reproach, I think. It's like a kind of almost like a child feeling neglected by his mother. But it's also a request for a reassurance that he is not in her way. And if she doesn't want him, then he will go. And Mrs. Thrail replies to it, what care can I promise my dear Mr.

24:23Tom Holland:Johnson that I have not already taken what tenderness that he has not already experienced and she says why don't you go to the Hebrides I believe Mr. Boswell will be your best physician I mean it's very sensible go and have a holiday go and you know ride a horse around the highlands whatever spend time with Boswell and she then I said that there's something of a kind of a child tugging on the skirts of his mother about that letter. Maybe I should say, describing Mrs. Strel as his governess, because that is how she describes herself. So she writes to Johnson as he's about to leave for Scotland, farewell and be good, and do not quarrel with your governess for not using the rod enough.

25:07Dominic Sandbrook:So she sent him on his travels, as it were, and he's gone off to Scotland. And over the course of that journey, he and Boswell, of course, have become very close, although they have had the odd row, haven't they? And Boswell has been writing down Johnson's conversation. And this is the point, of course, at which Boswell is formulating the great biography. You know, that's taking shape in his mind, isn't it?

25:33Tom Holland:Yeah, I think he's already, you know, he's been planning to do it before that. But one of the reasons that he's wanted to go on this trip with Johnson is it gives him a chance not just to record conversation, but also to ask Johnson details about his life before he met Boswell. And so that's also what Boswell is doing.

25:51Dominic Sandbrook:But then Boswell loses control when Johnson goes back to London. Mrs. Thrail is back in the driver's seat, as it were.

25:59Tom Holland:Yeah. And of course, Boswell is now worrying that actually perhaps Mrs. Thrail is better placed to write this great biography than he is. And his mood is not improved the following year when Johnson goes with the Thrails on a tour, not of Scotland, but of Wales. You know, Mrs. Thrails' native land. And Johnson tries to reassure him Wales is so little different from England that it offers nothing to the speculation of the traveller. That's something for our Welsh listeners to bear in mind. It has to be said, Boswell doesn't entirely believe this. And so he remains anxious and frankly, a little bit jealous.

26:35Tom Holland:I can't believe Johnson is dissing Wales in that way. Poor. Well, he also goes with them to Paris and is similarly disobliging about Paris, I think, to try and cheer Boswell up. And basically for the next six years, Johnson remains at Mrs. Thrale's and he is so often at Streatham Place. And he's so patently devoted to Mrs. Thrale that Boswell, when in due course he comes to write his great biography, barely bring himself to mention it. So you could read Boswell's biography and barely be aware that he'd been spending most of his time in these years with the Thrills.

27:09Dominic Sandbrook:But everything changes, doesn't it? In 1781, April 1781, Henry Thrill, who never speaks anyway, so how does anyone notice? He has a massive stroke, apoplexy, and that's the end of him. He's dead. That is the end of him. And Boswell does a very weird thing. he writes a poem in which he imagines johnson basically in a state of erotic ecstasy that he can finally marry mrs thrale with delight in the keen aphrodisian spasm shall we reciprocate all night that's mad boswell is writing johnson erotica and he's so pleased with it he goes

27:51Tom Holland:around he's down to london goes around reading it out to all his friends there's something very weird going on there it's so odd the reality couldn't be more different because johnson now that mr thrale is dead is really worried what the future is going to hold and so again he keeps writing to mrs thrale for reassurance do not neglect me nor relinquish me nobody will ever love or honor you more but this time mrs thrale doesn't write back and say there there i'll always be there for you because she is thinking well i've i no longer have this taciturn philandering husband that means that I'm you know I could find someone new I could find someone much better better even than Johnson well I mean Johnson by now is 71 years old how does Mrs.

28:38Tom Holland:Threault so she must be in her early 40s now late 30s early 40s Johnson you know he's still got his spasmodic twitches he's still demanding that she stay up late uh with him drinking tea pockets full of orange peel and he's apparently also becoming quite smelly. So all of these are reasons why that a certain distance starts to open up between Johnson and Mrs. Thrail in the wake of Mr. Thrail's death. And in the autumn of 1782, so that's a year after Thrail's death, Mrs. Thrail rents Stretton Place out. And it's obvious to Johnson that, you know, he's not going to be going back there. And so he's incredibly distraught.

29:16Tom Holland:And shortly before leaving Stretton Place forever, he sits in the beautiful little church in the gorgeous little village of Streatham. And he prays for the Thrails to thy fatherly protection, O Lord, I commend this family, bless, guide and defend them. But the good Lord, I'm afraid, does not bless, guide and defend them because Mrs. Thrail has fallen spectacularly in love. And it's not with Johnson, but with her children's music teacher, who's a very handsome young Italian called Gabrielle Piazzi. And of course, we mentioned that Mrs. Thrail speaks Italian. So, you know, it's looking good for them, but it's not looking good basically for anyone else.

30:01Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. So Piazzi is not terribly popular, is he, with Mrs. Thrail's friends?

30:06Tom Holland:Or her children.

30:07Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. Do you think Piazzi is a bit of a gold digger or a bad sort generally?

30:11Tom Holland:I think that is what her friends think. It's also, as we will see, what the press think. And I think is also what Queenie in particular thinks, who by now is 18.

30:20Dominic Sandbrook:Hester, yeah.

30:21Tom Holland:Yes, Hester. She's very formidable. And she leads the opposition to her mother's affair. And for a while, she succeeds in breaking it up. And she gets Piozzi to leave England and go back to Italy. But Mrs. Thrale then goes into a very ostentatious decline, says that she's going to die unless Piozzi comes back. So Piozzi does return. And so on the 25th of July, 1784, Mrs. Hester Thrale, the former wife of the very respectable brewer Mr. Thrale, becomes Mrs. Hester Piozzi, the wife of an Italian music teacher. And the reaction now is vituperative because it is open to the world. So I said that the press were negative.

31:02Tom Holland:They write editorials fulminating against Mrs. Piozzi because by raising an obscure and penniless fiddler into sudden wealth, she has brought disgrace on her family on britain on wales most importantly absolute shocker and mrs piazzi's daughters agree and they come to believe that their mother had made her second marriage and i quote from one of them from original and persevering dislike and real hatred of us all and from her hatred of her father so they're really not taking it well and mrs piazzi responds to this by condemning her daughters as savage and ungrateful and nicknaming them Reagan and Goneril after the monstrous daughters in King Lear.

31:45Tom Holland:And essentially, the whole family breaks up and Queenie never forgives her. She ends up, interestingly, marrying Lord Keith, who featured in our series on Lord Nelson. He had very sound views on Emma Hamilton. Yeah, he clearly doesn't approve of headstrong marriages, I think it's fair to say.

32:04Dominic Sandbrook:But crucially, what does Johnson make of all this? Because he is he surely he's gutted that Mrs. Thrail has become Mrs. Piazzi.

32:12Tom Holland:He's completely devastated. So right up to the end, he is hoping that it won't happen. And then Mrs. Thrail, as she still is at this point, writes him a letter saying, look, I'm going to be tying the knot with Signor Piazzi. And Johnson's so devastated that he writes her a very uncharacteristically cruel response. if you have abandoned your children and your religion god forgive your wickedness and the moment he sent it he's kind of repenting it and he writes her a second letter kind of retracting these angry words but it's too late their friendship is over they will never see each other again and by now samuel johnson is 75 years old he is in palpable physical decline he's had a stroke a few months earlier and he's bereft of this family with which he had been so intimate for 15 very happy years.

33:01Tom Holland:And so he's never felt so alone.

33:04Dominic Sandbrook:So heartbroken, Samuel Johnson is alone or is he? Because after the break, we will be digging into the extraordinary story of Samuel Johnson's. This episode is brought to you by Rocket Money. Tom, we often talk about how to organise our finances. I'm very conscious that I'm paying for a lot of mad subscriptions. And there's one thing that we've talked about often on the show. it's the thing that we probably hate more than any other and it's a hidden fee. I would love to get my finances under control. There are all these things piling up on our bank statements and I think I need to fix this problem.

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34:25Dominic Sandbrook:That's rocketmoney.com slash is history rocketmoney.com slash is history dear mcdonald's your breakfast menu fire tens across the board i could be happy with anything even though i order the same thing every time thanks for not judging me i'll try something new next time maybe right now for six dollars get a big breakfast with hot cakes complete with a biscuits, sausage, scrambled eggs, and hash browns. Order McDelivery or in the app to save time. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong.

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35:40Dominic Sandbrook:okay welcome back to the rest is history what a cliffhanger we left samuel johnson in the shadow of his rupture with the former mrs thrale who's now disgraced herself and let whales down by becoming mrs piazzi so there'll be no more trips to the uh paradise of streatham but i tantalize you dear listeners with the talk of samuel johnson's secret son and we'll be getting into that won't we tom but first of all you know there's always been this tension with johnson there's the clubbable side the social side the johnson who surrounds himself with garrick and burke and joshua reynolds and boswell and then there's the sort of melancholy solitary man who's bottling up his mental health anguish and not subscribing to bet elb and talking to prince harry so where is he now he's 75 you said he's developed a terrible stench but is yeah is

36:38Tom Holland:he i don't think it's a terrible stench i think i think it's just maybe palpable if you've been tipped off it's mildly off-putting well the thing is it's not sufficiently off-putting that his friends don't want to see him he remains this word clubbable which is a word that johnson has coined he originally used it to describe boswell as it happens and even though he's been staying with the thrales all these past years he has continued to see all his friends i mean he's you know they are still very much part of his social circuit. And even if he's in his kind of, you know, his rooms off Fleet Street, Bolt Court he's now moved to, which is very near Gough Square, which you can still go and visit to this day.

37:21Tom Holland:He's not alone there either. Listeners may remember in the very first episode, we had our first mention of Mrs. Thrail. And I quoted her as saying about Johnson that he loved the poor as I never saw anyone else do. And what makes her say this was the memory of all the waifs and strays that he was always giving shelter to in his rooms so to quote her she wrote how for years he'd nursed whole nests of people in his house where the lame the blind the sick and the sorrowful found a sure retreat from all the evils whence his little income could secure them he also has with him this man who is nominally his manservant but had in effect come to rank as his son so you were yes slightly slightly perhaps overemphasizing the element of scandal there his secret son his adoptive son and apologies to listeners who may feel cheated of that and this is a guy called francis barber frank barber and he was a one-time slave and orphan who at the age of 10 had been brought from Jamaica by his owner to England, where he'd been set free.

38:32Tom Holland:And Frank Barber had ended up in Johnson's charge. And Johnson thought he was wonderful and essentially fathered him, paid for his schooling. Frank then went and signed up to the Royal Navy, which to Johnson was an absolutely mad thing to do. Johnson thought that you were better off in prison than in the Royal Navy, because at least in prison, you couldn't drown. And so Johnson pulls strings to get Frank out of the Navy. And Frank comes back and kind of operate kind of as Johnson's manservant. But I mean, he's really his companion. And Johnson ends up writing Frank into his will as his residual heir.

39:10Tom Holland:And in due course, when Johnson dies, Barber will inherit most of his, you know, the property that hasn't been given to other people. And he moves to Litchfield, so Johnson's native home. He uses the legacy to set up a draper shop. He marries a local woman, and I gather that his descendants live in Litchfield to this day.

39:28Dominic Sandbrook:And Frank, or Francis Barber, to be clear, you know, you said he was formerly a slave. He's black. He's of African descent. Yes, he is. Johnson has always been an abolitionist, hasn't he? That's why he was down on the American tax rebels, because he pointed out their hypocrisy in wittering on about liberty when they were some of the most terrible people who ever lived.

39:49Tom Holland:Yes. So he essentially has an adoptive black son. He also has another series of companions. One of the series of companions is probably the most famous of all the creatures who lived with Johnson in his rooms, human or non-human. And this companion was dead by 1784. But since he's the only one who has his own statue, I think it would be remiss not to mention him. And again, anyone who wants to see the statue, it's in Gough Square. It's a very handsome statue. And it's a statue of Hodge. And Hodge was one of a number of cats kept by Johnson. But the only one that we know by name, thanks to Boswell specifically mentioning him in his life of Johnson.

40:34Tom Holland:And in fact, Boswell himself hated cats and had been criticised for it by Rousseau when Boswell had been to meet Rousseau. Rousseau thought cats were great. He said the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave. And I think Johnson probably agreed with that. It was maybe one of the few things that Johnson and Rousseau would actually have agreed on. Johnson adored cats and he adored Hodge and would go out to buy him oysters. As Boswell says, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.

41:01Dominic Sandbrook:The cat ate oysters. Do cats eat oysters?

41:04Tom Holland:Yeah, clearly. I mean, oysters were much more common then than they are now. It was a kind of working class food rather than going to a posh restaurant. But even so, Johnson is obviously spoiling Hodge. There's this very touching, sad story that Boswell narrates. It was a ludicrous account, Boswell writes, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. Sir, Johnson says, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats. and then in a sort of kindly reverie he bethought himself of his own favorite cat and said but hodge shan't be shot no no hodge shall not be shot and you can imagine him kind of tickling

41:43Dominic Sandbrook:hodge under his chin so what's happened to hodge hodge is dead is he are we killed off hodge

41:49Tom Holland:hodge has longed since died but there's probably another cat we don't know because boswell doesn't like cats so he doesn't keep us up to speed on that so mrs thrale is morally dead because she's

41:57Dominic Sandbrook:married an Italian fiddler. Hodge is physically dead. He's gone. But Boswell is very much alive.

42:04Tom Holland:Yeah, he's still on the scene. And of course, by the summer of 1784, he is the only one of those two great Johnsonians, Mrs. Sorrell and Boswell himself, who is still left standing. Now, there are times when even Johnson has grown impatient with Boswell's adulation. So at one point, He brilliantly said, you have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both. But he knows that he is loved and revered by Boswell. And obviously, in the wake of the implosion of his relationship with Mrs. Thrail, this counts for a great deal. And so that summer of 1784, Johnson arrives in London on the 5th of May, and he spends two months there.

42:45Tom Holland:And most of his time is spent with Johnson. I think Boswell has a sense that this might be the last time that he will see Johnson. And the highlight of his stay is a trip to Oxford. And going to Oxford is a jaunt that has become something of a tradition when Boswell is down in London with Johnson. And actually, those trips to Oxford had provided Boswell with some great moments, which he records in his life. So there were times when Johnson had really shocked him. So you mentioned how Johnson is a very keen abolitionist. And so Boswell records an occasion when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was, here's to the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies.

43:27Tom Holland:So he's saying, you know, here's to the next slave rebellion. And Boswell is shocked because he is completely unbothered by slavery and sees Johnson's opposition to it as what he describes as a mere violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers.

43:43Dominic Sandbrook:So he thinks that Johnson's abolitionism is basically a little bit of a veneer, that Johnson is pretending to be woke, but in reality, he's just anti-American.

43:51Tom Holland:I think that is probably what he's saying, because one of the reasons that Johnson is against the American Revolution, as we mentioned in our first episode, is that he sees the American revolutionaries as hypocrites. Conversely, Boswell is all in favour of the American Revolution. You know, he sees the Americans as being like the Corsicans and George Washington as being a kind of new Paulie. So that's something that they definitely disagree on. But it's not, you know, when they go to Oxford, it's not all kind of arguments about politics or whatever so um it's a perfect opportunity for boswell to do some research to find out about johnson's early years and to meet people who had known johnson while he was a student so in 1778 there's a famous incident johnson meets with a guy called oliver edwards an old fellow collegian of johnson's and johnson hadn't seen this guy since 1729 and johnson of course is famous so this guy edwards comes up to him and says oh brilliant to see you and johnson has no idea who he is.

44:46Tom Holland:And then suddenly he remembers and they have this kind of great conversation. And Edwards reveals that he'd been, he'd practiced as a solicitor. He'd then retired to the country. Boswell describes him as a decent looking elderly man in grey clothes and a wig of many clothes. And it's evident that Edwards is a really charming man. So he has this very famous comment, you are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried to in my time to be a philosopher, but I don't know how cheerfulness was always breaking in this was one of the favourite quotations of Leonard Cohen hold on when was cheerfulness breaking in with Leonard Cohen surely the answer never also he misattributed it to Ben Johnson the Jacobean playwright

45:29Dominic Sandbrook:oh for God's sake

45:31Tom Holland:you know who doesn't like

45:32Dominic Sandbrook:Leonard Cohen who our producer Tabby she says in the chat he's such a moaner he's such a moaner

45:39Tom Holland:well I tell you someone who isn't a moaner even though he's very depressed is by this point johnson he is pretty down at this point but he he remains as fluent as ever so um on the carriage going up to oxford in 1784 they meet with two american ladies and they hear him talking and they go my my how he does talk

45:58Dominic Sandbrook:every sentence is an essay and johnson is polite to these ladies i mean they're americans so does he not incredibly rude to them in some way i think i think actually they have they're going

46:07Tom Holland:to worcestershire and i think they have worcestershire accents oh really so i think maybe he doesn't appreciate that but having said that johnson is clearly oppressed not just by a sense of his own mortality but by a sense of what may happen to him after his death he has dinner with another old college friend of his um a guy called dr adams who'd been the master of pembroke and they start talking about death and what happens to people after death and johnson says I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be damned. And Boswell in his stage direction says looking dismally. Dr. Adams, what do you mean by damned?

46:45Tom Holland:Johnson, passionately and loudly, sent to hell, sir, and punished everlastingly.

46:52Dominic Sandbrook:Is this because Johnson is troubled by things like his own lusts? They're always on his mind. He doesn't like to go and see the actresses because they'll excite his passions, all of that. Boswell certainly finds unsettling that Johnson

47:03Tom Holland:is this nervous about the destination of his soul. And this is partly because Boswell's own faith is shaky. And so he needs Johnson to serve as an example of kind of unshakable Christian orthodoxy. And if Johnson is worried he's going to be damned, then, you know, what the hell's going to happen to Boswell? And I think you're right that there may be a sexual dimension to this.

47:27Dominic Sandbrook:Just like, what else has Johnson conceivably done that would get him into hell? I mean, he's not going to get in hell because he's written the dictionary or been rude about the Scots. But if there's private stuff that's going on in his head, it's like Jimmy Carter committing adultery in his heart many times. Do you think there's that? Let's come to that in a minute.

47:45Tom Holland:Let's just look at Boswell and Johnson's parting and what happens then. So Boswell leaves London on the 1st of July, 1784. And the evening before, he had gone with Johnson to Sir Joshua Reynolds for a kind of private dinner. So just the three of them. And at the end of the evening, Reynolds lends Johnson his carriage to take him back to Bulk Court on Fleet Street. And Boswell goes with him and helps Johnson out of the carriage and sees him to the passageway, which leads from Fleet Street to Bulk Court. Boswell remembered this parting. When he had got down upon the foot pavement, he called out, farewell.

48:18Tom Holland:And without looking back, sprung away with a kind of pathetic briskness, which I think is a wonderful phrase. Johnson goes back into his rooms and waiting for him there is the fatal letter from Mrs. Thrail announcing her intention to marry Signor Piozzi so all of that kind of nightmare is now kind of unleashed for Johnson Boswell meanwhile has gone back to Scotland and he keeps writing to Johnson saying you know how are you I'm very worried how anxious you seemed about the fate of your eternal soul tell me all about it and Johnson's furious he doesn't want to talk about it He doesn't want to put up with Boswell's nagging.

48:53Tom Holland:And so he writes back to Boswell, write to me often, but write like a man. Then on the 3rd of November, he does something that he never does. He complains to Boswell about his health. He says, I feel unwell. I feel short of breath. I'm finding it hard to walk. Early December, he draws up his will. He burns a few papers, maybe suggestive, and he falls increasingly to prayer. And on the evening of the 13th of December he dies and he's found the next morning in his bed and his passing is marked as a very solemn national occasion he's buried in Westminster Abbey Joshua Reynolds is among the pallbearers and the eulogy is delivered by Edmund Burke Boswell is not at the service he is up in Scotland the news reaches him four days after Johnson's death and he is thrown utterly into misery and eight days after Johnson's funeral, say that's the 28th of December, he can still write in his journal his sense of disbelief that Johnson is dead.

49:54Tom Holland:But he also feels now under the most massive pressure because everyone knows that he has been preparing notes for a biography of Johnson. And I think that Boswell himself feels that his entire life up until this moment had been preparation for that great task. And so publishers are aware of this and they write to him and say, can you get us something immediately? It's December. One publisher says, get me 400 pages by February.

50:20Dominic Sandbrook:And I guess there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that he wants to produce a memorial to his great friend. He feels this task has been appointed to him. He'll sell more copies, the closer it is to Johnson's death. This is peak fame, but people will start to forget Johnson. Yeah, people forget, but also there might be competitors, other rivals working on

50:40Tom Holland:johnson books yeah of course and mrs piazzi chief among them so boswell is very anxious about this and he thinks well probably the best thing for me to do is to go down to london and start work there which is a terrible plan because of course the moment boswell arrives in london he starts behaving as boswell does in london so he goes out to watch a hot air balloon uh he goes to bedlam interestingly the place where the lunatics are chained up and he ends up singing a song with an inmate that Boswell himself describes as having been very pretty.

51:12Dominic Sandbrook:Boswell is such a dog, isn't he?

51:13Tom Holland:He then gets drunk with a couple of prostitutes who are wearing red coats in the churchyard of St. Paul's. He's so drunk that he doesn't notice his pocket being picked. He falls over and he has to be helped home by a pair of strangers. And none of this is helping him to write his biography. And it goes on like this and the months pass and then the years and Boswell's life begins to fall apart at the seams as he had worried it would with Johnson gone so he ends up leaving Edinburgh altogether trying to set up as a barrister in London and it's a disaster you know he doesn't know English law it's absolutely hopeless he tries to secure a seat in Parliament and he ends up humiliated by the aristocrat that he'd been hoping would serve as his patron tragic and his wife falls ill with tuberculosis and Boswell neglects her she then dies and he's then prostrated with grief and guilt.

52:05Tom Holland:And while all this is going on, all these kind of catastrophic developments in Boswell's life, on the publishing front, it's exactly as the booksellers had feared. Lots of biographies of Johnson start appearing. And the first of these, which was published in spring 1786, was by Mrs. Piozzi. And it was very waspish and pretty embittered. And it reflected the breakdown in her relations with Johnson you know and therefore it has the hint of gossip and so it's you know it's pretty popular yeah and then in 1787 there's a very pompous formal biography which is claimed to be definitive and that was written by one of the executors of Johnson's will a lawyer by the name of Sir John Hawkins and you know it's it's very stiff but again this the fact that it's being marketed as definitive.

52:54Tom Holland:It's a massive, you know, anxiety for Boswell. And the 1780s become the 1790s. And still from Boswell, there is no sign of this long promised, long anticipated life of Johnson. And so both his friends and his enemies are endlessly, you know, the friends are saying, get a move on. His enemies are saying, ha ha ha, you're useless, you're an old drunk, you're never going to publish it. And it's true that the chaos of his own life, you know the the whoring and the drinking and the growing debts well he is drinking a lot isn't he masses amounts by this point i mean these are clearly factors why he's finding it hard to finish his book but i think it is also due to something more and that is a sense that actually with his biography he is on the verge of something great that everything else in his life is a disaster but if he can get this biography right then that will be his memorial you know he will have achieved something wonderful.

53:50Tom Holland:And his ambition is as simple as it's hubristic, to write a biography of a kind that has never been written for, to portray Johnson in the words that he ends up putting in his introduction to the biography, more completely than any man who has ever yet lived.

54:07Dominic Sandbrook:So he makes Robert Caro, who writes these 6 ,000 page books about the life of Lyndon Johnson. He makes him look like a mere pamphleteer, doesn't he? Because Boswell wants to check every fact. He wants to talk to every associate of Johnson's. He wants to write the complete life. Definitive, no question, unasked or unanswered.

54:29Tom Holland:Boswell's life of Johnson is not as long as Robert Caro's, but Robert Caro is definitely the heir of Boswell. And essentially everyone who writes a biography today is Boswell's heir because he has established the template that every detail matters. You have to be sure of every detail. You can't just repeat hearsay. So that takes a lot of work and effort. But I think also, you know, you were talking about Boswell worrying about why is Johnson thinking he's damned in the final months of his life? And Boswell is worried about that, I think, as a biographer, as well as a friend. and so he is trying to work you know if his biography is going to be complete then he need he can't veil that he needs to kind of get to grips with that and so he's kind of roving in his mind all kinds of possibilities so had johnson's faith for instance been wavering in the final months of his life you know was he worrying that he might go insane might become a lunatic or as you suggested was it the memory of something sexual perhaps which had been causing him shame and making him worry that he might be damned.

55:32Tom Holland:And Boswell doesn't discount any of these possibilities because he's been doing his research and he knows that as a young man, actually, Johnson had had religious doubts. So David Garrick, the great writer, Boswell's oldest friend, he'd said Johnson did have religious doubts as a young man. We've seen how Johnson did indeed dread being plunged into madness. And also, it's evident even from things that Johnson said himself, often making a kind of jest out of it, that he did feel a constant tension between his sense of morality and his sexual desire. So you mentioned that wonderful line about him going backstage and telling Garrick, I'm not going to become here because, what is it, the white bosoms and silk stockings of your actresses arouse my amorous propensities.

56:16Tom Holland:But he also had this kind of wonderful phrase, if I had no duties and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post chaise with a pretty woman. So Boswell's own hunch, he ends up deciding that actually this is what Johnson had been worrying about. And so he writes in the biography that his suspicion that as a young man, Johnson had turned to prostitutes, or as Boswell himself puts it, had been led into some indulgences which occasioned much distress to his virtuous mind. So, I mean, that's one way of putting it, I guess. But there is another possibility, and this is one that came to light in 1949 when a scholar called Catherine Balderstone suggested that perhaps what was on Johnson's mind were memories of a sadomasochistic relationship that he had had with Mrs.

57:08Tom Holland:Thrale. so there have been hints of that being dropped throughout this episode so in that opening letter Johnson had spoken of that slavery which you know so well how to make a happy one and Mrs. Thrail had written to him sending him on his way to to join Boswell for their tour of the Hebrides do not quarrel with your governess for not using the rod enough now that padlock and chain that Johnson had bought he made a gift of that to Mrs. Thrail and Mrs. Thrail made a note in her diary says johnson a woman has such power between the ages of 25 and 45 that she may tie a man to a post and whip him if she will and she then goes on to say well i know for a fact that johnson is aware of this and just kind of leaves that hanging so is it a possibility i mean i think it's not

57:55Dominic Sandbrook:anachronistic to say it might have been la vice galoise the uh the welsh vice rears its head again

58:02Tom Holland:no the marquis de sade is on the scene in france even as mrs rail is writing that what's going on

58:08Dominic Sandbrook:here is this i think this is bonkers i think this is just three unrelated things padlock metaphors

58:15Tom Holland:yoked together i agree uh and i think that even even if there was an element of that to it i think it was unacted on i also think that johnson didn't sleep with prostitutes as a young man But I think that like Jimmy Carter, he felt lust in his heart and felt guilty about that. And it's beyond Boswell's ability to comprehend that someone might feel guilty about wanting to go with prostitutes because Boswell is doing it literally every day. So I think Boswell is misreading what Johnson felt guilty about myself. myself.

58:51Dominic Sandbrook:But doesn't Boswell see Johnson's torments as signs, not that he's screwed up in some way, but signs of reminders of just how great his imagination is? The fact that he can be tormented by doubt about something that he didn't even do. Boswell has this wonderful metaphor, doesn't he? A very Tom Holland metaphor about the Colosseum in Rome.

59:16Tom Holland:Yeah, it's such a beautiful, powerful metaphor. His mind resembled the vast amphitheater, the Colosseum at Rome. In the center stood his judgment, which like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens, but not killing them, they were still assailing him. So this is a fight that Johnson is undertaking his entire life And I think the groundbreaking achievement of the biography that Boswell ends up writing of Johnson is that readers of that biography do not need to take this on trust because Boswell's portrayal of Johnson ends up being so capacious, so detailed, so empathetic, so compassionate, so rich that readers of the life can feel that for themselves.

1:00:13Tom Holland:It's why it's such a moving book. You feel the flaws of Johnson and how he overcame them. That's what his greatness lies in.

1:00:23Dominic Sandbrook:It's immersive. It's compelling. It's internally coherent in a way that biographies up to that point were not. It's psychologically acute, but it has room for contradiction and for complexity and for eccentricity and all of those kinds of things. So you do feel, I agree with you, you feel like you're getting the picture of a complete rounded character. complicated human being rather than the sort of slightly simplistic streamlined portraits that people had done up to this point, including kind of classical portraits and whatnot. There's no sense of caricature about it, is there?

1:00:59Tom Holland:No. And on top of that, it is insanely entertaining. I mean, Johnson's conversation is brilliant and Boswell has preserved it. And so you can read page after page after page it's like i mean it is so enjoyable and so when it comes out you know it's been a seven-year wait for this this biography and everyone says this is brilliant i mean this is this is incredible we've never read anything like that and i think we're so habituated to the form that biography has taken today that perhaps it can be hard to recapture the sense of excitement and disbelief and enjoyment that people felt on reading it and boswell almost overnight was enshrined as the kind of the Shakespeare, the goat of biographers.

1:01:44Dominic Sandbrook:Just one question about the time that it comes out. It came out in 1791. And it is the portrait of the ultimate Englishman, somebody who almost self-consciously incarnates the pragmatism, the common sense, the small c conservatism that people like to equate with the English character. Do you think it makes a difference to its reception that it comes out two years after The French Revolution has begun. And two years before, I think it is, Britain is going to end up in war with revolutionary France. And that a portrait of an Englishman of this kind would resonate with people in a way that might not have done at a different point.

1:02:20Tom Holland:I think that must be the case. I think that Johnson is an intellectual, funny, warm-hearted John Bull. And that's exactly what people in Britain, England perhaps more particularly, want. And that's what Boswell has given them. You know, it's not just down to Johnson. It is also down to Boswell. And I think that that's what makes them, you know, as a pair, such kind of irresistible subjects for a history podcast, because Johnson, I mean, he continues to live. There are lots of people who have been like Johnson, kind of great literary lions. Nobody remembers them. But he continues to live, thanks to Boswell, in a way that, in my opinion, no one in history before that biography lives today.

1:03:10Tom Holland:he is the oldest complete portrait of a person that we have well i was about to say it's the

1:03:16Dominic Sandbrook:completeness that's the thing isn't it i mean there are great characters in history there's i don't know augustus or henry the eighth or oliver cromwell or whoever it might be but we only see them you know we see very partial pictures of them at best but johnson you feel like you know the man you feel like he could be your friend like you know him that well yeah and it's not just johnson of course because um you know we're also seeing the people that he's dining with

1:03:39Tom Holland:you know in private dinners or in London taverns or on the Hobbodies or whatever and these scenes are so vivid so Adam Sisman who's written a wonderful book Boswell's presumptuous task about how Boswell went set about writing this biography he's written brilliantly on how Boswell frames these scenes of kind of Johnson having conversations with with his friends as scenes in a play and why he took such care over them and Sisman writes he knew that they were what made his biography distinct from any other. But I think that, you know, we can push that analogy perhaps even further, because in the episode we did on the tour of the Hebrides, we cast Boswell as a kind of documentary maker.

1:04:21Tom Holland:And I think that reading these scenes of Johnson talking is as close to having fly on the wall documentary footage from the 18th century as we get. It's that incredible to read. And these are not scenes from a play because they actually happened boswell recorded them and put them in his journals and reworked them and you can read them and there they are and it's not just it's a tribute not

1:04:49Dominic Sandbrook:just to johnson though but to boswell right yeah completely i mean you say they're scenes from a documentary i mean they're not because they're literary constructs and boswell is a great writer i mean boswell is a brilliant writer with a brilliant judgment of you know when to stop the anecdote how much detail to go into all of those kinds of things i mean he's obviously recreating conversations from memory and he seems to have amazing memory for that but also boswell i mean boswell's a pretty bad man in some ways but he has a great enthusiasm for life doesn't he he loves being himself and being alive and the world and he takes such boyish pleasure in it that it's irrepressible you can disapprove of his conduct which is often pretty poor while at the same time you know finding him fun and finding his world really fun and also of course reflect

1:05:40Tom Holland:the fact that we only know how badly boswell behaves because he actually writes it down in these journals so these journals were lost uh people didn't even know they existed for a century and more and then they were found in very weird circumstances in the 20th century and people who want to know more about that more about how boswell um might have uh recorded all the details that goes into the life of Johnson, I will be talking to Adam Sissman on a bonus. In fact, by the time you listen to this, it may already have gone out. But just to end by saying that I think that, you know, there are kind of amazing literary duos.

1:06:12Tom Holland:So Don Quixote or Sancho Panzer or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Wonson. And Johnson and Boswell are up there in that kind of pantheon. But the amazing thing is they're real. They're not invented, but they have that kind of character of kind of timeless archetypes. And I think that to read Boswell's life of Johnson essentially is to come as close as is humanly possible to overhearing the 18th century. And to read it is to experience a form of time travel.

1:06:47Dominic Sandbrook:Well, to think about Johnson and Boswell always reminds me of, I once saw a lecture online by Neil Ferguson, the sometimes controversial historian. and it's a sort of welcome lecture that he does for students he's talking about his love of history and he says people who I think of as great friends of mine have been dead for 200 years and I've encountered them through studying history and the pages of history and I feel like I know them better than I know people I see every day and I love them and I love you know being reacquainted with them and being in their company and that's one of the beauties of history and Johnson and Buzwell are like that aren't they they're such irresistible characters that you feel you know them and you relish every moment that you spend in their company absolutely and if this series

1:07:31Tom Holland:encourages anybody to read boswell's life of johnson or even some of his journals then it

1:07:36Dominic Sandbrook:won't have been in vain oh it definitely won't have been in vain tom so that uh is johnson and boswell what a what a wonderful story and we're going to be doing something completely different next time so next time we will be venturing back to 19th century america for the rather darker story of the ku klux clan so tom thank you so much uh what an immersive journey into georgian london that was and indeed to scotland and most of all to wales so on that welsh bombshell we say thank you very much and goodbye bye

1:08:22Thank you.