It became a favourite party piece, and passed into the Boswellian legend.
They took their ‘precepts of economy’ from an Irish painter, dined once a day at the Pine-Apple Coffee-house in New Street off the Strand for eight pence, and paid formal visits on ‘clean-shirt-days’ only. When Johnson first applied for literary work at a bookseller’s in the Strand, the proprietor Mr Wilcox ‘eyed his robust frame attentively’ and then suggested he take a job as a vegetable porter in Covent Garden.3
But these picturesque details, lovingly gathered by Boswell, mask a much bleaker truth. Johnson was a failed schoolmaster, who had spent most of his wife’s inheritance, and gone off to London with a teenage pupil in a desperate last attempt to recoup his fortunes. Garrick had a definite plan: to apply to Lincoln’s Inn, and if that failed to stay with his actor-brother Peter. He was also due to inherit a legacy of a thousand pounds, sufficient to make him independent.
Johnson, by comparison, was adrift in the capital. He had the unfinished manuscript of his tragedy Irene, and an idea of applying to the Gentleman’s Magazine for hack-work (it had been refused previously, in 1734). He also carried a kindly but useless letter of recommendation from his friend Gilbert Walmsley to the headmaster of Colson’s Academy, a fellow native of Lichfield. Omitting Johnson’s personal circumstances, Walmsley wrote: ‘Mr Johnson [is] to try his fate with a Tragedy, and to see to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French. Johnson is a very good scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a fine tragedy-writer. If it should any way lie in your way, doubt not but you would be ready to recommend and assist your countryman.’4
This left out a good deal about the difficulties of Johnson’s character and circumstances.
The young Johnson of Lichfield may have been ‘a very good scholar and poet’ potentially, but so far his professional achievements in either field had been minimal. At twenty-seven he had published nothing except some desultory essays in the Birmingham Journal and a pedestrian translation of Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia. The translation had been dictated to his friend Edmund Hector, while Johnson lay in bed too depressed to go to his desk.5
His scholastic career was equally undistinguished. His failure to complete a degree at Pembroke College, Oxford, in December 1729 (because of his father’s poverty, which had caused him endless humiliations) virtually destroyed his chances of a good grammarschool post or headmastership. Combined with his physical handicaps, this produced from 1730 onwards long periods of profound, chronic depression, with days of crushing slothful inactivity. At this time he told his school-friend, John Taylor of Ashbourne, that he ‘strongly entertained thoughts of suicide’.6
Over the next six years, Johnson failed in half-a-dozen masterships in small schools scattered between Lichfield, Birmingham and Stourbridge; each time fleeing back to the houses of his friends – Walmsley, Hector, or John Taylor – for solace and domestic comforts. A final blow came in 1736, when an attempt to start his own school at Edial, two miles outside Lichfield, failed through lack of pupils renewing their fees. It was closed with the loss of several hundred pounds. This money was not his own, but belonged to his new wife.7
Johnson’s difficulties were not merely, or even largely, financial or professional. They were profound problems of temperament and physical disability. These showed in depressive episodes, alternating with bullying aggression. His immediate appearance was out-landish: over six foot tall, looming in doorways, and shambling dangerously down streets (often muttering to himself). Closer up, he was a large, gaunt, bony young man of alarming, restless movement: quite unlike the noble, rolling, monumental, almost Buddhalike figure who emerges from the later descriptions of Boswell and portraits of Reynolds. He was partially blind in one eye, and heavily scarred round the throat with childhood scrofula. He suffered from frightening nervous spasms of the arms and shoulders, and uncontrollable facial twitches.
Boswell recorded these with great accuracy and tenderness in later life, when they had become almost endearing features. Yet even he notes that the painter Hogarth, on first spotting Johnson in Richardson’s drawing-room, assumed he was a congenital idiot taken in for philanthropic reasons.8
In his late twenties Johnson was a figure of horrid fascination. Men were intimidated by him, women were both excited and repulsed, children were frightened in his presence and cruelly mocking behind his back. This disturbing, unfamiliar picture emerges from the confidential reports of several of the schools that rejected him.
The governors of Solihull, seven miles outside Birmingham, sent this reply to Gilbert Walmsley’s recommendation of Johnson for the vacant headmastership in 1735: ‘… all agree that he is an excellent scholar, and upon that account deserves much better than to be schoolmaster of Solihull. But then he has the character of being a very haughty, ill-natured gent., and that he has such a way of distorting his face (which though he can’t help) the gent, think it may affect some young lads; for these two reasons he is not approved on …’9 Boswell did not know of this report, or at any rate did not quote it.
A similar rejection came from the headmaster of Brewood Grammar School, fifteen miles west of Lichfield, in 1736. Johnson was refused the post of assistant master, ‘from an apprehension that the paralytick affection … might become the object of imitation or of ridicule, among his pupils’.10 Boswell did have this report in his archives, but omitted it from his account of young Johnson, including it only as a retrospective footnote to his moving description of Johnson’s death in 1784.
Less than a dozen letters have survived from this Lichfield period of Johnson’s life, and so it has always remained obscure. But something of that ‘haughty, ill-natured’ manner appears in his earliest attempt to find a professional opening in London. Writing to Edward Cave of the Gentleman’s Magazine in November 1734, he confidently recommends himself – an unknown, unemployed schoolmaster from Stafford – for the post of literary correspondent: ‘Sir: As You appear no less sensible than Your Readers of the defects of your Poetical Article, You will not be displeased, if, in order to the improvement of it, I communicate to You the sentiments of a person, who will undertake on reasonable terms sometimes to fill a column.’11
We particularly catch young Johnson’s voice in his bullish, and splendidly tactless, summary: ‘By this method your Literary Article, for so it might be called, will, he thinks, be better recommended to the Publick, than by low Jests, awkward Buffoonery, or the dull scurrilities of either Party.’12 The application met with a polite refusal.
Haughtiness covered not merely provincial gaucherie, but desperate loneliness and uncertainty. Johnson’s frustrated intellectual brilliance hid extraordinary emotional immaturity. This, Boswell never seems to have grasped. For him, Johnson was a sage from boyhood, a wise owl from the egg. Yet the truth seems to be that, barricaded in his large monstrous body, Johnson had the tender, awkward emotions of an overgrown child.
He depended on his friends, and needed almost to be mothered by them. In 1735, he wrote one of his few revealing letters to Richard Congreve, a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate then at Oxford. Congreve had known him briefly at Lichfield and had written a summer letter vaguely suggesting a renewal of their ‘old acquaintance’. Johnson, then twenty-six, replied with an awkward but surprisingly romantic enthusiasm. He imagines their friendship as
