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 Johnson (possibly because of his eyesight) did not have a delicate (‘elegans’) taste in the female form, and could also appreciate brazen and ‘vulgar’ sexual talents.28 Boswell once again safely confined this episode to Johnson’s reminiscences forty years later.
Anna Seward seems to have been right about Johnson’s ‘princess’ syndrome, and the pattern that emerges is not unlike the classic fairy-tale of Beauty and the Beast. Johnson’s marriage does not really seem to have altered this, and throughout Johnson’s early London years there is evidence that it continues. It made Johnson both peculiarly sympathetic, and perhaps even vulnerable, to Savage’s own much wilder emotional fantasies.
Johnson’s strange romance with Elizabeth Porter began in 1734. His good friend Harry Porter, a mercer at Edgbaston, had been taken ill, and Johnson rode out frequently from Lichfield to attend Harry’s sick-bed. Johnson became a friend of the whole family in their distress: two young sons Jervis and Joseph; an eighteen-year-old daughter, Lucy; and Mrs Elizabeth Porter, then aged forty-five.29
Boswell, and all Johnson’s subsequent biographers except Anna Seward, failed to draw the obvious conclusion. If Johnson had any interest other than pure friendship, it was evidently in the princess, the eighteen-year-old Lucy, to whom he had been attracted since his schooldays.30 Her mother Elizabeth, who was nearly twice his age and devoted to her ailing husband, was not initially the object of his dreams.
A formal introduction to Lucy, as with other girls, had later been made by Edmund Hector, who bought his clothes from Harry Porter.31 This was probably in 1732, when Lucy was a blossoming sixteen and Johnson twenty-three. She vividly recalled Johnson from those early visits, with a physical revulsion that is expressive. This is Beauty describing the Beast, as reported years later to Boswell. Both maintain the comfortable fiction that Johnson was only ever interested in Lucy’s mother. But this is not what emerges, and it is not what Anna Seward thought either ‘the rustic prettiness, and artless manners of her daughter, the present Mrs Lucy Porter, had won Johnson’s youthful heart.’32
In pictorial terms, these early meetings resulted in perhaps the most unforgettable image of Johnson in his twenties that we have. Boswell records:
Miss Porter told me, that when he was first introduced to her mother, [Johnson’s] appearance was very forbidding: he was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrophula were deeply visible. He also wore his hair, which was straight and stiff, and separated behind: and he often had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which tended to excite at once surprize and ridicule.33
This, with its touch of horrified exaggeration, is almost worthy of Hogarth. The detail of the hair, ‘stiff and straight’, worn without a wig, and yet combed self-consciously behind, is curiously disturbing; and perhaps there is a grotesque hint, through Lucy’s eyes, of the suitor. Lucy recalls her mother’s extraordinary reaction: ‘this is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.’
Anna Seward was quoting a Lichfield tradition that Johnson was first in love with Lucy. She goes on to suggest, by way of proof, that Johnson’s poem ‘On a Sprig of Myrtle’ was written for Lucy, and given to her around 1733. Boswell ridicules this, and is able to show conclusively that the poem was written before they met, in 1731, and at the special request of a quite different friend of Edmund Hector’s – a Mr Morgan – who ‘waited upon a lady’ in the neigh-bourhood. At Boswell’s urgings, Hector even produced an original manuscript dated 1731. There biographers have left the matter.34
No one has considered that Johnson may later have given the same poem, or a version of it, to Lucy Porter as well, exactly as Anna Seward claims. The poem is about the ‘ambiguity’ of love, as summed up in the emblem of the myrtle which can mean many things in lover’s lore:
The Myrtle crowns the happy Lovers heads,
Th’ unhappy Lovers Graves the Myrtle spreads;
Oh! then the Meaning of thy Gift impart,
And cure the throbbings of an anxious Heart …35
Anna Seward’s account of its presentation to Lucy, written privately to Boswell, is particularly insistent:
I know those verses were
