I

Johnson’s assertion that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford” is one of his most famous and most frequently misinterpreted remarks. Though always eager for life, Johnson in his sixties and seventies sometimes became weary of the dirt, noise, crowds and bustle of the city, and longed for the quiet and tranquility, the silence and solitude of rural retreats. In 1776 he moved to Bolt Court, off Fleet Street, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he took delight in growing and watering plants in the little garden behind the house.

Johnson combined intense chauvinism with keen curiosity about foreigners and a restless desire to travel to distant places. Baretti, with some exaggeration and tactfully omitting any mention of Italians, quoted Shakespeare’s Richard II and called Johnson “a real true-born Englishman. He hated the Scotch, the French, the Dutch, the Hanoverians, and had contempt for all other European Nations.” He shared the views of his countrymen and thought every foreigner a fool till he proved otherwise. As George Trevelyan observed, the British, unlike subjects of the anciens régimes on the Continent, enjoyed “Parliamentary control, and freedom of speech, press and person... They looked with contempt on French, Italians and Germans as people enslaved to priests, Kings and nobles, unlike your freeborn Englishmen.”¹

Compared to his friends, Johnson’s travel experience was limited. Garrick had been apprenticed to the wine trade in Portugal, traveled to Italy and lived for a year in France. Reynolds had studied for two years in Italy. Goldsmith had attended three universities and seen six countries in Europe. Burke had toured northern France; Burney had ranged widely on the Continent. Boswell had studied in Holland and ventured as far as Corsica. Henry Thrale had done the Grand Tour. Psalmanazar was born in France; Baretti, born in Italy, had visited Spain. Charlotte Lennox had been to America; Robert Chambers became a judge in Bengal, India; Joseph Banks had sailed round the world. Even the humble members of his household were more cosmopolitan than Johnson. Levet had worked in France, where he’d picked up medical tidbits. Frank Barber, born in Jamaica, had gone to sea.

With Boswell, who was always urging him to travel, Johnson dreamed about journeys to remote and exotic destinations. Over the years, he talked of traveling to Iceland, Sweden, Poland and the Baltic countries. He vaguely hoped to turn up in some part of Europe, Asia and Africa; and oddly thought of going to Constantinople (where Turkish was spoken) to learn Arabic. Inspired by travel books and thinking of the wanderings of his own Rasselas, he told Hester of his fantastic plans, were he not bound to Streatham, to “go to Cairo, and down the Red Sea to Bengal, and take a ramble in India.” He felt particularly enthusiastic about seeing the Great Wall of China, and in 1772 expressed a wish to join the Resolution and sail around Antarctica with Captain Cook. Writers, free to wander, long for the farthest corners of the earth. Johnson could say, with D. H. Lawrence, “I wish I were going to Thibet—or Kamschatka—or Tahiti—to the Ultima, ultima, ultima Thule.”

These imaginary voyages were more a quest for knowledge than for pleasure. “The use of traveling,” he wrote Hester, “is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” He fervently believed that “a man who has not seen Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what is expected a man should see. The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.” It’s rather surprising, therefore, that in October 1764 Johnson had given up his one great opportunity for a long-sought visit to the Mediterranean. George Collier, captain of the HMS Edgar and a friend of Frances Reynolds, was taking his wife on a voyage to the Mediterranean and invited Frances and Johnson to join them. Instead of seizing what turned out to be his only chance, Johnson—who thought ships were even more unpleasant and dangerous than jails—made all sorts of excuses to Frances: “I cannot go now. I must finish my [edition of Shakespeare]. I do not know Mr. Collier. I have not money before hand sufficient... I do not much like obligations, nor think the grossness of a Ship very suitable to a Lady”—though the captain thought it was quite suitable for his wife.

In the eighteenth century, travel in the remoter parts of Europe could be very rough. Sea crossings, particularly in the Hebrides Islands, were dangerous. The towns were small, the countryside sparsely populated, the roads poor; travelers were often threatened by thieves and highwaymen. Accommodations were bug-infested, rations crude. Nevertheless, at an age when most men would have preferred to stay at home, Johnson was on the move, eager to make up for lost time and to see what he could of the world. He reached the peak of his travels in the early 1770s, when he went to Scotland with Boswell, and to Wales and France with Henry and Hester Thrale. Just after returning from Paris, he compared himself to a wandering vessel and told John Taylor, “fixed to a spot when I was young, and roving the world when others are contriving to sit still, I am wholly unsettled. I am a kind of ship with a wide sail, and without an anchor.”²

II

In the summer of 1773 Boswell finally persuaded Johnson to visit the Highlands and Hebrides. He first had to overcome Johnson’s deep-rooted prejudice against Scotland. The Act of Union in 1707 (two years before Johnson was born) had united the governments of England and Scotland in the London Parliament and combined their two flags in the Union Jack. After the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, Johnson regarded Scotland as a persistent threat to England’s peace and security. He loathed the Presbyterianism that opposed the sacred doctrines of the Church of England and “did not think that Calvin and John Knox were proper founders of a national religion”; he detested the freethinking, even atheistic views of Scottish philosophers such as David Hume; the prevailing Whiggism north of the border; and the disproportionate influence in the English government, exceeding their real merit, of Scots like the royal favorite Lord Bute.

Inspired as always by travel books, Johnson was both excited and alarmed when he read Martin Martin’s description in 1703 of the Corryvreckan whirlpool that threatened to overwhelm small craft in the Hebrides: “the sea begins to boil and ferment with the tide at flood, and resembles the boiling of a pot; and then increases gradually, until it appears in many whirlpools, which form themselves in sort of pyramids, and immediately after sprout up as high as the mast of a little vessel, and at the same time make a loud report.” Johnson was also familiar with the vertiginous passage about the beating billows and howling storms in the “Autumn” section of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), which described the islands as wild and savage wastelands:

Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast Whirls,
Boils round the naked melancholy Isles
Of farthest Thulè, and th’ Atlantic Surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

Two major themes of Johnson’s travel book, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), are the effects of the ’45 rebellion on Highland life and the extreme poverty of that barren land. After the defeat at Culloden the Highlanders were forbidden to bear arms and to wear their traditional tartan dress. The old clan system was breaking down, the lairds had lost their feudal power over tenants and there was massive emigration to America. A historian explained how the economic consequences of the peace had strangled a once vital society: “the chiefs, no longer reckoning their wealth in fighting men, began to demand rents from their principal tenants, the ‘tacksmen’ [leaseholders], whose main obligation hitherto had been to maintain the military strength of the clan and act as officers. Many tacksmen emigrated; those who remained demanded rent from their sub-tenants.”³

Johnson granted that “every government must be allowed the power of taking away the weapon that is lifted against it.” But when he saw the results with his own eyes, he believed the English repression had been too severe. In his book he echoed the famous passage in Tacitus in which a British chieftain surveyed the destruction of his country by the Romans and said “they make a wilderness and call it peace”:

To hinder insurrection, by driving away the people, and to govern peaceably, by having no subjects, is an expedient that argues no great profundity of politicks. To soften the obdurate, to convince the mistaken, to mollify the resentful, are worthy of a statesman; but it affords a legislator little self-applause to consider, that where there was formerly an insurrection, there is now a wilderness...

The clans retain little now of their original character, their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued, and their reverence for chiefs abated.

Johnson disapproved of the rebellion, but felt sympathy for the repressed, hungry and dispirited people.

John Brewer pointed out that Johnson experienced a common paradox of travel. After the rebellions were crushed: “the improvements that enabled travelers like Johnson . . . to visit the Highlands—coaches and improved communications with Scotland; roads into the Highlands built by General Wade after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715; the pacification after the rising of 1745 that ensured law and order and safe travel—were already intruding on the ‘natural’ primitiveness which travellers had come to observe.”⁴

Johnson’s itinerary—by coach, horseback, foot and boat—took him to Edinburgh, where he met Boswell; up the east coast; along the north coast; down the west coast; across the sea to seven islands in the Inner Hebrides: Skye, Rassay, Coll, Mull, Ulva, Inch Kenneth and Iona; back to the mainland at Oban; southeast to Glasgow; and then south to Boswell’s family estate at Auchinleck, in Ayrshire. During the Scottish trip, which lasted from August 14 to November 21, 1773, Johnson wrote Hester fourteen long, diary-like letters, which formed the basis of his book.

In Johnson’s time the Highlands were considered violent, treacherous, impoverished and backward. Writing to Hester on September 30, he described contemporary Scotland in the same way that he’d portrayed Shakespeare’s England: the Scots “are a Nation just rising from barbarity, long contented with necessaries, now somewhat studious of convenience, but not arrived at delicate discriminations.” In the Journey he amplified this judgment and enraged many readers by insisting on the superiority of the English and comparing the Scots to the world’s allegedly most primitive people: “till the Union made them acquainted with English manners, the culture of their lands was unskillful, and their domestick life unformed; their tables were coarse as the feasts of Esquimeaux, and their houses filthy as the cottages of Hottentots.”

He found a perfect example of this kind of rude cottage on the isle of Skye, where his bedroom combined a promising appearance with a nasty surprise: “I found an elegant bed of Indian cotton, spread with fine sheets. The accommodation was flattering; I undressed myself, and felt my feet in the mire. The bed stood upon the bare earth, which the long course of rain had softened to a puddle.” Johnson was still tough enough, at the age of sixty-four, to adapt to these spartan conditions. But, accustomed to the luxury of Streatham, he felt justified in emphasizing the hardships he endured.

Johnson seems to have been an excellent traveler, invigorated by the challenge of deprivation and stimulated by new sights and new acquaintances. As in London, he ranged from low to high society, from the mean turf cabins of the poor to the castles of the noblemen and chieftains. At the end of his journey he gloomily concluded: “of these islands it must be confessed, that they have not many allurements, but to the mere lover of naked nature. The inhabitants are thin, provisions are scarce, and desolation and penury give little pleasure.” Yet he found the bleak surroundings were constantly redeemed by the abundant generosity of the natives, who often welcomed strangers as guests when there was no other place to stay. “The hospitality of this remote region,” he wrote Hester, “is like that of the golden age [of plenty, innocence and happiness]. We have found ourselves treated at every house as if we came to confer a benefit.”⁵

Johnson reached the spiritual pinnacle of his journey on the island of Iona. The monastery, founded there in 563 by the Irish saint Columba, had once been the center for Celtic Christianity and for missionaries who spread the Gospel to the heathens in Scotland and Northumbria. Johnson was saddened by the ruins of the illustrious churches and chapels, the monasteries and convents, where “savage clans and roving barbarians [had once] derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion.” Iona inspired the noblest passage in the book, when he pitted the body against the mind, the delusive senses against the strength of thought, which could summon up the glories of the past: “whatever withdraws us from the powers of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.”

The ruined churches of Iona also inspired a furious passage that was suppressed in the printed book. Johnson connected the stripping of lead roofs from Scottish churches in time of war with an urge to commit similar depredations to a sacred building, Lichfield Cathedral, which had always been close to his heart. With characteristic violence, he imagined the would-be predators suffering a medieval torture that would burn out their guts: “let us not however make too much haste to despise our neighbours. There is now, as I have heard, a body of men, not less decent or virtuous than the Scottish council, longing to melt the lead of an English cathedral. What they shall melt, it were just that they should swallow.”

Johnson ended the Journey in a mood of elegiac tenderness. The “sixty-year-old smiling public man” investigated conditions at an Edinburgh school for the deaf. Partly deaf from birth himself, he identified with the handicapped children, who were taught to speak, write, and read both books and lips, a rare educational feat. “After having seen the deaf taught arithmetick,” he optimistically asked, “who would be afraid to cultivate the Hebrides?” The first edition of his Journey, which appeared in January 1775, was 4,000 copies and cost five shillings. Johnson was paid £210 plus an additional £70 for a one-third share of his copyright.

Just after publication, Johnson’s attack on James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, the most contentious part of the book, boiled over into a fierce controversy. In the early 1760s Macpherson, a Scottish schoolmaster, had translated and published three volumes of prose poems that he attributed to Ossian, a third-century Gaelic bard. The poems soon became famous throughout Europe and were quoted extensively in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Since Macpherson, when challenged, could never produce a genuine Gaelic manuscript, the poems could not be authenticated. Struggling against the contemporary tide of enthusiasm, Johnson took a forceful, even belligerent stance. In the Journey he declared: “I believe the [poems] never existed in any other form than that which we have seen. The editor, or author, could never shew the original; nor can it be shewn by any other; to revenge reasonable incredulity, by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence, with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.”⁶

Thinking of the bitter battles on Grub Street, in his life of Sir Thomas Browne Johnson noted, “the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.” In January 1775 Macpherson, greatly affronted, sent Johnson a threatening letter. Relishing a fight, Johnson sent back a magnificent denunciation that equaled his fierce letter to Lord Chesterfield:

I received your foolish and impudent note. Whatever insult is offered me I will do my best to repel, and what I cannot do for myself the law will do for me. I will not desist from detecting what I think a cheat, from my fear of the menaces of a Ruffian.

You want me to retract. What shall I retract? I thought your book an imposture from the beginning. I think it upon yet surer reasons an imposture still. For this opinion I give the publick my reasons which I here dare you to refute.

But however I may despise you, I reverence truth and if you can prove the genuineness of the work I will confess it. Your rage I defy...

You may print this if you will.

Johnson replaced the stout walking stick that was stolen from him in the Highlands with one even stouter to deal with Macpherson. He also sent a categorical letter to Boswell, who desperately wanted to believe his countryman and to preserve the honor of Scotland, carefully weighing the evidence: “Every thing is against him. No visible manuscript; no inscription in the language: no correspondence among friends: no transaction of business, of which a single scrap remains in the ancient families.” Gibbon agreed with him, and in October 1775 wrote, “the dogmatic language of Johnson . . . seems to have given the bard a dangerous, if not a mortal wound.”⁷ Later on, Scott and Wordsworth also called the Ossian poems fakes, but Johnson’s literary instinct and sceptical attitude had struck the first blow.

III

Boswell shaped Johnson’s life by luring him to Scotland, even as he was preparing to write it. Johnson published his Journey fourteen months after completing the trip. He gave Boswell himself only a minor role, and focused on the historical, social and economic issues inherent in the barren landscape and rocky islands. He left out descriptions of his challenging intellectual discourse in Edinburgh and Glasgow, then at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as his heated dispute with Boswell’s father at Auchinleck. Boswell published his Tour to the Hebrides in October 1785, a decade later and ten months after Johnson’s death. Following Johnson’s advice in Rambler 60 (which Johnson had ignored) and foreshadowing the method he would use in his Life of Johnson (1791), Boswell chose to lead “the thoughts into domestick privacies, and display the minute details of daily life.” Johnson’s book is about Scotland; Boswell’s book is about Johnson.

Boswell’s physical proximity to Johnson during their three-month tour, when they sometimes slept side by side on the bare floor, encouraged intimate revelations. He began his book with an intensely realistic portrait of Johnson’s appearance and dress, which emphasized his vast size, scarred face, defects of hearing and vision, and jerky tremors. Overcoming these disabilities and completing the arduous journey, Boswell suggested, was a heroic feat:

His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of that evil which it was formerly imagined the royal touch could cure. He was now in his sixty-fourth year, and was become a little dull of hearing. His sight had always been somewhat weak . . . [but] his perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head and sometimes also his body shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy; he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps or convulsive contractions, of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus’s dance. He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes with twisted-hair buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles. Upon this tour, when journeying, he wore boots and a very wide brown cloth greatcoat with pockets which might almost have held the two volumes of his folio dictionary, and carried in his hand a large English oak stick.

Boswell mentioned that Johnson was well aware of his forbidding, even ogreish appearance. “‘Would you not, sir,’ Boswell asked, ‘start as Mr. Garrick does if you saw a ghost?’ ‘I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost.’” Assuming a deep voice and Polyphemus persona, he told a little girl that “he lived in a cave and had a bed in the rock, and she should have a little bed cut opposite to it.” Johnson’s convulsive motions seemed to amuse Boswell’s four-month-old daughter, Veronica, who allowed him to hold her and gave proof that his figure was not horrid. Paradoxically, though he looked like a monster and wolfed his food in the crudest way, he could be unusually delicate. When a waiter picked up a lump of sugar with his greasy fingers and dropped it into Johnson’s cup, he indignantly flung the tea out the window and seemed ready to knock the servant down.

On two occasions Boswell’s display of domestic privacies led, rather surprisingly, to down-to-earth discussions of domestic privies. Noting the lack of “that very essential particular,” the “little-house,” in one grand house, Johnson said, “if ever a man thinks at all, it is there. He generally thinks then with great intenseness. He sets himself down as quite alone.” Noting on another occasion how rare the convenient “temple of Cloacina” was on the Hebridean islands, Johnson remarked, “you take very good care of one end of a man, but not of the other.”⁸ This was a somewhat cruder variant of his comment about whipping boys’ bottoms at school.

At Loch Ness they asked an ancient crone where she slept in her cottage and, fearing they had designs upon her person, she seemed perturbed by the question. Her reaction inspired some good-natured banter. Playing on Boswell’s sexual propensities and Johnson’s frightening demeanor, they exchanged the roles of villainous and virtuous men.

[Johnson]: She’ll say, “There came a wicked young fellow, a wild young dog, who I believe would have ravished me had there had not been with him a grave old gentleman who repressed him. But when he gets out of the sight of his tutor, I’ll warrant you he’ll spare no woman he meets, young or old.” “No,” said I, “She’ll say, ‘There was a terrible ruffian who would have forced me, had it not been for a gentle, mild-looking youth, who, I take it, was an angel.’”

Another apparently minor incident provoked a furious reaction from Johnson. As Boswell started to ride ahead in the Highlands to warn the innkeeper of their imminent arrival, “Mr. Johnson called me back with a tremendous shout, and was really in a passion with me for leaving him... He said doing such a thing made one lose confidence in him who did it.” In the evening “Johnson was still violent upon that subject, and said, ‘Sir, had you gone on, I was thinking that I should have returned with you to Edinburgh and then parted, and never spoke to you more.’” The critic Michael Joyce wrote that Boswell’s apparent desertion and betrayal made “the whole universe seem hostile” to Johnson, but didn’t explain why he felt that way. It may have reminded the always guilt-ridden Johnson of his ride to Derby on his wedding day, when he too rode out of sight, left Tetty behind and found her in tears as she caught up with him. His primordial fear of being abandoned by his guide in a barren and desolate region may also have recalled, deep within him, the sense of being abandoned by his mother to the wet nurse—the very source of his unhappiness.

Johnson was far less frightened when his life actually was in danger. His courage was tested as they crossed the open sea from Skye to Coll, ran into a fierce storm and were hit by “a prodigious sea with immense billows coming upon a vessel, so as that it seemed hardly possible to escape.” Boswell was terrified and feared for his life. But “Johnson had all this time been quiet and unconcerned. He had lain down on one of the beds, and having got free of sickness, was quite satisfied... He was lying in philosophic tranquillity, with a greyhound at his back keeping him warm.”⁹

Though Boswell’s chief concern was to describe daily life with his fascinating traveling companion, he suppressed many passages in the first edition that showed Johnson in a negative light. They were not restored until the text of the original manuscript was published in 1936. He did not include Johnson’s piquant remarks about privies, nor describe how Johnson, enraged by the Reverend Kenneth Macaulay’s disrespect for the English clergy, called him, in uncharacteristically vulgar language, “the most ignorant booby and the grossest bastard.”

Most significant were the passages Boswell omitted at the end of the Tour, when Johnson met Boswell’s wife and forbidding father in Auchinleck. Margaret, Boswell’s first cousin and devoted wife, was thirty-five in 1773, two years older than her husband. Veronica, their first child, was born that year, and they later had four other children. Margaret served Johnson tea until two in the morning and gave up her own bedroom for him to sleep in. But she was unimpressed by his genius and disliked his irregular hours and eccentric behavior, which the Thrales so obligingly tolerated. Writing to Hester from Auchinleck, Johnson described Margaret as a suitable companion for his friend, in a way that suggested Tetty at her best: “Mrs. Boswell has the mien and manners of a Gentlewoman, and such a person and mind, as would not be in any place either admired or contemned. She is in a proper degree inferiour to her husband; and she cannot rival him, nor can he ever be ashamed of her.”

Both Margaret and Lord Auchinleck resented Johnson’s overwhelming influence on Boswell and compared his mentor to a bad-tempered beast. His father was the first to pun on the name of a starry constellation and call him “Ursa Major,” the Great Bear. Margaret acerbically remarked, “I have seen many a bear led by a man: but I never before saw a man led by a bear.” When Johnson was especially rude on his trip to Edinburgh, a departing guest gave the host a shilling and said, as if visiting a zoo, “have I not seen your bear?”¹⁰ Boswell carefully cut out these sharp remarks.

Though Johnson had managed to avoid personal confrontations with political adversaries like Walmesley, Burke and Wilkes, he got into an explosive argument—despite several warnings—with Boswell’s father, Lord Auchinleck, a year older than himself. “He was,” Boswell nervously wrote, “as sanguine a Whig and Presbyterian as Dr. Johnson was a Tory and Church of England man.” Boswell had tried to provoke a fight with Wilkes and now tried to prevent one with his father, but was foiled both times. Anxious that all should be well, he begged Johnson “to avoid three topics, as to which they differed very widely: Whiggism, Presbyterianism, and—Sir John Pringle,” who had liberal religious views. “The contest began,” Boswell wrote, “while my father was showing him his collection of medals; and Oliver Cromwell’s coin unfortunately introduced Charles the First, and Toryism. They became exceedingly warm and violent, and I was very much distressed by being present at such an altercation between two men, both of whom I reverenced.” ¹¹ Submitting, for once, to discretion, he was unwilling to entertain the public with the dispute between two intellectual gladiators. But Boswell’s Tour still contained a lively portrait of Johnson, who read and approved the book in manuscript, endorsing Boswell’s method and general veracity. Despite the dangers and discomforts it described, the popular book also encouraged travelers to explore the most remote and wild regions of Britain.

IV

Eight months after returning from Scotland, Johnson was ready once again to hoist his sail and start roving the world. On July 5, 1774, he set out for Wales with the Thrales. The main point of the three-month trip with Henry, Hester and Queeney was to inspect the property that Hester had inherited in her native land. Their own coach and four fast horses first carried them to Lichfield and Ashbourne to see Johnson’s old friends, including his step-daughter Lucy Porter, David Garrick’s brother Peter and his old school chum John Taylor, who put them up for eleven days. In North Wales they stayed with Hester’s uncle Sir Lynch Cotton, near Denbigh, for three weeks. They then traveled along the north coast to Anglesey, had a chance meeting with General Paoli in Caernarvon and visited Hester’s birthplace at Bodvel, in the Lleyn Peninsula. They returned along the north coast through Bangor and Conway; saw Edmund Hector in Birmingham; and spent the last days at Burke’s country estate in Beaconsfield, about twenty miles northwest of London.

In the eighteenth century the pristine rural landscape—with no factories, highways or mechanical transport—had pure air, glistening streams, clear birdsong and night skies filled with bright stars. Because of his poor vision, Johnson did not respond to the spectacular scenery, but he was intensely curious about everything else, especially the Welsh language, churches and religious services. He also seemed determined to dislike everything he saw, in both the west of England and the north of Wales. His diary, repeating the word “mean,” recorded an endless series of disappointments while visiting the great houses and cathedrals. He noted that Chatsworth, the grand estate of the Duke of Devonshire, “fell below my ideas of the furniture.” Dovedale “did not answer my expectation.” Kedleston was “very costly but ill contrived,” with bed-chambers “fitter for a prison than a house of splendour.” Lord Kilmurrey’s house in Shropshire “was not splendid... He has no park, and little water.” The disturbing precipices at Hawkstone had “the horrour of solitude, a kind of turbulent pleasure between fright and admiration.” Chester Cathedral was “not of the first rank.” The house at Bachycraig “was less than I seemed to expect.” The bishop’s palace at St. Asaph was “but mean.” Cotton’s summerhouse was “meanly built and unskilfully disposed.” John Middleton’s home at Gwaynynog was “below the second rate.” Lord Bulkeley’s house was “very mean.” In Hugh Griffiths’ garden “fruit trees did not thrive, but . . . reached some barren stratum and wither.” In Bangor Cathedral “the Quire was mean, the service was not well read.” At Bodvel the churches were “mean and neglected to a degree scarcely imaginable.”¹²

When Hester finally reached her childhood home, she wandered through the rooms and summoned up remembrance of things past. Johnson, taking a characteristically self-centered view, recorded, “this species of pleasure is always melancholy”—for him, perhaps, though not for her. Their hostess Mrs. Cotton (another relative), already intimidated by Johnson, was not used to being treated rudely by him or anyone else. At her home, he wrote with a certain schadenfreude, “we then went to see a cascade, I trudged unwillingly, and was not sorry to find it dry.” Though the water eventually flowed and produced a striking cataract, he teased Mrs. Cotton about her dry cascade till she was ready to water it with her own tears. Trudging unwillingly through Wales, Johnson felt obliged to criticize everything in order to balance Hester’s forced enthusiasm. “Why is it,” he asked her, “that whatever you see, and whoever you see, you are to be so indiscriminately lavish of praise?” Rather saucily, she replied, “Why I’ll tell you, Sir, when I am with you ... I am obliged to be civil for two.”¹³

Back in London and contrasting Scotland to Wales (perhaps to please Hester), Johnson wrote that the former “seems to me little more than one continued rock, covered from space to space with a thin layer of earth,” while the latter was “a very beautiful and rich country, all enclosed, and planted.” But in a letter to John Taylor he also reduced Wales to a nullity, declaring, “I am glad that I have seen it, though I have seen nothing, because I now know there is nothing to be seen.” He paradoxically found value in nothing and seemed to think almost any place was worth seeing—if only to prove that there was, in fact, nothing at all to see. Mentioning a fashionable resort on the Dorset coast, he wrote Hester, “I think You will do well in going to Weymouth for though it be nothing, it is, at least to the young ones, a new nothing, and they will always be able to tell that they have seen Weymouth.”¹⁴

The following year, from mid-September to mid-November, the itinerant Thrales, accompanied by Johnson and the indispensable Baretti as their majordomo and dragoman, took Johnson on his first trip to the Continent. The Thrales must have been extremely tolerant and optimistic to embark on a long journey with two such contentious personalities. Johnson’s hostility toward France was even greater than his dislike of Scotland. To most Englishmen of his time, Catholic France seemed superstitious, decadent, militaristic and repressive. France was England’s most formidable enemy, and in 1700 its population was three times larger. The British fought several major wars with the French throughout the eighteenth century: the War of Spanish Succession (1702-13), the War of Austrian Succession (1743-48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). In 1775 they were gearing up for another series of battles in the War of American Independence (1778-83). Visiting France that year would have been like visiting hostile Germany in the 1930s, soon after one war and just before the next. Since the British had defeated the French in the first three wars, Johnson felt justified in asserting, “we had drubbed those fellows into a proper reverence for us, and their national petulance required periodical chastisement.”

In his youth, Johnson had taught himself to read and write French. A modern critic has concluded that his French was undoubtedly that “of a well educated Englishman, but it also shows a strong vocabulary and a reasonable grasp of idiom, together with a courtliness of expression that would be considered rare at the present time.” But Johnson’s accent was atrocious and the wretched French found his speech incomprehensible. He used language as part of his struggle against the French, and as he told Frances Reynolds, “I spoke only Latin, and I could not have much conversation: There is no good in letting the French have a superiority over every word you speak.”¹⁵

En route to Paris the travelers passed through the cathedral towns of northern France and came back by a slightly different route. Between Rouen and Paris, as they were descending a steep hill, the postilion fell off the lead left horse, the straps broke and one of the horses was run over. Henry Thrale leaped out of the carriage and sustained a minor injury. Everyone was astonished and indignant about Johnson’s behavior. He remained as calm and apparently unconcerned about the accident as he’d been during the perilous storm at sea in Scotland.

Led by the multilingual Baretti and spurred on by Johnson’s eagerness to see everything in Paris, they visited monuments, palaces and collections of art, as well as places where goods were manufactured: the École Militaire, Observatory, Courts of Justice, Bastille and orphanage; the Palais Royal, Palais Bourbon and Luxembourg Gardens; the king’s cabinet of curiosities, king’s library and paintings in the Tuileries; the king’s watchmaker, the Gobelins carpet factory, the Sèvres porcelain factory, a looking-glass factory and, of course, a brewery. Johnson especially enjoyed his visit to the monastery at St. Cloud, just west of Paris, and his day with the English Benedictine monks, who spoke Latin well and said they’d always keep a cell ready for his use.

They also traveled to notable sites outside the capital. At Versailles, another “mean town,” ten miles southwest of Paris, Johnson saw in the royal menagerie some of the wild animals with whom he’d been compared: a bear and an elephant, as well as a lion and tiger. The rhinoceros had his long horn broken and pared away, and his “skin folds like loose cloth doubled over his body, and cross his hips.” At the Prince of Condé’s magnificent mansion in the lace-making town of Chantilly, twenty-five miles north of Paris, he was struck by “a young hippopotamus preserved, which, however, is so small, that I doubt its reality. It seems too hairy for an abortion, and too small for a mature birth. Nothing was in spirits; all was dry.”

Johnson had been touched by Queen Anne in 1712 and had conversed with King George III in 1767. He encountered his third monarch, Louis XVI, at Fontainebleau, thirty-five miles southeast of Paris, “a large mean town, crouded with people.” After being admitted to the king’s bedchamber, he was allowed, like courtiers and other spectators, to watch the king and queen eat dinner. He also saw the queen, Marie Antoinette, daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, riding through the forest. Both king and queen were destined to be overthrown in the Revolution and to die on the guillotine. Dining in Paris with Madame Bocage, a literary lady of rank, was a less fortunate occasion. As in Scotland, Johnson had a run-in with an indelicate servant, whom he honored with an English nickname. After noting that the French would spit anywhere, he said that “the footman took the sugar in his fingers, and threw it into my coffee. I was going to put it aside; but hearing it was made on purpose for me, I e’en tasted Tom’s fingers.”¹⁶

Johnson’s judgment of France was even harsher than his criticism of Scotland and of Wales. He was distressed to find that the country towns were filled with beggars and disturbed by the extreme contrast between rich and poor. He also disliked the food: “the great in France live very magnificently, but the rest very miserably. There is no happy middle state as in England. The shops of Paris are mean; the meat in the market is such as would be sent to a gaol in England . . . the cookery of the French was forced upon them by necessity; for they could not eat their meat, unless they added some taste to it.” After returning to London, Johnson assumed a chauvinistic John Bull stance in letters to Edmund Hector and John Taylor: “I have seen nothing that much delighted or surprised me. Their palaces are splendid, and their Churches magnificent in their structure, and gorgeous in their ornaments, but the city in general makes a very mean appearance... The French have a clear air and a fruitful soil, but their mode of common life is gross, and incommodious, and disgusting.”¹⁷ His tour de France, like his previous journeys to Scotland and Wales, confirmed his belief in the superiority of the English.

After France, the Thrales planned a long-awaited trip to Italy, but in March 1776 their hopes were cruelly disappointed. Their last surviving son and heir, the promising nine-year-old Harry, fell sick one morning. After a violent illness that lasted only a few hours, he died mysteriously, possibly of convulsions, a ruptured appendix or a cerebral aneurysm. Since he’d nearly reached adolescence, his death was very difficult to bear, and Henry Thrale was absolutely devastated. Knowing that now he had no son to take over the prosperous brewery, he began to lose interest in both beer making and Parliament. Lapsing into gloomy inertia and consoling himself with food, he outdid Johnson in devouring gargantuan meals, suffered a series of strokes and hastened toward death.

Attempting to console Hester but unable to do so, Johnson wrote, “I know that such a loss is a laceration of the mind. I know that the whole system of hopes, and designs, and expectations is swept away at once, and nothing left but bottomless vacuity.” Though not especially religious or prone to guilt, Hester blamed herself for the death of her favorite child and felt she’d reached the very limits of her endurance. “I was too proud of him, and provoked God’s Judgments by my Folly... Suffer me no more to follow my Offspring to the Grave.” Harry’s death forced the Thrales to cancel “the grand object of all travelling,” the trip to Italy and the shores of the Mediterranean.

Harry’s death also led to the final break with Baretti, nearly three years after his arrival at Streatham. He suddenly erupted, like a little Vesuvius, and took off after another quarrel. “On this day I quitted Streatham without taking leave,” he indignantly wrote in June 1776, “perfectly tired of the impertinence of the Lady, who took every opportunity to disgust me, unable to pardon the violent efforts I made at Bath to hinder her from giving tin-pills to Queeney.” Johnson thought Baretti, who had no other prospects, had acted foolishly and would regret his impulsive decision. He told Boswell that “Baretti went away from Thrale’s in some whimsical fit of disgust, or ill-nature, without taking any leave. It is well if he finds in any other place as good an habitation, and as many conveniences.”¹⁸ Without Baretti’s provocations and tantrums, the household settled down to deal with their grief, and Johnson and Hester became increasingly intimate.

Baretti later vented his spleen against Hester with vindictive annotations in his copy of her Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson (1788). Little Ralph Thrale had died at the age of twenty months from a congenital softening of the brain, which (the autopsy revealed) was almost dissolved in water. But Baretti, with savage irony, blamed Hester for his death: “he died within the year of the innoculated small-pox, during which the mother used to wash him in cold water in consequence of her great skill in physick.” He also unjustly blamed her for the death of young Henry and for trying to conceal the evidence that she had killed him. Annotating Johnson’s letter of March 25, 1776 (two days after Henry’s death), but without suggesting the motives for her alleged behavior, Baretti wrote: “here our Madam has sunk the letter to which this is an answer. Did she own in it that she herself poisoned little Harry, or did she not?” Hester was deeply wounded when Baretti published some of his malignant accusations in the European Magazine of May 1788. She expressed her grief by recording that “Baretti alone tried to irritate a wound so very deeply inflicted, and he will find few to approve his cruelty.” She condemned him as “the man in the World I think whom I most abhor, & who hates, & professes to hate me the most.”¹⁹

Unusually tolerant and forbearing with Baretti, Johnson also quarreled with him at the end. A high point of the French trip, he told Levet, was when he raced Baretti (who was ten years younger) and beat him. When Baretti played several games of chess with Omai—a handsome “Noble Savage,” brought home by Captain Cook from Tahiti and enthusiastically taken up by London society—Omai also beat him. As Hester remarked, “you would have thought Omai the Christian, and Baretti the Savage.” Greatly amused by the result of this unequal contest, Johnson—who could be a cruel tease—enraged Baretti, on his last visit to Bolt Court in 1782, by constantly referring to his humiliating defeat. After the quarrel, according to Baretti, he exploded and took off exactly as he’d done at the Thrales: “[Johnson] recollected that Omai had often conquered me at chess; a subject on which, whenever chance brought it about, he never failed to rally me most unmercifully, and made himself mighty merry with. This time, more than he had ever done before, he pushed his banter on at such a rate, that at last he chafed me, and made me so angry, that, not being able to put a stop to it, I snatched up my hat and stick, and quitted him in a most choleric mood.”²⁰

V

Between his return from Wales and departure for Paris Johnson wrote his last political pamphlet of the 1770s, Taxation No Tyranny (March 1775). Commissioned by the British government, it defended Parliament’s right to tax the American colonies. In May, Garrick wrote Boswell in Scotland about how eagerly this work was received: “our friend has this day produc’d another political pamphlet call’d, Taxation No Tyranny, a very Strong attack upon Americans & Patriots—it is said to be well & masterly done—I shall devour it the Moment I have finished this letter.”

Johnson’s pamphlet, written in a fury of chauvinism and loathing of rebellion, combined bitter vituperation with false reasoning. He angrily complained that the Americans “multiply with the fecundity of their own rattle-snakes,” and famously asked: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”²¹ But Johnson, as an Englishman, was in no position to attack the American treatment of slaves. Despite the loud yelps of evangelicals in England, slavery was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833.

The essential issues raised by the American Congress in September-October 1774 were, according to Donald Greene, “first, did the central government at Westminster, the Parliament of Great Britain, have the constitutional right to enforce fiscal legislation in the outlying parts of the British dominions, and, second, is ‘taxation without representation’ legal and equitable? To both questions the Congress answers no and Johnson yes.” Johnson believed that the principle “no taxation without representation” was false because millions of Britons, who were not qualified by land or income to vote for members of Parliament, had to pay taxes. But this argument could not convince American landowners and farmers, who produced great wealth for the empire and got precious little in return. Johnson’s argument was doubly fallacious because even British citizens without the vote were represented by a Member of Parliament for their district. The Americans had neither a vote nor members to protect their interests. Johnson’s statement “as all are born the subjects of some state or other, we may be said to have been all born consenting to some system of government” was (as the subjunctive “may be said” suggested) also specious. There could be no such tacit consent by infants at birth, and American adults strongly contested this so-called acquiescence.

In the end, Johnson advocated the use of force to maintain the power of the central government and the unity of the empire: “government is necessary to man, and where obedience is not compelled, there is no government. If the subject refuses to obey, it is the duty of authority to use compulsion. Society cannot subsist but by the power, first of making laws, and then of enforcing them.” This was clearly an argument for war. He concluded with a completely unrealistic plan to threaten the Americans with a huge army, which would make them submit to British authority without loss of blood: “I cannot forbear to wish, that this commotion may end without bloodshed, and that the rebels may be subdued by terrour rather than by violence; and therefore recommend such a force as may take away, not only the power, but the hope of resistance, and by conquering without a battle, save many from the sword.”²²

Once the War of Independence began, Johnson abandoned this notion and seemed to thirst for American blood. In April 1778 he forcefully told Boswell, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American. . . . Rascals—Robbers—Pirates . . . [I’d] burn and destroy them.” Three years later he wanted, like the Roman generals in ancient Britain, to make a wilderness and call it peace: “had we treated the Americans as we ought, and as they deserved, we should have at once razed all their towns,—and let them enjoy their forests.”

Johnson’s Tory blast in Taxation provoked many replies. Burke made his great speech on reconciliation with America on March 22, 1775, just after the appearance of Johnson’s pamphlet. He forcefully argued that the Americans “were fighting for the same liberties, including the principle of no taxation without representation and consent, as those which Englishmen had given their lives to defend during previous centuries.” John Wesley plagiarized the essence of Johnson’s tract in his Calm Address to Our American Colonies (1775). The Americans avidly responded to Johnson’s pronouncement. Benjamin Franklin, in his Retort Courteous (c.1776), replied to Johnson’s remark about slavery and ironically declared: “an order arrives from England, advised by one of their most celebrated moralists, Dr. Johnson, in his Taxation No Tyranny, to excite these slaves to rise, cut the throats of their purchasers, and resort to the British army, where they would be rewarded with freedom.”²³

Franklin’s counterattack was especially significant for, as James Basler observed, American political leaders particularly valued Johnson’s work:

In 1750 Benjamin Franklin was quoting The Vanity of Human Wishes in Poor Richard’s Almanac, in 1757 twenty-year-old John Hancock acquired his own copy of The Rambler. . . . Harvard College listed The Rambler and Idler in a catalog of the most frequently used books in its library in 1773, and the next year Alexander Hamilton . . . cited Johnson’s Dictionary in his first political essays. John Adams quoted London and The Vanity of Human Wishes in some of his earliest writings, and periodically sniped at Johnson in his private letters. George Washington himself had in his library both Johnson’s Dictionary (the 1786 folio edition) and, more surprisingly, The World Displayed [1759], with Johnson’s vehemently anti-imperialist, anti-slavetrade introduction. Johnson was part of the consciousness of every literate American during the Founding Era.

The politically conservative Coleridge, usually hostile to Johnson, took his side against the Americans and in August 1833 recorded: “I like Dr. Johnson’s political pamphlets better than any other parts of his works—particularly his Taxation No Tyranny is very clever and spirited.” Johnson’s views on America were reactionary because he hated revolutionary chaos on principle, and he resorted to any kind of argument against it. But he was progressive on most other questions, and during the next thirty years his ideas influenced the vital social issues of that time: the abolition of slavery, prison reform, rehabilitation of prostitutes and treatment of the poor.

Johnson had been awarded honorary degrees every ten years. He had received a master of arts degree from Oxford in 1755; a doctor of laws degree from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1765 (which made him Dr. Johnson); and a doctor of civil laws degree from Oxford in 1775. Since the prime minister, Lord North, was also chancellor of Oxford and Johnson’s last degree was awarded three months after Taxation appeared, it was generally considered the reward for his political pamphleteering. When some politicians suggested that Johnson—equaled only by Burke as an intellectual, writer and speaker—stand for a pocket borough in Parliament, Lord North refused. Fearing that Johnson could not be controlled, North compared him to a rogue elephant in battle, “quite as likely to trample down his friends as his foes.”²⁴ In the 1780s Johnson’s government pension was listed in the category “Writers Political,” but in June 1784 he complained to Hester that he hadn’t been paid for nearly a year and was very poor.

VI

In 1727 Johnson’s friend Richard Savage was tried and convicted of murder, and given a royal pardon. In 1769 Giuseppe Baretti was also tried for murder, but was acquitted. In May 1777 (two years after Taxation ), Johnson—who’d defended Savage in print and testified for Baretti in court—became involved in another murder case, but this time the defendant was convicted and hanged. Johnson’s sceptical mind had exposed three frauds and forgeries: William Lauder’s claim that John Milton had plagiarized Renaissance Latin poets in 1750, the Cock Lane ghost in 1762 and Macpherson’s Ossian poems in 1775. He did not believe in the authenticity of Thomas Chatterton’s pseudo-medieval Rowley poems, supposedly the work of a fifteenth-century Bristol poet. Yet when William Dodd, a popular and successful clergyman, was charged with forgery, Johnson was called in to assist with the defense.

Dodd, the son of a clergyman, was born in Lincolnshire in 1729 and educated at Cambridge. Extremely good-looking and charming, he soon became famous for his theatrical preaching and charitable work. A historian characterized him as “an adroit and ambitious divine who founded his career on the fashion for sentimental sermonizing. His performances in the pulpit were highly regarded, not least by philanthropic ladies disposed to pity the plight of fallen women and distressed debtors.”

In Reflections on Death (1763) Dodd described how some of his contemporaries had met their end. He’d preached a sermon against the excessive use of capital punishment, but in 1772, after being shot at by a highwayman, he gave evidence that led to the criminal’s execution. Dodd had been chaplain to George III, but lost that position when his wife attempted to bribe the lord chancellor in order to secure a lucrative living for her husband. William Cowper, who considered Dodd histrionic, hypocritical and self-serving, portrayed him in The Task (1785) as “a stranger to the poor; / Ambitious of preferment for its gold.” Handsome and polished, worldly and fashionable, materialistic and greedy, Dodd was the antithesis of Johnson. After their first and only meeting, in 1751, Dodd condescendingly described him as “the oddest and most peculiar fellow I ever saw. He is six feet high, has a violent convulsion in his head, and his eyes are distorted. He speaks roughly and loud.”²⁵

The 4th Earl of Chesterfield, to whom Johnson had written his angry letter about the Dictionary, had hired Dodd to tutor his cousin and heir, who succeeded him in 1773. But Dodd’s substantial income could not match his luxurious way of life. On February 1, 1777, he forged papers to procure a loan of £4,200, ostensibly for the 5th Earl, and pocketed the money. The truth came out when the earl was asked about the loan. Dodd immediately repaid £3,600 and gave promissory notes for the remaining £600, but he was arrested anyway and charged with forgery. Leon Radzinowicz, the historian of criminal law, wrote, “owing to Dodd’s social standing, his fashionable life, his great popularity and the circumstances of his offence, the case at once became the sensation of the day.” Dodd’s case was “the first to stir the public conscience, and to force it to question whether the absolute capital punishment was socially and morally justifiable.”

Johnson’s principal motives for helping Dodd were compassion for the criminal, desire to have Dodd publicly confess his crime, and belief that it was wrong to execute a clergyman. As he wrote to the Reverend John Taylor: “it is a thing almost without example for a Clergyman of his rank to stand at the bar for a capital breach of morality. I am afraid he will suffer [the penalty]. The Clergy seem not to be his friends. The populace that was extremely clamorous against him, begin to pity him.” Most important, he thought such a penalty for forgery was unjust and in Dodd’s case amounted to judicial murder.

Johnson took up Dodd’s case with tremendous energy. He wrote an eloquent speech, which Dodd delivered at his Old Bailey trial, but which carried scant legal weight. After Dodd’s conviction on February 22, Johnson wrote petitions of clemency to the lord chancellor and the chief justice, to the secretary of state for war and to the king himself. When asked why he took up Dodd’s cause, he recalled his own fear of death and replied: “I thought with myself, when Dr. Dodd comes to the place of execution, he may say, Had Dr. Johnson written in my behalf, I had not been here, and (with great emphasis) I could not bear the thought.”²⁶

All Johnson’s efforts failed to secure a royal pardon, despite a public petition of 23,000 signatures and the fact that Dodd was personally known to the king. He then composed Dodd’s last solemn declaration in the form of a convict’s sermon addressed to his “Unhappy Brethren.” The sermon stressed the need for Dodd’s personal contrition and for his recognition that the verdict was, according to the law, both inevitable and just. Delivering the ghostwritten sermon in Newgate prison on June 6, 1777, Dodd declared: “of him, whose life is shortened by his crimes, the last duties are humility and self-abasement... For my own part, I confess, with deepest compunction, the crime which has brought me to this place; and admit the justice of my sentence, while I am sinking under its severity.” Paul Alkon explained Johnson’s subtle and effective rhetorical technique in this sermon: “the speaker includes himself among the condemned, thus collapsing ordinary distinctions between preacher and audience... [Johnson] places one simultaneously in the position of a condemned man and his chaplain, who in this case is the voice of that man’s conscience.”

Dodd’s impending execution inspired one of Johnson’s most famous declarations: “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” But, ironically enough, the irrepressible Dodd still didn’t believe he was about to be hanged. He had £500 in his pocket and hoped to bribe the turnkeys to let him escape, but they were watched too closely to be suborned. Ever optimistic, Dodd thought to the very end that he would be reprieved or even pardoned. And he was still trying, until a few days before his death, to get his comedy produced on the London stage. Dodd was executed, four months after his trial, on June 27. A modern critic noted that Garrick’s Drury Lane production that year of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera commented on this case. By substituting “a specific royal pardon for the poetic reprieve” in Gay’s play, Garrick alluded “to the king’s refusal to pardon the celebrated clergyman forger, Dr. Dodd.”²⁷

Johnson disliked the disorder and violence that accompanied public executions, but he himself was capable, on occasion, of inciting discord and civil unrest. In 1749 he’d attacked the absurdity of a government-sponsored fireworks display to celebrate the Peace of Aix-le-Chapelle in the Seven Years’ War: “nothing more is projected, than a crowd, a shout and a blaze; the mighty work of artifice and contrivance, is to be set on fire, for no other purpose, that I can see, than to shew how idle pyrotechnical virtuosos have been busy... How many widows and orphans, whom the war has ruined, might be relieved, by the expence which is now about to evaporate in smoke, and to be scattered in rockets.”

Twenty-five years later, in about 1774, Johnson and the Shakespearean editor George Steevens went to see Signor Torré’s display of pyrotechnics at Marylebone Gardens. It had been raining, and the management told the sparse crowd that the fireworks were thoroughly water-soaked and had to be cancelled. Johnson, like a spoiled child, demanded an impossible treat:

“This is a mere excuse,” says the Doctor, “to save their crackers for a more profitable company. Let us but hold up our sticks, and threaten to break those coloured Lamps that surround the Orchestra, and we shall soon have our wishes gratified. The core of the fireworks cannot be injured...

Some young men who overheard him, immediately began the violence he had recommended, and an attempt was speedily made to fire some of the wheels which appeared to have received the smallest damage; but to little purpose were they lighted, for most of them completely failed.²⁸

Even Johnson could be irrational and violent, yet he was properly horrified when attacks on public order and property rights broke out during the first week of June 1780. Lord George Gordon, leading the Protestant Association and demanding the “repeal of more liberal legislation for Roman Catholics,” “taught to ignorant men most violent ways, / And hurled the little streets upon the great.” Pat Rogers described the chaos of the Gordon Riots:

The crowd attacked the homes and coaches of prominent figures believed to be responsible for the measure, including [the chief justice] Lord Mansfield, as well as targeting the houses and businesses of Catholics. Mass-houses were burnt and jails opened to release the prisoners. The Bank of England was seized for a time and the outlook for the authorities appeared bleak. On 7 June thirty-six fires were in progress. Among the civic authorities attempting to quell the riot was John Wilkes, as City Chamberlain. The soldiers, militia and citizen bands gradually gained the upper hand.

During that week, the most disastrous civil disturbance in modern British history, crowds shouting “No Popery” destroyed more than a hundred houses and did more than £100,000 worth of damage. Burke’s home near St. James’ Square was threatened by the mob and saved only by the timely appearance of a detachment of soldiers.

On the scene and ignoring the danger, like a modern war correspondent, Johnson wrote Hester (who was safely taking the waters in Bath) a vivid eyewitness report of the riots:

At night they set fire to the fleet [district], and to the kingsbench, I know not how many other places; you might see the glare of the conflagration fill the sky from many parts. The sight was dreadful. Some people were threatened. [The publisher] Mr. Strahan moved what he could, and advised me to take care of my self. Such a time of terrour you have been happy in not seeing.

The King said in Council that the Magistrates had not done their duty, but that he would do his own, and a proclamation was published directing us to keep our servants within doors, as the peace was now to be preserved by force. The Soldiers were sent out to different parts, and the town is now quiet.

Two months later, Johnson told Boswell how Thrale’s brewery, a prime target for the drunken crowd, had been saved by a cunning and comparatively cheap stratagem: “in the late disturbances, Mr. Thrale’s house and stock were in great danger; the mob was pacified at their first invasion, with about fifty pounds in drink and meat; and at their second, were driven away by the soldiers.”²⁹ The “time of terrour” showed the English how easily a mob could be roused to destruction, and helped inoculate them against the revolutionary violence that would erupt in France in 1789.