6

In which Samuel Johnson, being entrusted with a mission of Love, proceeds to execute it; With what success will hereinafter appear

We left Sam at a critical moment – the publication of his first book. If this seemed to mark the start of a new chapter in his existence, an even more significant change occurred in 1735 when, after a brief but eager period of courtship, he married. Elizabeth Jervis Porter, affectionately known as Tetty, was a widow whom he probably met through Edmund Hector, and at forty-five she was twenty years his senior. Her husband Harry, a mercer in Birmingham, died in the autumn of 1734, and she and Sam were wed the following July, not in Birmingham or Lichfield but on neutral ground in Derby.

In marrying someone so much older than him, he must surely have recalled the circumstances of his cousin Cornelius Ford, who had shown that, whatever other people might think, an age gap of this kind need not be a problem. It was the first time that his affections for a woman had been returned, and that sensation – of love, of reciprocity, of someone being willing to make sacrifices for him – was enough to fortify him against criticism. There was plenty of that. To many in Tetty’s social circle, the appeal of this poor, strange and dishevelled young man was impossible to fathom. Of her three children, only her nineteen-year-old daughter Lucy was willing to accept him, and even she was unnerved by his appearance. The standard image of Dr Johnson is of a man built like a Toby jug – well-fed, even fat. Such is the portraitist’s privilege (or obligation). But although in later years his body became large and unwieldy, until middle age he was formidably built rather than overweight. When Lucy Porter met him, he struck her as ‘lean and lank’, his imposing bone structure alarmingly visible even through his clothes. Her brothers found his arrival in their mother’s life both physically and morally repugnant. Tetty’s elder son, eighteen-year-old Jervis Henry, refused to have anything more to do with her, and the younger, Joseph, took many years to get over his disgust.

Tetty brought £600 to the marriage, and as a result Sam was able to set up a school. This was at Edial, a hamlet a few miles from Lichfield, and an advertisement in the Gentleman’s Magazine sought to attract interest from all around the country, boasting that ‘At Edial, near Lichfield in Staffordshire, Young Gentlemen are Boarded and Taught the Latin and Greek Languages, by SAMUEL JOHNSON’. Readers of this London publication, launched in 1731 by a fellow Midlander called Edward Cave, could have had no idea of who Samuel Johnson was, and the advertisement failed to inspire great confidence. But the school seemed at first both a brave experiment and a reproof of all who had cast doubt on Sam’s suitability as a teacher.

Later, when he was famous, people struggled to see other motives for the union with Tetty and concluded that it was odd or opportunistic (or both). She was not an obvious match for a man of his powers. Imprisoned by the affectations of faded beauty, she had weaknesses for gaudy make-up, trashy romances and opium. One of Sam’s Victorian biographers, Leslie Stephen, puts the matter with wry succinctness: ‘The attractions of the lady were not very manifest to others than her husband.’1 But to her husband they were clear. He apparently trusted her judgement, and she declared him ‘the most sensible man I ever met’ (sensible at the time meant ‘judicious’ or ‘capable of tender feeling’). It also seems likely that she was receptive to the affections his mother had seldom encouraged or welcomed, and that she embodied an idea of nurturing womanhood he had heard about but not experienced. She grounded and pacified him. Yet the possibility that she saved him from himself – that their private life together had a substance outsiders couldn’t divine – seems scarcely to have occurred to any of his biographers until the twentieth century.

While the couple didn’t need the rest of the world to approve of their union, they were wounded by its mockery. The school at Edial opened in the autumn of 1735 and attracted a handful of pupils; it is possible that there were as many as eight, but we know the identity of only three. Among them was David Garrick. In later life, established in fashionable London society, Garrick would turn party tricks for his admirers. One of these involved impersonating Tetty (‘a little painted poppet, full of affectation’) and exaggeratedly recalling certain amorous scenes between man and wife that he had witnessed through a keyhole. Hard luck for Sam that, of the tiny number who could have witnessed the newlyweds’ fumblings, one turned out to be the age’s leading actor.

By his own account, Sam married for love. But love, he argued, was not a guarantee of marital happiness. Boswell records his saying that ‘marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter’. It is tempting to dismiss this as flippant or say that Sam was reflecting his own experience of an unsatisfactory union. Yet he touches on an interesting issue. While marrying for love is today exalted in most cultures, and we perhaps tend to sneer at those where arranged marriage is common, there is a history of love marriages being regarded as foolish. According to this school of thought, passion makes us blind. Arranged marriages, widely considered coercive and authoritarian, often work. They have pragmatism at their core and are supported by both families involved. Comparatively untroubled by the problems that cause love matches to fail – a lack of realism, tension between the couples’ relatives – they can be secure rather than flighty, and love, at first absent, may gradually emerge.

Am I advocating arranged marriage? No. But there is evidence all around us that people aren’t very good at judging whether they should bind themselves in perpetuity to a particular individual, and while ‘due consideration of characters and circumstances’ is something most of us are likely to carry out before marrying, an impartial expert may perceive points of incompatibility that someone lovestruck will overlook. Sam’s line about the Lord Chancellor engineering marriages shouldn’t be read as a serious suggestion, but it is the comment of someone who has observed the arbitrariness of people’s decisions about marriage – the imprudence with which they enter into it, or indeed the callousness with which they are shepherded in its direction. We hear a similar note of realism in Sam’s short romance Rasselas; the title character is an Abyssinian prince, and his sister Princess Nekayah says that ‘Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.’ She is immediately accused of ‘exaggeratory declamation’, yet imagine being charged with that – it’s like being told you’re right.

In Sam’s lifetime, there was a marriage crisis. Anxiety about the relationship between love, sex, property and matrimony took many forms: the denunciation of fortune hunting, a fretfulness about the large number of bachelors, an insistence that regulating marriage was a means of preserving the boundaries of social class. The vigorous debates surrounding the Marriage Act of 1753, which sought to prevent clandestine marriages, focused political attention on this anxiety. Before the Act, the laws governing this institution were a curious hotchpotch. The Act’s sponsors were unhappy about the number of marriages contracted without parental consent. Many of these were worryingly ‘unequal’, and the result was social chaos; the attorney general Sir Dudley Ryder wondered ‘How often have we known a rich heiress carried off by a man of low birth, or perhaps by an infamous sharper?’ When the Act was debated in parliament, one of the most compelling speakers was the Earl of Hillsborough, who argued that ‘mutual love’ was ‘a very proper ingredient’ of marriage, but that it should be ‘a sedate and fixed love, and not a sudden flash of passion which dazzles the understanding but is in a moment extinguished’. Critics of the Marriage Act saw it as an assault on the freedom of the individual – an attempt to curb love and control the circulation of wealth – and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the motives for the new legislation were at root economic.²

In the build-up to the Act, Sam was mulling over his own marriage. No one has ever pretended that it was exemplary. But, like his parents’ uneasy bond, it prompted a lot of thought about how marriage could and should work. When he writes in Rambler 18 that marriage is ‘the strictest type of perpetual friendship’, he’s proposing something that would have struck most of his contemporaries as radical: not a hierarchical relationship, but a balanced union, a place of confidence and integrity. In Rambler 167 he pictures a couple who in their ‘connubial hopes’ are ‘less deceived’ than is common. On the face of it they have a ‘general resemblance’. Yet ‘a nearer inspection discovers . . . a dissimilitude of our habitudes and sentiments’, of a kind that ‘affords that concordia discors, that suitable disagreement which is always necessary to intellectual harmony’.

The theory of the concordia discors can be traced back to the Greek thinkers Pythagoras and Empedocles, but the expression itself was first used by Horace. The world, so the theory goes, is in perpetual flux between harmony and strife. When it comes to relationships, the ideal state is one of dynamic tension. In Rambler 167 Sam goes on to say that each half of a couple has thoughts ‘tinged by infusions unknown to the other’, yet they can be ‘easily united into one stream, and purify themselves by the gentle effervescence of contrary qualities’. While this could be more appealingly phrased, his thinking is suggestive. Although relationships need solid foundations, they are kept alive by our from time to time experiencing the frisson of difference: the person you know so well surprises you with an opinion or attitude that is at odds with your own, and you feel the fizz of chemistry, the pleasure of being tested, the same pulse of excitement that surged when you first met.

Sam’s understanding of what mattered in marriage was tested in 1773, when his friend Henry Thrale got involved in trying to block the marriage of his niece, Frances Plumbe. The fifteen-year-old Frances wished to be wed to her sweetheart, Jack Rice; her father, Samuel, known in the family as Old Sammy, opposed the match and threatened to have Frances locked up. Our Sam surprised the Thrales by taking Frances’s side. Alert and hostile to the ways in which marriages could be contrived for dynastic convenience, in order to keep assets in the family, he argued that a child’s duty of obedience to its parent was not absolute: ‘There wanders about the world a wild notion which extends over marriage more than over any other transaction. If Miss Plumbe followed a trade, would it be said that she was bound in conscience to give or refuse credit at her Father’s choice? And is not marriage a thing in which she is more interested and has therefore more right of choice?’ It was a while before Old Sammy Plumbe came round, but Frances and Jack Rice married, in Holland, and together they would have thirteen children before her premature death at thirty-two.³

This episode again shows Sam’s soberly businesslike attitude to how one chooses a spouse. The individual is entitled to select a course of action – and to get it wrong. In Rasselas, the prince discusses ‘the common process of marriage’, which is ‘a choice made in the immaturity of youth, in the ardour of desire, without judgement, without foresight, without inquiry after [the couple’s] conformity of opinions, similarity of manners, rectitude of judgement, or purity of sentiment’. He claims that all the evils of a bad marriage could be averted ‘by that deliberation and delay which prudence prescribes to irrevocable choice’. But Nekayah puts him straight: delaying marriage means that a couple ‘suspend their fate upon each other at a time when opinions are fixed and habits are established’. Although a youthful or hasty marriage may be made in a mood of ‘desultory levity’, the alternative is a union between people too set in their ways (and guilty of a ‘pride ashamed to yield, or obstinacy delighting to contend’). It’s not possible, she says, to resolve the question of a marriage’s suitability simply by applying reason and logic; intense feelings can pass, but well-advised arguments in favour of a marriage or against it are equally fugitive.

Nekayah may not strictly speak for Sam, but in its fundamentals her position is his: the most frisky or facile case for matrimony can sometimes stand up, and the most considered can founder. In his sermon on marriage (written for his friend John Taylor to deliver), he comments that it is ‘an institution designed . . . for the promotion of happiness’ but ‘sometimes condenses the gloom, which it was intended to dispel’. This is because many married couples neglect their duties, for instance failing to maintain the ‘continual acts of tenderness’ that keep the flame of love burning. There are lots of reasons why this happens, scarcely foreseeable at the point when one marries. Among them is this: the demands of life can erode our capacity for tenderness. In Rambler 45, Sam observes that people who complain of the unhappiness of their marriages will often say that they were wed in a moment of folly, yet ‘the days which they so much wish to call back, are the days not only of celibacy but of youth, the days of novelty and improvement, of ardour and of hope, of health and vigour of body, of gaiety and lightness of heart’. Such people’s expressions of regret for what they have lost are the tokens not of superior judgement, but of jaundiced maturity, since ‘whether married or unmarried, we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn’.