7

The mournful truth of London life: or, an author embarks upon the sea of Literature (with but a smattering of wormy cliché)

The first two years of Sam’s married life were dominated by his efforts to launch and then maintain his new school at Edial. When it failed, he decided to try his fortunes in London. On the morning of 2 March 1737 he left Lichfield, travelling with David Garrick. He was Garrick’s mentor and friend, and their journey – sharing a horse, which they took it in turns to ride – now sounds like a story contrived by a nutty scriptwriter, rather than something that actually happened. To picture them in transit is to picture, let’s say, Marlon Brando crossing America on a motorbike, with Ernest Hemingway in his sidecar. Except it’s bigger than that.

Garrick’s name is indelible in the history of British theatre. His approach to portraying a character was sympathetically imaginative, rather than declamatory like that of his predecessors. Besides redefining what it meant to act a part, he promoted the idea that a cast should work as an ensemble instead of largely ignoring one another onstage. He revolutionized the theatre’s understanding of how to achieve its effects, particularly through lighting and scenery, and overhauled the mechanisms of management and publicity.1 Yet when he quit Lichfield, a few days after his twentieth birthday, he had no definite plans. In hindsight, his ascent looks astonishingly swift – a decade after arriving in the capital he would be earning more than £1,000 a year. But before he blazed across the stage, there was a fallow period. His father believed that his loquacious energy suited him to a legal career – and was hardly the first person, or the last, to misconstrue acting skills as a gift for advocacy. That career did not materialize, and in fact his early years in London were spent working in the wine trade with his elder brother Peter, selling bottles of port at eighteen shillings a dozen.² It was only in 1741 that he made his professional stage debut, stepping in to replace an unwell performer as the harlequin in a pantomime. That year he had several roles as part of a small company in Ipswich, and in October he made an astonishing breakthrough, as the king in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

But in March 1737 Garrick was a volatile young man whose eagerness to amuse others had not yet found a proper outlet, and his mentor was scarcely any more sure of the road ahead. As Adam Gopnik has observed, Sam had the misfortune to arrive in London ‘in a time not unlike this one, with the old-media dispensation in crisis and the new media barely paying’. Aristocratic patronage, which had tended to deform writers’ endeavours, was dwindling, but authorship was not yet securely established as a career.³ At the time, Alexander Pope was perhaps the only living English author who had grown rich from writing. Many others were ‘writers by profession’. The term, later interchangeable with ‘authors by profession’, seems to have been coined by the critic James Ralph in 1758, and he used it disapprovingly of the quill drivers he had come across since arriving in London from Philadelphia more than thirty years before. After trying his hand at poetry, political pamphleteering and writing for the theatre, Ralph was conscious of how precarious professional authorship tended to be. Sam, who would follow in Ralph’s footsteps as a parliamentary reporter, was entering a realm in which writers were expected to work quickly, be versatile and embrace political causes with gusto – all for very modest rewards.

By unhappy coincidence, on the day of departure his brother Nathaniel died, aged twenty-four. Three days later he was buried at St Michael’s Church in Lichfield. We can’t be sure how or when news of this reached Sam, but it is safe to assume that he left without knowing of his brother’s death. Ignorance was in this case a blessing. Had he been aware of Nathaniel’s fate, he would have delayed his journey. Instead, for a moment, he had the pleasure of not knowing: he was relinquishing a scene with which he was tediously familiar to venture to a place he had visited once as a child. He could imagine himself stepping into freedom: a life with more elbow-room and fewer threads binding him to the Johnson family and its gloomy legacy. But the journey itself was the moment of psychological liberation.

Before we continue to London, let us pause to think of Nathaniel Johnson. He is a murky figure, and it is a grim irony that his passing is one of the few moments that bring him into view. It seems that he drank too much and shared the melancholy temperament of his brother and father. He may well have had little genuine interest in the family’s bookselling business, but there is evidence that he practised that trade in the West Midlands and in Somerset. The one document that survives to shed some light on his life is a letter to his mother, written the year before his death. In it he speaks of a plan to emigrate to America. Hoping to go to Georgia, which was then being settled under the guidance of James Oglethorpe, he admits that he has little idea of what to expect there – but is sure that his new life can be no worse than the one he will leave behind. In the letter he refers to ‘these crimes . . . which have given both you and me so much trouble’ and to his brother who ‘would scarce ever use me with common civility’.⁴ We can only speculate about the nature of the crimes – forgery is one suggestion – and what passed between him and Sam. As to the manner of his death, nothing is known. Suicide seems plausible, save for the detail of his being buried in consecrated ground; perhaps he had an accident or was felled by sudden illness. It is clear, though, that in adulthood the older brother, who as a child had been encouraged to think of Nathaniel as ‘little Natty’, barely acknowledged that he had existed. When Sam mentioned that memories of Nathaniel had surfaced, he was tantalizingly unspecific about them. On the day of their mother’s burial in January 1759, he wrote in his diary, ‘The dream of my brother I shall remember.’ More than twenty years later he wrote to Mary Prowse, who had once employed a cousin of his and lived near Frome in Somerset, asking if she could find any information about a bookseller who had resided there ‘more than forty years ago’ – ‘He was my near relation.’

Because we know so little about Nathaniel, it’s easy to overlook him completely. But it is clear that their cheerless fraternity was something Sam felt glad to leave behind. London promised different flavours. His awareness of the possibilities of a literary life there, begun during his teenage stay with Cornelius Ford, had been strengthened by his reading of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Edward Cave’s periodical was the first to call itself a magazine – the word had previously denoted a storehouse or centre of commerce – and aspired to be a sober, useful publication. Its audience consisted not so much of gentlemen as of the middling sort: professionals and tradesmen and their families.⁵ Many of the people who wrote for it weren’t Londoners, and Cave welcomed new voices. About half of each number consisted of contributions from readers, and in 1734 he ran the first of several generously funded poetry competitions – nothing out of the ordinary now, but an innovative scheme at the time, and one that suggested to Sam that an outsider with no secure standing and no rich backers could find ways to make a living in the capital.⁶

Although he had several literary projects in mind and dreamed of being recognized as a serious scholar, Sam’s most pressing task in the spring of 1737 was to complete his stately tragedy Irene. He believed that it would make him a fortune if only he could get it finished and put on, yet it wasn’t a good time to be trying to do this. New plays were not often staged, and in June his prospects worsened when parliament passed the Licensing Act, which restricted both the subject matter of theatre – so as to quash political satire – and where it could be presented (a form of censorship that would last until the Theatres Act of 1968). In 1739, he would write a heavily ironic pamphlet, A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, arguing that, given the political will to keep the public in a state of ignorance by suppressing plays, it might also be sensible to stop teaching people to read. The pamphlet contains one especially chilling sentence: ‘What is power but the liberty of acting without being accountable?’

By the time of the Complete Vindication, insults and frustrations had blighted his sense of London as a place of opportunity. Soon after his arrival, he met a bookseller known to Garrick, John Wilcox, who asked how he expected to make his living. When Sam replied, ‘By my literary labours’, Wilcox laughed and suggested that, given his burly appearance, he might be better off looking for work as a porter. Wilcox wasn’t being needlessly mean; he was making the point – an enduringly true one – that anyone proposing to live off their literary labours had better come up with a Plan B (or a Plan A, around which the writerly ambitions can fit). But the judgement was still galling. No one delights in being told what they look like they should do. ‘You should be a model’, which is about as good as this gets, is usually an offer of a leg-over rather than a leg-up. My own experience on this front, which runs to ‘You’d make a good bouncer’ (a wild misreading) and ‘You’d be perfect for one of those ads about hair transplants’, is merely dismal.

In retrospect, Wilcox seems an outlier among Sam’s acquaintances in the book trade, a source of discouragement rather than a generous sponsor of literature. Yet he was willing, despite his reservations, to lend Sam and Garrick £5. This was hardly a trivial sum at a time when £30 a year was reckoned enough for a young man to live frugally but not contemptibly. Furthermore, words that sound like discouragement can sometimes serve a different purpose: by challenging a person’s ambitions we oblige them to stiffen their resolve. Wilcox’s putdown was bracing, a useful illustration of the capriciousness and competitive spirit so prevalent in the literary marketplace. It also demonstrated how important perceptions could be in that sphere: authors’ looks were thought a foretaste of their style.

The London in which Sam found himself was dangerous. At night, robbers skulked in the unlit streets. Armed muggers and pickpockets crawled over the open spaces of Spitalfields and Covent Garden. At any time of day one might be mown down by an out-of-control cart or startled by a stray animal. The city was a confusing patchwork of districts, divided by the Thames, with only one bridge connecting its northern and southern halves. The river itself was spectacular and often busy with ships – as later depicted by Canaletto, who moved to London in 1746 – but the bankside neighbourhoods were squalid. Much of what we now think of as central London had yet to become urban: St Pancras and Paddington were villages, and anyone who walked along Oxford Street could glimpse open fields to the north, while west of Hyde Park lay a broad swathe of green.

As Sam wandered London’s streets and ventured beyond its limits, from Chelsea to Bow and from Southwark to Hampstead, he got the measure of the city, which seemed overwhelmingly crowded. It had a population of about 700,000, whereas Birmingham was home to roughly 20,000 people, Oxford to 8,000, and Lichfield to 3,000. Violent and noisy, it was in the grips of a mania for gin, despite legislation the previous year to curb its consumption. The Gin Act had provoked riots, and so had competition in the building trade between British and Irish labour. The threat of mass protest was constant. The streets were dirty, too – Benjamin Franklin reported in 1742 that the gutters running up their centre were often glutted with offal. Grime from the street was popular with market gardeners, who bought cartloads of it and rejoiced in the richness of its ‘glutinous mixture of animal manure, dead cats and dogs, ashes, straw, and human excrement’. No eighteenth-century citizen could avoid occasional over-intimacy with dung, but London’s abundance of horse-drawn traffic – and the enduring habit of driving cattle through the streets – meant that the city’s thoroughfares were alarmingly feculent.⁷

If we look at William Hogarth’s famous prints of London life, which date from Sam’s first decades in the city, we see its cobbles, signs and lamps, its paupers and fanatics, charlatans and tipplers, the mad and the sick, the textures of material profusion, the chaos of the crowd. But not all London is in Hogarth, and for a more Johnsonian flavour of the city we can turn to the Gentleman’s Magazine. Its issue for March 1737 contains an account of 300 footmen rioting after being denied access to their usual places at the Drury Lane playhouse; the report mentions that they fought their way to the stage door, forced it open, and wounded twenty-five people. The following month it notes that the cost of rice has gone up dramatically as a result of a trade embargo, and a terse report of the sessions at the Old Bailey on Saturday 23rd records eight people being sentenced to death and thirty-three condemned to be transported to the colonies. A glance at April’s bills of mortality shows that more than half the month’s deaths were children under the age of five. In May there is a reference to Dick Turpin, ‘the noted Butcher Highwayman’, who ‘almost every day this month, committed some robbery or other’; another small item concerns a mad ox that swam across the Thames, injured a couple of bystanders when it reached the shore, and was shot to prevent further nuisance. In June, ‘the officers of excise gave information against 300 persons for selling punch’.

Sam would have read all this with less and less amazement. Depressed by the filth and hubbub around the Strand, where he first lodged, he moved for a few months to Greenwich, which was comparatively sedate.⁸ Perhaps he remembered Daniel Defoe’s claim that it had the best air and views in England, as well as the best conversation. But the point of moving to London had not been to find a salubrious spot to roost. When one chooses to live in a city, it’s in order to experience its swarming density, to collaborate and be exposed to unfamiliar stimuli, to step outside oneself, to share in its madness and productive antagonisms. The retreat to Greenwich had to be temporary.

By the end of the year he appeared committed for good to life in the capital. There would later be one last attempt to secure a teaching job in the Midlands, but that autumn Tetty felt able to join him in London. They lodged close to Oxford Street, first near Hanover Square and then in the house of a Mrs Crow on Castle Street, two minutes from Cavendish Square. This, you might think, was a fashionable address, but the square was embarrassingly unfinished, twenty years after building work had begun. In 1734 James Ralph, in a critique of London architecture, had cited its ‘neglected condition’ as a perfect example of how ‘the modern plague of building’ could produce dismal results, with many projects abandoned.⁹ An all too familiar case, this, of a scheme of improvement that ends up being an eyesore, and Sam was quick to take an interest in the relationship between the city’s fabric and the conditions of its people. Ultimately this would lead him to reflect on how London’s infrastructure could be upgraded, and it would crystallize more than twenty years later in his support for the architect John Gwynn’s proposal that the design of inner London be subject to central planning, not the piecemeal efforts of speculators. In the short term, he was simply unimpressed with the mess and muddle of his surroundings, and he was adamant that once Irene was a hit they could move somewhere better.

But he had to find ways to scrape a living. With the draft of Irene stashed in a drawer, he tried a more fluently populist style of writing, and it was not long before he gained notice – with a wittily disillusioned poem about his new home. London, published on 12 May 1738, pictures a city full of fiery fops, raging rabbles, prowling lawyers and thieves waiting to ambush unwary pedestrians. These images tumble from the mouth of Thales, a self-pitying poet who is leaving the town for a new home in the country; he addresses a younger man, who is planning to stay. He complains that in London the houses keep collapsing, hangings are so frequent that there isn’t enough hemp to produce the necessary rope, and everything is for sale – even smiles. If you are really unlucky, a drunk will stab you for a joke.

This was a sensationalist image of the city, but not one that entirely misrepresented it. Plenty of Londoners could relate to Thales, and plenty who saw him as a caricature of an embittered satirist were nevertheless amused by his strident commentary on the city’s corruption. The first printing sold out in a week, the second inside a month, and literary London was curious to know the identity of the poem’s unnamed author. Its best-known couplet is ‘This mournful truth is everywhere confess’d, / SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESS’D’. The next line, ‘But here more slow, where all are slaves to gold’, makes it clear that the problem, though universal, is felt very keenly in the city. Yet the decision to set just one of the poem’s 263 lines in capitals makes it stand apart from its context and look like a motto. Or perhaps it’s an idea for an epitaph: Sam imagines that, if he were to die right now at the age of twenty-eight, this would be a suitable statement to chisel on his gravestone. It is not so much a ‘mournful truth . . . everywhere confess’d’ as his mournful truth, and feels like a lament for the time he has lost, in London certainly but also before arriving there.

That his condition was truly one of ‘poverty’ is open to question. Yet by convention poets were regarded as beggarly – a generation later, one of the members of Sam’s circle, Oliver Goldsmith, could write that ‘The poet’s poverty is a standing topic of contempt’ – and for the next few years, whenever Sam earned money by his pen, lax management and generosity to others meant that too much of it slipped through his fingers.¹⁰ In London his references to poverty form part of a complaint about the gulf between ordinary citizens and their unprincipled overlords. He writes with feeling about society’s grossest insults being directed exclusively at the poor. ‘All crimes are safe, but hated poverty,’ he claims, and ‘This, only this, the rigid law pursues’. By contrast, the rich persist in fraud, knowing they’ll get away with it. Sam attacks the corruption of a parliament full of hypocrites who are easily bought, and attacks the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who can resist no opportunity to increase his personal fortunes. In the end, London is less about the physical detail of the city than about the moods it provokes: outrage, disgust, and an exhilaration that his attempts at satirical aloofness can’t quite disguise.

By the time he wrote London, Sam was often consorting with other writers, inhabitants of Grub Street, a place associated with plague, penury and, on account of its proximity of the lunatic asylum at Bedlam, mental infirmity. In his Dictionary he would identify the physical space it occupied: ‘originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems’. But Grub Street was also a state of mind: to be there was to be a literary hopeful, trying to scrape a living. The name makes one think of worms and maggots; since the seventeenth century, grub has been a word for a person with unlovely manners or limited abilities, and Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1731 defines the plural grubs as ‘a kind of white, unctuous, little pimples or tumours’. Inevitably we picture not just hacks manufacturing third-rate literature – people who can’t hold their ink – but also filth and parasitism. Here, in the valley of the shadow of books, one might learn a lot about human motives.¹¹