Hester Lynch Piozzi: Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786)

Hester Lynch Piozzi in 1785-86, by an unknown Italian artist

[Image source: National Portrait Gallery]

Chronology

1709  Samuel Johnson born

1735  Marries Elizabeth (Tetty) Jervis

1740/41 Hester Lynch Salusbury born

1746-55 Johnson’s Dictionary

1749   The Vanity of Human Wishes

1750-60 The Rambler, The Adventurer, The Idler

1752  Tetty Johnson dies

1759  Johnson’s mother dies. Rasselas

1763  Johnson meets James Boswell

1763  Hester marries Henry Thrale.

1765  Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare.

         Johnson meets the Thrales. A year later, he moves in with them.

1775  Journey to the Western Islands

1777-81 Lives of the Poets

1781  Henry Thrale dies

1783  Hester moves to Bath. Last meeting with Johnson (April).

1784  Hester marries Gabriel Piozzi (July). Death of Johnson (December).

1785  Hester writes Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson in Italy (Summer).

          Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

1786  Anecdotes published.

1791  Boswell’s Life of Johnson

1809  Gabriel Piozzi dies

1821  Hester Piozzi dies

The main points arising from this chronology are as follows. Johnson was in his mid-fifties when he met the two young friends who did so much for him and who would become his chief biographers (Boswell and Hester Thrale disliked each other, by the way). His wife had died more than a decade earlier. The literary achievements that had established him were in the past; he was semi-retired. In another sense, his life may be said to have begun again. During the remaining twenty years of his life he lodged most of the time with the Thrales, in fact for most of each week throughout their marriage. Hester was usually pregnant; the Thrales had twelve children. Henry Thrale’s death, the burden of supporting an increasingly difficult Johnson, and his disapproval of the liaison with Piozzi, brought all this to an end. Hester’s life, in turn, began again. She was about 24 when she first met Johnson, and about 42 when they last saw each other.

She revered Johnson; he was always her friend; and she had nursed him through serious depressions. Still, her book is quite candid; there was something monstrous about him. At first his presence in the house (she calls it her confinement) was “terrifying”, towards the end “irksome”. Boswell tries to canonize him, portraying his prejudiced, bullying and often unintelligent conversation as if it was a dialogue in heaven.

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