The Johnson Society (Lichfield)

Everybody knows he was born and bred in Lichfield; most people can quote you his remark that ‘when a man is tired of London he is tired of life.’ And some may also recall his disparaging remarks about the country and those who live in there. It may, therefore, seem odd, that throughout his life he was drawn back again and again to this part of the world. So perhaps something needs to be said, briefly, at the outset about Johnson’s strong familial and social connections with Derbyshire, and more particularly with the Ashbourne area.

First of all, those family ties; his father Michael Johnson, who eventually set up as a bookseller in Lichfield, was born at Cubley, about five miles distant from Ashbourne. Michael’s customers came from all over the diocese of Lichfield (which included a fair chunk of Derbyshire) and Samuel had Derbyshire cousins, one of whom later married the clerk to John Taylor of Ashbourne.

It was to Derby that Johnson famously rode leaving Tetty, his wife-to-be, trailing in his wake before their marriage there in St. Werburgh’s church. After her early death (in 1752) two Derbyshire ladies he had met at Bradley Hall near Ashbourne, Mrs. Fitzherbert (née Meynell) and Hill Boothby, the evangelical sister of Ashbourne’s squire, became his most admired feminine companions. The former he credited with the best understanding he had met with in a woman and with the latter he kept up a regular, and sometimes flirtatious, correspondence.

However, his closest and longest-lasting friendship in the area was with Dr. John Taylor, known locally for his munificence style and local patronage as the ‘King of Ashbourne.’

Boswell’s puzzlement as to how to account for the relationship between two such different people misses the point of Johnson’s own remark about friendship; ‘a friend is one who supports and comforts us when others do not.’ It is clear that at key points in their lives both knew from experience that the other would not be found wanting when called upon.

Taylor, who came from a prosperous Derbyshire family with strong connections to the clergy and the law, was educated at Lichfield Grammar School where he met Johnson and Congreve (a relative of the poet). At Oxford, on Johnson’s advice, Taylor attended a different college but apparently copied lecture notes for his friend. It was probably with Taylor’s help that Johnson applied (unsuccessfully) to be a master at Ashbourne Grammar School and it may possibly be more than coincidence that Taylor’s first preferment after taking Holy Orders was at Market Bosworth, where Johnson had recently vacated a teaching post. It was to Taylor that Johnson turned when his wife died and to Johnson that Taylor turned when his second wife left him. Johnson at the very least helped Taylor with his sermons and, in turn was the recipient of a famous letter from his friend bolstering his faith in the after-life. And in his last illness it was Taylor who was summoned to his bedside, for as he told Boswell, Taylor knew his heart better than anyone. In the end this counted for more than their political and religious differences and their very different interests and living habits.

Taylor inherited the house in Church St. (already known as ‘The Mansion’) on the death of his father in 1731. It had been described as ‘my new house’ in his grandfathers’ will of 1690 and was, therefore, probably built c. 1685. The gables at the back, a late seventeenth century staircase and the blind arcade at the front, against which an Orangery once lent, are the more evident surviving features from this period. The most striking aspects of the house today date from John Taylor’s remodelling carried out by the Derby architect Joseph Pickford. The latter’s account books mention a visit to Ashbourne in 1764 and the first building phase probably including the superb octagonal Music Room, giving onto the Garden Front was complete by the following year according to Johnson’s correspondence. It may, in fact, have been partly due to Johnson’s suggestion after the defection of his friend’s wife that he might divert himself with ‘ little schemes of building’ that the work took place at all.

The Palladian style with a portico and a Venetian window is entirely typical and recalls other designs such as his own (later house) in Friargate, Derby, now the Pickford Museum. Perhaps more relevantly, it closely resembles the stone-faced Grey House opposite the Mansion designed for Brian Hodgson in the 1750s. Pickford had an extensive practice in the Midlands designing elegant town houses and country seats. He was also the architect of Josiah Wedgwood’s new pottery at Etruria in Staffordshire and built its owner’s residence, Etruria Hall, which still stands. He was a close friend of the celebrated painter, Joseph Wright of Derby, who also worked for Wedgwood and to whom a portrait, (now lost) of Dr. John Taylor is attributed. His masterpiece is St. Helen’s house in Derby, and he also worked for many of Johnson’s friend’s such as the FitzHerberts at Tissington Hall and in a minor role for both the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth and for Lord Scarsdale at Kedleston Hall. In Ashbourne, he also designed a fine town house for the attorney, Frances Godwin, now Lloyd’s Bank in Compton Street.

Johnson certainly visited the house after the re-facing took place and was there during the execution of the second phase of alterations (possibly by Pickford’s assistant Thomas Gardener) in which the entrance hall was given an elegant staircase and balcony and some remodelling done on the garden front. Taylor’s guest criticized the latter and grumbled in a letter (26/7/84) to Boswell about the privations he was forced to suffer.

On the 20th, I came hither, and found a house half-built of very uncomfortable appearance: but my own room has not been altered. [Johnson, it seems, regularly occupied a small bedroom at the font of the house on the left facing towards the house from Church St.] That a man worn with diseases, in his seventy-second or third year, should condemn part of his remaining life to pass amongst ruins and rubbish, and that no inconsiderable part, appears to me very strange.

 

Though Johnson stayed in Ashbourne often there are only a few occasions about which any kind of detailed information survives. The most celebrated and fullest account is that given by Boswell on his second visit, but some description of the house and Johnson’s activities in the earlier years of the decade appears in the writings of Mrs. Piozzi, or Mrs. Hester Thrale as she then was, and in Johnson’s letters. From all this we learn that although Mrs. Thrale thought them ‘very poor creatures’, Johnson did spend time with a number of local families including many of Taylor’s neighbours in the elegant town houses in Church St. Most of these would of course have been Taylor’s friends and acquaintances. However, Boswell was independent enough to have dined across the road at the Grey House with Brian Hodgson, who was not of Taylor’s party and who was despised by him as a self-made man. Hodgson had been a high-class innkeeper in Stamford and Buxton and had great wealth through profitable copper-mining interest. Through later upwardly mobile marriages in the family he is ancestor to both sides of the Queen’s family. Boswell also met his son-law, the ex-barrister, Edward Leigh, who he said was more a squire than a counsellor.

There do not seem to be any contacts with the Beresfords another lawyer–family who for some reason were so detested by Taylor that his heir, John Brunt (later Webster) would by the terms of the will have been immediately disinherited for marrying into any branch of that family. Most of the neighbours were like the Beresfords from Fenney Bentley local families who had out-grown small unfashionable manor houses and bought their Ashbourne properties as the main residence. They had gone into profession especially the law and acquired land and money by business dealings and/or marriage. Two such families were the Dales and the Alsops The Dales, from the Ivies and Dove House had property at Parwich. Robert Jnr. JP c1749-1835 was a frequent visitor. John Alsopp Jnr.1725-1804 described by Boswell as a round-headed squire, who apparently went to bed about the time he got drunk, was also often at the house. He lived at Vine House.

Johnson also kept up with his well-connected friends, such as the eccentric Meynells and the Fitzherberts. One of the Miss Meynells, Johnson’s favourite, Mary ‘who had the best understanding he had ever met with in any human being’ later became somewhat over- zealous in her religious and wifely duties. Her unassuming husband, William, (1712-72) M.P for Derbyshire, who Johnson liked because he ‘over-powered nobody by superiority of talents’ was nonetheless known locally for his fine taste in music painting and architecture. He probably commissioned Pickford to carry out the new building there in the 1770’s possibly as a result of his work for Taylor at the Mansion.

Boswell had already been impressed the previous year by the style in which Taylor lived but on that occasion he was not to enjoy it for long as news of the death of Johnson’s friend, Henry Thrale made it imperative for them to curtail their visit.

Mrs. Thrale on her own visit in 1773 had also spoken highly of the magnificence of Dr. Taylor’s surroundings, She found ‘everything around him is both elegant and splendid.’ He has fine pictures, which he does not understand the beauties of, a glorious Harpsichord which he sends for a young man out of town to play upon, a waterfall murmuring at the foot of his garden, (and) deer in his paddock.’ She notes his menagerie included pheasants and long-horned cattle among them ‘a Bull of enormous size.’ Some of Taylor’s prize livestock, of which he was inordinately proud, was sent as gifts to the Royal household.

The liberal supply of food and fine wines was also frequently the subject of comments by visitors to the Mansion. However on one occasion, a creditor spoiled the effect, dramatically interrupting a meal at which Johnson was present by bursting into the room and jerking away the tablecloth! Taylor was certainly a wealthy man, known to be generous to the poor, but seems to have had a mean streak when it came to paying his bills, in this case for the meat on his table.

Johnson wrote to Boswell on 30 Aug 1777 saying ‘I am this day come to Ashbourne and have only to tell you that Dr. Taylor says you will be welcome to him an you know how welcome you will be to me.’ Boswell arrived on 14 Sept and was greeted as he alighted at the door from his post-chaise. The next day after breakfast he was taken across the road by Johnson to see his friend, the Rev. Langley’s garden at the Grammar School ‘very pettily formed on a bank ‘at the back of the house. They discussed the poor salaries of clergymen, which was partly the reason for the malpractices of absentee clergy of which Taylor was a prime example. Johnson later spoke of his disapproval of Taylor’s neglect of his clerical duties, which he knew his friend noticed and probably resented. However, he told Boswell that Taylor was ‘a sensible acute man’ and had ‘a very strong mind’ and was active in some ways but in others so indolent ‘that if you should put a pebble on his chimney-piece, you would find it there, in the same state, a year afterwards.’ He only preached for or five times a year and Boswell suspected Johnson had written many of the sermons that were published after Taylor died in 1788.

Taylor’s opinion of Johnson was that ‘He is a man of a very clear head, great power of words and a very gay imagination; but there is no disputing with him; he will not hear you and has a louder voice than you and must roar you down.’ Boswell records a couple of their roaring matches one over the succession to the throne and once when Johnson had the temerity to dispute a point over the breeding of bull-dogs. The Doctor’s geese were all swans was Boswell,s comment and Johnson said he was like the man in the bible ‘whose talk was of bullocks.’

The execution of Dr. Dodd in London, provoked the first of a number of discussions of mortality, a subject never far from Johnson’s thoughts. Hume’s refusal to show fear of death had scandalized Boswell and Johnson now confessed that he ‘never had a moment in which death was not terrible to him.’ This helps to explain why he did not like his birthday mentioned and was so cross with his friend for suggesting that they might light the chandelier in the octagon room to commemorate it and was so irritated when some visiting ladies wished him well. On the 19th September they set out early to go to Derby and decided to visit Kedleston which Johnson had see before and opined it would do well for a Town Hall, though diplomatically telling Ld. Scarsdale ‘My Lord, this is the most costly room I ever saw.’ This journey was the occasion for Johnson’s famous remark, ‘If I had no duties and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.’

They visited the famous Silk Mill of John Lombe and Boswell was impressed but the more significant developments of Arkwright and Strutt, which would forever change their world, seem not to have figured in their thoughts.

Another outing was to ‘romantick’ Islam, formerly the seat of the Congreves, where Johnson, in typical fashion disputed the existence of an underground river.

On taking his post-chaise from the Green Man, Boswell accidentally immortalized the Landlady, Mrs. Killingly and at Edensor where he stopped was told by the landlord of Johnson’s earlier visit and that he was known locally as ‘Oddity’ and wrote for the government. The inn, described by Johnson and Mrs. Thrale as ‘wretched’, by this time had been rebuilt in an urbane style by Pickford.

I want, in closing, to evoke a series of events that took place in the wonderful Octagon room and later in the garden which throw some light on Johnson contradictory views on music and give us a glimpse of Johnson's life at the Mansion at its best. The following excerpts from Bowel's Life of Johnson refer to an entertainment that took on Tuesday 23 September 1777.

In the evening, our gentleman farmer and two others entertained themselves and the company with a great number of tunes on the fiddle. Johnson desired to have ‘Let ambition fire they mind ‘, played over again, and appeared to give a patient attention to it: though he owned to me that he was very insensible to the power of music. I told him that it affected me to such a degree as often to agitate my nerves painfully, producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears; and of daring resolution, so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest part of the battle. ‘Sir’, said he, ‘I should never hear it, if it made me such a fool…

Boswell comments

This evening, while some of the tunes of ordinary composition were played with no great skill, my frame was agitated, and I was conscious of a generous attachment to Dr. Johnson as my preceptor and friend, mixed with an affectionate regret that he was an old man, whom I should probably lose in a short time. I thought I could defend him at the point of my sword…

…While Johnson and I stood in calm conference by ourselves in Dr. Taylor’s garden, at a pretty late hour in a serene autumn night, looking up to the heavens, I directed the discourse to the subject of a future state. My friend was in a placid and most benignant frame. ’Sir, (said he,) I do not imagine that all things will be made clear to us immediately after death, but that the ways of Providence will be explained to us very gradually…

This, perhaps significantly, recalls a conversation, some five years earlier, on similar themes, when Johnson appeared in a comparably mellow mood.

BOSWELL. As to our employment in a future state, the sacred writings say little. The Revelation, however of St. John has given us many ideas and particularly mentions musick.

JOHNSON. Why Sir, ideas may be given you by means of some thing you know: and as to music there are some philosophers and divines who have maintained that we shall not be spiritualized to such a degree, but that something of matter, very much refined will remain. In that case, music may make a part of our future felicity.

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The Johnson Society, The Birthplace Museum, Breadmarket Street,
Lichfield, Staffs. WS13 6LG
contact@lichfieldrambler.co.uk