THE GOOD DOCTOR:
Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years (Henry Oliver, May 04, 2026, The Common Reader)
He rarely got out of bed in the morning. When he did, it was often to read a book about depression. He paid a great deal of attention to his belly, not just to keep himself well-fed so he could work without distraction—he concocted, out of his knowledge of medicine and food, his own syrups of figs and orange peel to keep digestion regular. He had no ear for music, and little appreciation of the visual arts, but few could claim to be better read in Latin or in English. He rolled, twitched, gesticulated, squinted, touched himself compulsively; he took religion so seriously he would admonish people fiercely in the middle of conversation; sometimes his political views came out in sulking fits. The woman he is thought to have loved, who said he would have been a hero to his own valet, once rated his personality traits out of twenty: for religion, morality, and general knowledge, he scored twenty; for person and voice, manner, and good humour she gave him zero.
A supporter of women’s education and accomplishments, in an age of patronising patriarchy, he gave Latin lessons to girls and women of his acquaintance, read and complimented (by quoting from memory) the novels of women writers, promoted their work, advised them and helped them get published; but he treated women with the same contempt he treated men, and when Catherine Macaulay published her radical History of England, which was republican, he not only refused to read it, but got into the habit of making toasts in her name, mockingly, when a toast to the King was called for. This was the same King, who he once said, if the people of England could be fairly polled, would be sent out of England, and his adherents hanged.
He so loved the hierarchical order of society, he thought the King—chosen by Parliament, a German Elector, and thus not the direct descendant of James II—was not the true King. It is not known what he was doing in 1745, the year in which a rebellion by James II’s descendants was launched against the throne. He wrote anonymous pamphlets which were sympathetic to the rebels’ cause. Scholars of his work argue bitterly in petty tones about where he might have been, and what he might have been doing. After recording the details of a rant about the recent history of England’s kings, his biographer declines to keep adding details of the expostulation, and instead merely notes, “He roared with prodigious violence against George the Second.”
This man who so loved hierarchy was an abolitionist before the abolitionist movement. He once shocked the company at a university dinner by making his toast to “the next insurrection of Negroes in the West Indies.” He took in a twelve year old boy, a freed slave, and trained him as a servant, eventually leaving him the majority of his estate. This servant, Francis Barber, had gatherings of other free Black Britons at his house.