My copy of Mary Alden Hopkins’s Dr Johnson’s Lichfield looks like a fairly sedate affair, possibly even a little bit dry, but perfect for getting myself back into eighteenth century Lichfield as I return to writing my novel in Samuel Johnson’s little brother (as I’ve had a little time off writing it).
It starts fairly calmly, with a huge list of acknowledgements, with one of the first being to Percy Laithwaite, the man who wrote the surprisingly entertaining history of Lichfield’s Conduit Lands Trust - possibly the most entertaining book about a civil authority/charity that could be written. Then follows the gossipiest timeline I have ever seen in front of a historical book. Yes, there are entries for births and deaths, but most detail strange affairs, scandals and relationships and this timeline suggests the sudden turn the book will make after a few chapters.
For a while, it’s a book about Lichfield in the time of Samuel Johnson, beginning with a potted history of the city, a little about the social and economic make-up of the place, told with a visual eyes and a tendency to fantasise about the fantastic costumes everyone was probably wearing. However, it soon leaves Samuel Johnson as he leaves Lichfield and becomes a full-on soap opera about the lives of those in Lichfield’s Cathedral Close. Albert Square and Coronation Street have nothing on this sedate corner of ecclesiastical housing, and Hopkins loves every detail of it.
The first mini-history of Lichfield was very interesting, especially its founding myth of the cathedral being built on the site of a huge Roman massacre of Christians. Johnson himself believed this myth, believing that the ‘Lich’ of Lichfield came from the same ‘lich’ in ‘lichgate’ and meant death. Then there was the founding of the Cathedral by St Chad (a name to conjure with), the Maryan martyrs in the Market Square, the three attacks on the Cathedral Close during the English Civil War and the leader of the Parliamentarians being killed by a deaf-dumb sniper - and you get a real sense of the local stories and legend that the Johnson boys would have grown up in.
There’s a lot of weight given to David Garrick and Samuel Johnson being invited to the Walmisleys - how it was a singular honour for a town kid and a garrison kid to be invited to the close. Hopkins notes the apparent coldness in the Johnson home but doesn’t attribute it to lack of love. In comparing the noisy conviviality of the Garricks she says, “there may have been no more love in the Garrick family than the Johnson, but their love was more articulate.” She doesn’t have much to say about Nathaniel, nothing except to suggest that he may have been a “problem son”.
Hopkins is great about Tetty though. She really brings out how pretty Tetty must have been, with her baby soft hair and general soft features, of how she was witty and gave as good as she got, how she was a good listener. It’s very much the picture of Tetty I want to include in my book. She also points out that the Porters were related to Dr Hunter, and suggests Samuel Johnson’s relationship with him may have affected the family’s acceptance of him. Personally, I think it’s a stretch, but it’s something to bear in mind.
Then Samuel Johnson leaves the book until the last two chapters and Hopkins talks about what she really wanted to, Anna Seward, the younger Lichfield set and all the crazy love lives. When I went to the Dr Johnson Reading Circle’s discussion of Wits and Wives with Kate Chisholm, she said she specifically didn’t choose to write about Anna Seward because she found her annoying. Hopkins reveals and revels in how annoying she could be. Full of passion and self-belief, Anna Seward seems like a truly exhausting person, but someone who made things happen around her - and was reliably expected to blab to everyone else also.
There was Seward’s near miss with a man called Taylor. She was all set to marry him but her family cooled things down a bit and Taylor married another woman. However, Seward started receiving messages from Taylor’s new wife which showed that Taylor still loved Anna more, and what’s more, that his wife had a thing for Anna also. When Taylor died, she moved into Lichfield as a devoted follower of Anna. Then there was her thing for the Vicar Choral, Saville. Although they claimed a never-consummated love, it was enough to make his wife kick him out into a small house next door, where they mooned at each other for years and years.
There’s the story of John Andre and Honora Sneyd, a story known by “every schoolchild” according to Hopkins.. I hadn’t heard of it. He loved her, she tolerated him but the families never really came together, so he went to America, where he was hanged as a British spy and turned into a tragic figure by Anna Seward. Honora later married Richard Edgeworth, who first entered Lichfield on a self-designed one-wheeled carriage, where he’d come to visit Erasmus Darwin.
Other visitors to Erasmus Darwin was Thomas Day, who was a massive twat and I don’t wish to go more into him than that.
Even the bit players in the book, like Dr Vyse had crazy stories where he was engaged to Sophia Streatfield (the long-necked woman who caught Thrale’s eye) and engaged to marry her. The only thing was, he was married, so he engaged to marry her immediately after his wife died. When she did, he ditched her and married someone else.
To say this book on the history of eighteenth century Lichfield devolves into a gossipy series of crazy romances is true, but it is much more entertaining for it. I loved it.
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