Review: The History of the Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust by Percy Laithwaite

 I saw the Lichfield Press’s reprint of Percy Laithwaite’s The History of the Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust in the bookshop in Dr Johnson’s Birthplace and I thought it might provide some useful context for representing the town in the novel I’m currently planning. I didn’t buy it though, finding the little volume a bit too expensive and wondering whether the subject matter might be a little too anoracky, even for me. Then I saw a copy cheaper at the Oxfam bookshop three doors down and got it. (Incidentally, the road between The George Inn and Johnson’s Birthplace is festooned with cheap book-buying options).

I was not expecting this book to be so enjoyable.

On the 3rd of January 1546, the laster master of the Lichfield Guild, Hector Beane gave the guild’s lands and privileges to a group of people who became the Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust. This was done in a document called a feeoffment, and the eight people now in charge of it were called feeoffees. The task given to this group was to secure clean and cheap water to be available for the people of Lichfield and to use any excess money or profits for the good of the city. 

Like a lot of these early charities, there was a physical chest where the money belonged, still in possession of the trust today. The chest has three keyholes, with the keys given out to three officers who needed to be quorate to open the chest. I once had a similar system with a friend when we bought an expensive bottle of whisky. We kept it in his cupboard, which was locked by a key I held, ensuring we could only drink it when we were together.

The first part of the book is about the water conduits themselves. It boasts how quickly Lichfield secured itself with public sources of water, earlier than London even, and how the trust developed the system to ensure that the city had the cleanest, cheapest water of anywhere around. There were a number of conduits around the city, where people collected this clean water. The conduits themselves were decorated and kept in goo repair, being known as “our special ornaments.” Essentially being the civic version of water-coolers, they were where people game to gossip, and sometimes fight. There was even a rhyme about it;

  “At the conduits, striving for their turn

  The quarrel it grows great

  That up in arms they are at last

   And one another beat.”

Another problem was that people used to wash their underwear in the conduits and special laundry points established.

After a while, some people wanted their own private water supply. The first to ask for it was the headmaster of the grammar school in 1707. Creating this private supply was a lot of work, because the house is up a small hill but it was achieved, with the headmaster having to pay for the work. As the eighteenth century went on, private water supplies became more common, with Johnson’s step-daughter, Lucy Porter getting her own tap in 1772. One negative effect of people having access to their own water is that they grew wasteful of it and citizens had to be reminded not to waste water.

The trust did more than look after water though. They were instrumental in shaping Lichfield, paving it, giving it lights, funding its famous grammar school and giving charity. Samuel Johnson’s grandmother was giving charity by the Trust, his father’s apprenticeship was a bookseller was due to the Trust’s charity and Johnson’s own education was free, thanks to the Conduit Trust. Michael was later to serve on the trust as a warden. His job would have been collecting the rents from the lands owned by the trust, as well as checking the pipes and conduits. Every year there was an audit meal, where the accounts were double checked and a slap up meal was held, which he was eligible to attend even when he had retired from it.

The Conduit Lands Trust was very proud of their fire-fighting capacities. Unlike many places, they had a fire-engine nicknamed ‘The Indian’. By 1711 they also had fire engines called ‘The Batchelor’s Engine’, ‘The Great Engine”, “The Force Engine” and “The Virgin’s Engine.” Such was the civic pride, that on the feast days of Holy Thursday, Whit-Monday and the 5th of November, it was a requirement to ‘play’ the fire engines around town. Each engine needed 12 operators and they were paid in beer. The 1741 meal offered; “a round of beef, boiled, a large pudding, 2 geese roasted, 2 fowls boiled with bacon, 2 fowls roasted, 2 couple of ducks roasted and 1 turkey roasted.” This was the small meal, the feeoffees were blessed with even more. 

Also, in the winter, from Michaelmas to Lady Day, there were a group of four watchmen, who went from 11pm, to 4am and who had to wake everybody up twice a night - presumably this was to check that fire was regulated in the house. If the local church bells rang than all able-bodied men in the area were expected to get up and lend a hand.

The Trust also involved itself in law and order, building the guild hall, with it’s cells underneath and, in 1666, buying the city its own scold’s bridal and cucking stool. Considering these were both torture devices used to keep women in line, the charitable status of them is on shaky ground.

The final brilliant story is about the clock tower the Trust had built. There were a number of designs, some of them ridiculous but they settled on a fairly solid four-sided structure with Norma arches. It was a problem from the beginning and later moved from where it had been built and was blocking the streets. The town ordered a clock to be built for the tower. The one they were expected would need to be wound every 8 days, the one they recieved needed to be wound every 5, so they had to double the pay of the person whose job was to wind it. What’s more, the clock wasn’t all that accurate and the clock-keeper had to pop down the train station every day to get an accurate time to fix the town clock with. It seems a very British farce.

While I found this book both useful and entertaining, my favourite element of it was a strange little quirk of the writer. Whenever he wanted to pick a town that Lichfield was cleaner than, safer than, more protected from fire than, less prone to cholera than, better educated that - he always picked Coventry. Each time, it seemed like he was simply picking a town relatively near but as it built up, it felt very much like a running joke and a personal grudge. As a very reluctant four-year resident of Cov, I appreciated it a lot.

The History of the Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust is a surprisingly brilliant book. For a copy you could write to Lichfield Press, who have the email lichfieldpresd@hushmail.com - an email company that sounds like it was created for blackmailers. 

Review: The Time-Thief by Patience Agbabi

 I picked up The Time-Thief by Patience Agbabi from the library, having heard her on a BBC podcast talking about Samuel Johnson and his fictional depiction in this book. It’s the second book of four, so some of the difficulties I had with the book may have been covered in the first - I presumed, as a children’s book, I’d pick the world up as I went along.

The books is about leaplings, a tiny subsection of people born on the 29th February who have the ability to jump backwards and forwards in time. The protagonist, Elle is one such person who is also a member of a secret group called Infinity. Their job is to secure the future against unscrupulous leaplings known as the Vicious Circle and headed by the evil Millenia. In this book, an item is stolen from the Museum of Past, Present and Future and her friend is framed. She must go back in time to learn about the item so she can clear her friend’s name. 

Luckily for me, as a Johnson fanatic, the item was an hourglass given by Samuel Johnson to Francis Barber, so Elle meets Johnson, Barber and Anna Williams when they are living at Gough Square in 1752. It’s partly this provenance that makes the hour glass worth so much, as anything Johnson related is worth three times as much in the leapling world.

Elle doesn’t go back until the middle of the book and the first person she meets in Johnson’s household is Anna. She’s incredibly rude and slams the door on them but eventually opens it up and apologies. Elle understands, she’s told that Anna is almost blind and sympathises with how difficult she must find things in a world that ignores her needs. Indeed, when Johnson lived at Bolt Court later in life, neighbours found it irritating how many people asked them for directions to Samuel’s place.

In the acknowledgements at the end, Agbabi thanks Helen Woollison, former Deputy Curator at Dr Johnson’s House. I went to many events run by her and also volunteered in the house under her supervision for a while and she is a knowledgeable and helpful person. It’s clear she helped Agbabi, the description of the garret on page 96 is really good, depicting the long table with teetering piles of books. Describing the books as being a little shabby, rather like Johnson’s clothes and marvelling at all the little slips of paper. She talks with an amanuensis about how Johnson is using quotations, including poetry to define the words and bring them to life. It’s a really nice moment.

I also liked a lot of how Johnson himself is portrayed. Many people, when writing him, choose to make him speak Boswell quotes at all times. This relieves them of the pressure of having to invent something Johnson might say but it is rather jarring to someone who knows that those quotes happened years apart. While there are some nods to some quotes, Agbabi writes her Johnson whole and makes him a figure who is strange and a little alarming at first but ultimately warm and likeable. He might not always sound like the Johnson we know, but at least he’s not just a Bozzy-spouting automaton. 

One of the first things Elle notes about him is the smell of his sweat, then his shabby clothes and constant movements. She wonders if he’s stimming, a concept we were giving a page-length description of earlier, when a person repeats a repetitive action (such as rocking, clapping or blinking) to self-soothe. She’s later informed that Johnson has Tourette’s, that his movements are not a balm to him but an impulse he can’t repress. The person informing her then says, 

  “His supreme intellect and extreme challenge stem from the same source.” It’s an interesting idea, and one I recently read discussed in Robert DeMaria Jr’s The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography. While I am very wary of attributing Johnson’s exceptional qualities to his (probable) neurodivergence, I am interested in how that helped shaped him.

The character of young Francis Barber is also handled well. It’s clear that Agbabi has read Michael Buncdock’s The Fortunes of Francis Barber, as it reveals his real name, Quarshy, and talks about how he was Colonel Cathcart’s slave in Jamaica but was now in a strange, in-between state, living with Johnson. I liked the little jokes about how he was officially a servant who didn’t do all that much servanting and the chance to see him as a free-spirited young man.

One big element of this book I haven’t much touched on is autism. Maybe it was explained in the first, but the 0.007% of people born on 29th February who can leap in time are all neurodivergent in some way or another. There are six characters with autism, one non-verbal, one character with ADHD and then Johnson with his possible Tourettes. Is it diversity if almost everyone in the book is autistic? The book frequently stops to describe some aspect of autism, sometimes it’s just the narration that stops to explain it but sometimes the whole narrative itself.

At one point, Elle and her fellow autistic leapling, Big Ben, almost fail to jump in time and follow the bad guys because they worry their disguises might be too itchy. Elle herself is a character who shuts down because she is over-stimulated if offered food any other colour than white, but finds the strength to cope with London in 1752. The lovely description of the dictionary garret then goes into a paragraph about how Big Ben is dyslexic and would find the handwritten notes difficult to read - but he doesn’t need to read them. Elle sympathises with Anna Williams’s blindness because, “she must find everything tricky if she’s blind just like I find things challenging because I’m autistic.” It’s about a hundred pages in at this point, we know.

Ultimately, I did not enjoy The Time-Thief because I really didn’t like the writing. Occasionally it flowed but generally it was stiff and awkward. Whenever Elle had been on a little adventure, she’d return to her friends and retell exactly what the reader had already read and then told the reader all the implications of the new information. Everything was stated and re-stated, plainly, baldly and obviously. They talk about an alibi, so then need to have a few sentences explaining, plain, clear and boringly what an alibi is. This is partly why the references to autism became such a hurdle to the telling of the story, because the book wouldn’t let something play out without a flat explanation of it. A character couldn’t stim without the narrator giving a flat description of what stimming is. She couldn’t shut down without explaining what a shut down was and why she was doing it. 

This is an especial problem when the book is supposed to be a fast-paced, time travelling mystery adventure. The book would describe an event happening, then state what had happened and then a character would come up and restate it and another restate it upon that. Then, later on, the character would have to restate that event again in case we’d forgotten before another would state the significance of that restating. 

I’ll end with a quote. Francis Barber, Elle and Big Ben are walking through London in 1752. They see people in sedan chairs and Elle asks if the occupants are disabled. This is Francis’s completely natural reply;

   “No they are not, The sedan chair is a common transportation for hire but take note: those adorned with gold and brocade belong to the monied class who wish to be seen but contribute little to society.”

   Right on with the anti-rich people sentiment, shame about the prose.

Review: Sketches of Some Booksellers in the Time of Doctor Johnson by Edward Marston

 

It feels odd to call a book cute, but Edward Marston’s Sketches of Some Booksellers in the Time of Doctor Johnson is just that. It’s a dinky little volume with a clumsily large title that tries to do little else but give the reader some biographical sketches of a number of booksellers. The main sources for the book are Boswell’s Life, and John Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century.

It starts with the bookseller closest to Samuel Johnson, his father. Most of the information about him is taken from Boswell, so it presents him as a melancholy man who struggled his whole life as a provincial bookseller. It also quotes Michael’s own sales copy, where Micheal wishes his public ‘to be pleased’ and himself ‘a good sale’. The most interesting part of this chapter was the fact this book came out in 1902, and Johnson’s birthplace had become a public museum in 1901. There’s obviously a lot of hope and pride at this opening, and a wish that Lichfield will become the new Stratford-Upon-Avon, full of literary tourists. Birkbeck Hill (of Miscellanies fame) dedicated the museum, which was opened on 6th July - the day before my birthday. One speech given on the day hoped that Johnson’s “works, character and genius would be as well known 117 years hence.” That year was 2019, and although Samuel Johnson may not be as widely known as he was in 1901, there are still many that know of him, and those that do love him a little more.

The next is Andrew Millar, who Johnson said “raised the price of literature.” He clearly had a good eye, publishing Thompson’s Seasons, as well as all of Henry Fielding’s novels, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia. for the Johnsonian, he may be best known as the printer who uttered a sigh of relief when The Dictionary was finally gone and thanked God he was done with Samuel Johnson. When Johnson heard this, he said he was glad Millar thanked God for something.

The next bookseller was Thomas Davies. He owned the bookshop near Covent Garden where Johnson and Boswell met, and most of the chapter is taken up with Boswell’s description of the event. He seems an interesting sort of person, described as less a bookseller than “a gentleman who dealt with books”. He had also dabbled in writing himself and for much of his career had been a mediocre actor. Marston says that;

  “In none of these callings was he particularly successful in a commercial sense … but he always retained the esteem and affection of his many friends.” - and his wife was apparently quite the looker.

Thomas Osbourne was the man most famous for being beaten up by Samuel Johnson. Described by Marston as arrogant, ignorant and insolent, he used to boast that he’d made £40,000 from his bookselling endeavours. He had the business practice of paying eye-watering sums for whole libraries and then selling them off piecemeal using a catalogue, which cost 5 shillings in itself. He said that book lovers would either pay the 5 shillings or they would miss out. He paid £13,000 for the Earl of Oxford’s book collection, saying that the binding alone was worth £18,000. Then he put two anonymous hacks on the job of creating the catalogue, one of them Samuel Johnson. When he berated Samuel about the speed of his work, Samuel picked up a large folio, knocked him to the floor and then trod on him and told him exactly what he thought of his employer. Most wonderfully, the book in question was noted down, it was Biblio Graeca Septuaginta (aka, a large, Greek Old Testament) printed in 1594 in Frankfurt. 

The book goes on, talking a bit about the Lintots, father and son, and a number of other booksellers. There’s a particularly nice chapter about Dodders, Robert Dodsley. Originally a stocking weaver, he became a footman and then parlayed his leaving bonus into setting up as bookseller. He was never ashamed of his working class roots and sometimes gave literary anecdotes about famous writers from the point-of-view of below stairs. 

I also learnt that Edward Cave, Johnson’s first employer on The Gentleman’s Magazine was the son of a cobbler and kicked out of his free place at Rugby School after he was accused of stealing a chicken. Despite going to London and putting together the first magazine, he was still known as ‘Ned the Cobbler’ in his home town. Rugby, incidentally was where my train suddenly stopped when I was trying to get home to London from Lichfield. Cave was a stickler for details, and even when his magazine was selling 10,000 copies a month, worried if he lost one subscriber. He’s encourage his writers to give it their all and ‘put something good in next month.”

This is a little book, and fairly limited in it’s scope, there’s not much original research but what is there is packaged nicely and told well. It’s also notably missing any women booksellers, of which there were many, except a mention of Sarah, Samuel Johnson’s mother not being allowed to mind the shop on cold days because her family didn’t want her to get cold. The book is charming, enjoyable and most of all … cute.