Dr. Johnson and Miss Hill Boothby

Extract

Some fourteen years after Boswell’s Life of Johnson was given to the world there appeared a small collection of Letters addressed to Dr. Johnson which had found no place in the great Biography. These were contained in a slim volume published in London in 1805 and bearing the title Original Letters to Dr. Johnson by Miss Hill Boothby. The little work has never once been re-printed, although some few extracts from it are to be met with in the notes to Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Johnson's Letters, and it has occasionally been referred to by other commentators. A copy of this now exceedingly rare book lies before us as we write, and suggests to us to set down something about one of the most singular of Dr. Johnson’s many friendships.

When Johnson was a very young man, poverty-stricken and unknown, he paid the first of many visits to his friend, the Rev. Dr. Taylor, of Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. There, we are told, ‘the daughters of some of the Derbyshire squires showed their good taste and good sense by desiring the company of the young genius, poor and unpolished as he was.’ Or, as Miss Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield,’ most appalling of poetesses, and a life-long enemy of Johnson, preferred in her acid and waspish way to put it, ‘They probably amused themselves with the uncouth adorations of the learned though dirty stripling, whose mean appearance was overlooked, because of the genius and knowledge that blazed through him, albeit with umbered flames owing to his spleen and melancholy.’