The Knight of Twickenham and his Daughter

Extract

For over one hundred and five years the memoirs of that decidedly acid female, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, have served as a quarry from which writers on the eighteenth century have dug their best anecdotes and extracted their sourest and most spiteful criticism. But not until this present year of grace did anyone think of reproducing the original book; and even now that reproduction comes to us in an extremely abridged and compressed form, and with a large and much-needed attempt at re-arrangement. For never was there a work more devoid of method and order, or more stuffed and padded with extraneous matter— unless, indeed, it be the ‘official’ Life of Dr. Johnson perpetrated by the fair author’s father, Sir John Hawkins, Knight, that ‘most unclubbable’ of men!

Sir John Hawkins, who claimed descent from the famous Elizabethan admiral of the same name, began life as an attorney with literary tastes. A fortunate marriage enabled him to retire by the time he was forty, and to settle down as a wealthy country gentleman at Twickenham, with a town house at Queen Square, Westminster, and to devote his leisure to literature, music, angling, the formation of a fine library, and the duties of a magistrate. He wrote a tedious History of Music in five volumes quarto, and a number of other books which no one nowadays ever reads; he knew in a certain way almost everybody worth knowing; he was an original number of the famous ‘Club’ in Ivy Lane, and he was Dr. Johnson’s executor, and selected by the publishers to edit his works and write his Life. He lies buried in the cloisters of the Abbey, and very few would ever have heard of him had it not been for his rather grudging inclusion in the great ‘Johnsonian Circle.’ Boswell hated him, and Johnson just tolerated him.