IN 1752, two weeks after his wife’s death and stricken by remorse and grief, Samuel Johnson greeted the arrival of Francis Barber, a slave about ten years old, from the sugar plantations of Jamaica. It had occurred to Johnson’s dear friend Richard Bathurst that the boy — who had been brought to England two years earlier — might be helpful to Johnson in his hour of need. In a way that few other Anglican Tories in the era of British slavery would have thought remotely conceivable, Johnson welcomed Francis into his home as companion and friend.
Initially, the boy’s domestic duties were light: preparing refreshment, waiting at table, answering the door, and keeping a watchful eye on Johnson’s beloved cat, Hodge. As the months passed, Francis became a valued aid, distracting Johnson from the melancholia that had stalked him from his childhood, and proving invaluable as he struggled to compile what would prove to be the greatest achievement of his life as writer, essayist, critic, and biographer: A Dictionary of the English Language.
The task took almost ten years to complete, and demanded all Johnson’s massive erudition and resolve. As he amassed more than 116,000 quotations, he began to doubt whether the project would ever be finished to his exacting lexicographical standards. There were also heated arguments with typesetters and bookbinders.
All ended well, however, and the publication of the dictionary made Johnson famous overnight: “I believe there is hardly a day in which there is not something about me in the newspapers.” He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Oxford University, and, after years of relative obscurity and hardship, the success of the dictionary made him financially secure.
Johnson not only paid for Francis’s education, but eventually left him the bulk of his estate. This magnanimous gesture set the seal on a delicate and sometimes exasperating relationship that, to onlookers and friends, most closely resembled that of father and son. Despite Francis’s determination to seek employment and adventure elsewhere on at least two occasions over a period of 20 years, it proved a lasting and affectionate partnership, fuelled by Johnson’s detestation of slavery at a time when few opposed it.
JOHNSON’s radical stance on slavery can still surprise. Until relatively recently, the pervasive myth of Dr Johnson as “the great man of English letters” has been that of the backward-looking conservative, the fierce Tory defender of tradition, who resisted change or new ideas, especially if they threatened the established order.
Johnson was unequivocal in his defence of the Church of England and the moral and spiritual part that it played in the life of the nation, and was gripped by a fear, bordering on hatred, of anarchy. But he was not an ideologue or stupid reactionary. In important respects, he was both liberal and unorthodox, preferring his deep reading of human nature to conventional rules or received wisdom as the best and most reliable guide in human affairs. This led him to challenge the cruel and negative social and political attitudes of his day which denigrated black people as barbarous and savage — “mischievous as monkeys and infinitely more dangerous”.
The black British population at the time was about 15,000, most of whom were slaves. Their presence in towns or villages created unease. Notable public voices declared that, within a few generations, they would become a source of contamination to English blood.
Johnson had no truck with such prejudices. On one occasion in Oxford, in 1777, he caused considerable consternation in influential company by proposing a toast to “the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies”. This was not wine-fuelled or hypocritical table-talk on Johnson’s part. Jamaica was Britain’s most lucrative colony, generating astonishing wealth. Johnson, in contrast, knew it as a place of wickedness, where, on the sugar plantations, there were twice as many deaths as births, and slaves typically survived seven years if they were not first raped, flogged, hanged, or burned alive.
Like other early abolitionists, Johnson paid close attention to reports of slave rebellions in the Caribbean, how violently they were suppressed, and how quickly they erupted again. An Anglican missionary observed that the first toy given to white children in Jamaica was a whip. The diary of a slave overseer, Thomas Thistlewood, recorded in unbearable and minute detail how he devised tortures and humiliations that forced some to defecate into other slaves’ mouths, or urinate in their eyes. After a flogging, Thistlewood would routinely pour lime juice into their wounds.
AGAINST this inhumane reading of commodified human flesh that was seen as fit only for exploitation and subjugation, Johnson insisted that “no man is by nature the property of another,” and that the real test of a civilised society was its treatment of the poor and excluded. He castigated the hypocrisy of the Americans, who excelled at keeping slaves and yet issued “the loudest yelps for liberty”.
Because Johnson believed in the uniformity of human nature — and that, therefore, distinctions based on colour or race were morally abhorrent — it was evidently right that Francis should be redeemed from slavery and afforded the opportunity of education in England, just as those in need on the streets should not be denied the chance of learning.
In preference to the coffee houses of London, where gentlemen discussed business and burgeoning colonial profits, Johnson favoured the taverns. There, he could converse with those who were failures or downtrodden, forget his innate sadness for a while, and entertain listeners with his wit and wisdom.
When, days before his death, Johnson was told that he was going to be buried in Westminster Abbey, he replied directly: “Place a stone over my grave that the remains may not be disturbed.” The inscription on it states simply his name, degree, date of death, and age.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, writer, and theologian.