Dr. Johnson’s Friend

Since there are, indeed, many writers “whose works are in better taste than their lives,” when we happen upon those about whom this is not the case, we naturally welcome biographies that confirm why they elude Auden’s otherwise just reproof. And since no one fits that bill better than Samuel Johnson, all readers interested in the exemplary virtues of the great lexicographer, poet, editor, and critic will delight in The Fortunes of Francis Barber.

Director of the Dr. Johnson’s House Trust, Bundock has produced a finely researched, admirably written, and altogether fascinating life, which shows how the boy who grew up in slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation deeply enriched Johnson’s moral and spiritual life. In addition to being a brilliant account of a relationship that might have begun as one of master and servant, but ended as one of father and son, Bundock describes the full horror of the Jamaican sugar plantations, where slaves worked from dawn to dusk six days a week under the broiling Caribbean sun, and where planters presided over a system of manifold iniquity.

Francis was given as a gift to Johnson in 1752 by his friend Richard Bathurst, the son of a ruined planter who styled himself Colonel Richard Bathurst. The titles planters gave themselves caused great mirth in England, one wit noting how “they are all Colonels, Majors, Captains, Lieutenants, and Ensigns.” When Frank arrived at Johnson’s house in Gough Square, he was 10 years old and Johnson 42. For the beleaguered lexicographer, the very presence of the young boy must have been a welcome distraction from the slow progress he was making on his Dictionary. He was also mourning the death of his wife. Then again, he was happy that Francis had been freed.

Fettered in a melancholy he could never entirely escape, he empathized with Frank. No one can read Johnson’s works without seeing how abhorrent slavery was to him. His opposition to the American colonists was rooted in his detestation of their slave owning, impelling him to ask, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” And as for his friend Bathurst, he was happy that giving Francis away freed him of the sin that had ruined his father. As he told James Boswell, “My dear friend Dr. Bathurst declared that he was glad that his father had left his affairs in total ruin, because having no estate, he was not under the temptation of keeping slaves.”

Drawing on the voluminous papers of the planter Thomas Thistlewood, Bundock shows the extent to which plantations doubled as brothels. “Thistlewood’s diary,” he writes, “reveals that in 37 years in Jamaica, he had sex 3,852 times with 138 women .  .  . There was simply no question of resistance, as the women knew the consequences only too well.” Those who refused were whipped. Whether Francis Barber was sired by the elder Bathurst is a lively question. No proof has surfaced.

John Hawkins, Johnson’s first biographer, notes the merriment that Frank’s arrival inspired in Johnson’s friends, especially since “the uses for which Barber was intended to serve .  .  . were not very apparent.” After all, “Diogenes himself never wanted a servant less than Johnson seemed to do.” Hawkins cited Johnson’s “great bushy wig,” which was “really as impenetrable by a comb as a thick-set hedge,” and the dust on his outer garments, which was never “known to have been disturbed by a brush.” Fortunately, Frank’s duties did not include seeing to it that his master was smartly turned out. Instead, he was responsible for running errands, carrying messages, greeting Johnson’s guests at the door, waiting at table, and joining Johnson on his occasional rambles outside London.

Since Johnson’s household included lodgers that Johnson had taken in out of charity​—​particularly, the bibulous doctor John Levett and the blind poet Anna Williams​—​Frank found himself in combustible company. Levett, Johnson admitted, was “a brutal fellow,” though he enjoyed his company, “for his brutality [was] in his manners, not his mind.” And Williams, although a learned woman, was equally unrefined, always losing her temper and eating her meals with her fingers. The fights between Francis Barber and Anna Williams were fierce, Frank complaining of Williams’s bossiness and Williams complaining of Frank’s laziness. Indeed, Williams’s rages became so unbearable that Johnson often had to flee the household. No wonder he told Hawkins that “a tavern-chair was the throne of human felicity.”

If Samuel Johnson enjoyed “the conflict of opinions and sentiments” in taverns, the conflicts at home were seldom jolly. In fact, Frank left Johnson’s household in 1756 to join an apothecary in Cheapside. Two years later, he ran away to join the Royal Navy. Since Frank always treated Johnson as a paterfamilias, his decision might have been an act of rebellion, particularly as he knew how contemptuous Johnson was of the seafaring life. (As Johnson told Boswell, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”)

The letter to the radical MP John Wilkes that the great comic novelist Tobias Smollett wrote at Johnson’s behest gave Johnson one of his most famous epithets.

As it happened, although Wilkes made appeals to the Admiralty, Frank was only discharged after Johnson wrote an appeal himself, saying that “it would be a great pleasure, and some convenience to me, if the Lords of the Admiralty would be pleased to discharge [Barber], which, as he is no seaman, may be done with little injury to the King’s service.”

From 1760 until Johnson’s death in 1784, Frank returned to the employ of his paternal master, who prized his company and sought to help him however he could. Starting in 1767, Johnson paid Frank’s fees to attend grammar school in Hertfordshire, where he studied Latin and Greek, as well as music and dancing. Johnson also shared with Frank his deep Anglican faith: “I prayed with Francis,” he wrote in one diary entry, “which I now do commonly, and explained to him the Lord’s Prayer.” That Johnson took a keen interest in Frank’s education is clear from his letters, in one of which he counseled him, “You can never be wise unless you love reading.”

Michael Bundock draws a richly sympathetic portrait of Frank. In addition to having a certain wanderlust, he was personable and handsome. “Frank has carried the empire of Cupid farther than many men,” Johnson wrote after they visited Lincolnshire, where the boy so enamored the local girls that one of them followed him back to London. In 1773, Frank married Elizabeth Ball (a pretty young white woman), with whom he had three children, all of whom came to live with Johnson in Bolt Court. Mrs. Thrale recalled inviting Frank and his wife to a servant’s ball at her home at Streatham, at which “Frank took offense at some attentions paid his Desdemona, and walked away next morning to London in wrath.” Presumably a white servant had flirted with his wife. At any rate, Frank was never altogether comfortable in the white world for which he had exchanged the black world of his captivity.

In his will, Johnson made Francis Barber his legatee, settling an annuity on him of £70 (a tidy sum in 18th-century England). At his master’s suggestion, Frank left London for Lichfield, Johnson’s birthplace, and set up a school in the nearby village of Brantwood​—​a mile away from Edial, where, 60 years earlier, Johnson had established his own school. Nevertheless, Frank, like so many of Johnson’s friends, was bad with money, and to keep the wolves from the door, he was forced to sell the personal mementoes that Johnson had given him.

“O how will Boswell envy me,” the Canon of Lichfield Cathedral wrote John Hawkins. “No less than Dr. Johnson’s watch is now in my possession! .  .  . I purchased it from Francis Barber, his black servant.” This galled Hawkins because he had wanted the watch for himself. In all events, Frank died in 1801 in Stafford Infirmary​—​which was run, curiously enough, by the grandfather of Charles Darwin, who founded the hospital to take in dying paupers.

“The highest panegyrick therefore that private virtue can receive,” Johnson wrote in one of his Rambler essays, “is the praise of servants .  .  . it very seldom happens that they commend or blame without justice.” That Francis Barber named not one but two of his sons Samuel shows the affectionate esteem in which he held his kind and loving master. 

Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Newman and his Family.