The great lexicographer, essayist, critic, editor and poet Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, educated at Oxford, and thereafter spent his professional life in London. One of his houses there, in Pump Court close to Fleet Street and The Olde Cheshire Cheese, one of hi favourite watering holes, is maintained as a museum to him to today.
His hold in the affections of those who read his work, supplemented by the tremendous biography of him written by James Boswell soon after his death, is still strong. Macaulay, the 19th century historian and essayist, wrote that `the memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive. The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger and swallowing his tea in oceans.’ (Thomas Babington Macaulay, `Miscellaneous Essays and the Lays of Ancient Rome’, Home Library, London. Undated, 254). This eccentric, avuncular image belies the reality clearly testified to in many of his works of a lifelong struggle against what today would be described as mental health issues – severe depression sometimes verging on the clinical. It would be invidious to try to give this a modern label like bipolar, but Johnson understood the darker reaches of the mind, and his productivity in view of this is astonishing. With his famous dictionary alone, he could lay claim to the name of father of the modern English language – a least in terms of its spelling, meanings and definitions.
In Swan Street, on the way from the modern station, a little way out of the town of West Malling, on the façade of Brooke House, now a Nat West bank, sits a sign saying that Samuel Johnson often visited, in the final decades of his life. Brooke refers to the name of the owner of the house at the time, Frances. One of his closest friends, the diarist Hester Thrale, who often went to visit him there wrote to Johnson of Malling being `the quiet old-fashioned place in Kent, that you liked so because it was agreeable to your own notions of a rural life.’ (in September 1777. Quoted in the footnote to James Boswell, `The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, Including a Tour of the Hebrides,’ Volume Two, John Murray, London, 1831, 47). Opposite the oasis of tranquillity which is St Marys Abbey, with its gardens, and the remarkable Norman tower possibly built by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, and by a small waterfall which figured in a painting by J M W Turner in the early 1800s, it is easy to see why this place might have appealed to him.
Despite this peacefulness, it is clear from recollections in Boswell’s life of the great writer that the demons certainly did not leave Johnson be when he sought refuge in this rural retreat. On 18th September 1768, in a note made while in Malling, he wrote:
`I have now begun the sixtieth year of my life. How the last year has past, I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking. This day has been past in great perturbation; I was distracted at church in an uncommon degree, and my distress has had very little intermission. I have found myself somewhat relieved by reading, which I therefore intent to practise when I am able. This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this I purpose to deliberate; I know not whether it may not too much disturb me.’ (Ibid, 47-8)
In a footnote to this, Bowell appends, `It appears that [Johnson] visited with Mrs Thrale, Mr Brooks of Town Malling of which primitive house and manners we find some account in the Letters.’ On 23rd August 1777, Johnson wrote to Mrs Thrale: `It was very well done by Mr Brooke to send for you. His house is one of my favourite places. His water is very commodious, and the whole place has the true old appearance of a little country town. I hope Miss goes, for she takes notice.’ Despite the prettiness, and the soothing sound of the cascade waters opposite, it did not, it seems, help to distract the great doctor from his inner turmoil. His unflinching honesty about this in his works is presumably why he was to appeal to figures like Samuel Beckett in the twentieth century, and why his work still has such resonance and such a contemporary feel today. Almost two and a half centuries after it was produced. “!=type