Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), surely one of the greatest of all Englishmen, is famous for creating the world's first English dictionary.
This is the dictionary in which he warned us that 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'; that 'no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money', and which informed readers that the oat is 'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'.
The abiding image of 'Dr Johnson' has been shaped by his friend James Boswell's Life Of Johnson. He is portrayed as a convivial public man - his loud voice booming in the coffee shops and taverns of 18th-century London, dispensing stinging putdowns, deft literary judgments and dazzling jokes.
However, a new biography of Samuel Johnson (in the year that marks the 300th anniversary of his birth) by the respected American literary historian Jeffrey Meyers makes the startling assertion that this towering figure in the history of English letters was tormented by a lifelong obsession with sadomasochism.
Meyers argues that this obsession was at the heart of Johnson's personality, and that it found its outlet in his 20-year relationship with Hester, the wife of his friend and patron Henry Thrale.
Revealed: Why the moralising Dr Johnson DIDN'T hold forth on his own love life
By Sam Leith
06th March 2009
Daily Mail
A sunny weekday afternoon in a well-appointed house in Streatham, South London.
A generous lunch has been served, and the dining room has echoed with laughter and conversation.
A distinguished male house guest is left alone with his younger and much more attractive hostess. He murmurs something. She flushes and assents. They retire to a private room and lock the door behind them.
She sits on a chair and slips off her shoes. He kneels before her and takes her foot on his lap. He fondles it in his big hands, then stoops to kiss it.
Soon, at his urging, she has bound him hand and foot with padlock and chains, and he - suffused with shame and delight - is submitting to be whipped.
Man of letters: Dr Samuel Johnson at work as his maid brings his meal
A lurid snapshot from Cynthia Payne's days offering 'personal services' from her Streatham brothel? Or a representative scene - 200 years earlier - from the startling secret life of one of history's greatest writers and wits?
Astonishingly, the second may well be the case. A new biography of Samuel Johnson by the respected American literary historian Jeffrey Meyers makes the startling assertion that this towering figure in the history of English letters was tormented by a lifelong obsession with sadomasochism.
Meyers argues that this obsession was at the heart of Johnson's personality, and that it found its outlet in his 20-year relationship with Hester, the wife of his friend and patron Henry Thrale.
It was an obsession that, arguably, played its part in destroying that relationship - yet has been all but overlooked by previous scholars.
'Despite the overwhelming evidence of Johnson's darkest secret,' writes Meyers, 'his modern biographers have not been able to reconcile his obsession with their exalted image of the great moralist and stern philosopher.'
The abiding image of 'Dr Johnson' has been shaped by his friend James Boswell's Life Of Johnson. He is portrayed as a convivial public man - his loud voice booming in the coffee shops and taverns of 18th-century London, dispensing stinging putdowns, deft literary judgments and dazzling jokes.
This is the Johnson whose aphorisms fizz from the pages of every dictionary of quotations: who warned us that 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'; that 'no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money', and who informed readers of his dictionary that the oat is 'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'.
The Johnson of this traditional version is a pious but irascible moralist. He is a man long on opinions and short on self-doubt; a man indulgent but disapproving of his friend's rakish escapades in the *****houses of London; a man, in short, entirely comfortable in his own skin.
Samuel Johnson's landmark Dictionary of the English Language
The Johnson who emerges from Meyers's gripping book, however, is one racked with self-doubt, tortured by sexual guilt and living under the dual terrors of earthly madness and eternal damnation.
Boswell came to know Johnson only late in the great man's long life. Johnson was flattered by Boswell, and amused by him, and perhaps conscious that it was through Boswell that he'd craft his own myth.
Boswell, though no prude himself, censored much of his story - ignoring Dr Johnson's drug use and mental illness, cleaning up his table-talk and, vitally, suppressing what if anything he knew of Johnson's sexual past.
If he hoped by so doing to spare Johnson's dignity, he ignored the precept that Johnson himself set out when writing his own Lives Of The Most Eminent English Poets. It was the job of the biographer, he said, to 'lead the thoughts into domestick privacies, and display the minutest details of daily life'.
It seems unlikely, though, that his biographer was the person to whom Johnson opened the innermost chambers of his heart. For that, we need to look to Hester Thrale, his confidante and comforter.
She was the woman with whom - more than his wife or his mother - he formed the most intimate spiritual connection of his life. When they first met, at the beginning of 1765, Samuel Johnson was a widower in his 56th year - his first and only wife, Elizabeth or 'Tetty', had died in the spring of 1752. Hester Thrale was then just two weeks shy of her 24th birthday.
She was only 4ft 11in tall, with chestnut hair, grey eyes and pretty features.
Vivacious and intelligent, she was full of curiosity and gossip, 'lively and chatty - all gay and agreeable'.
Her husband, Henry, a decade her senior, was a cold and selfish man of the world. Hester had married him when she was only 21 to please her mother.
Heir to a brewery fortune and MP for Southwark, he treated Hester with summary cruelty and humiliated her with his philandering. She, meanwhile, gave birth to 12 children in 14 years, of whom eight died in infancy or childhood.
The Thrales welcomed Johnson permanently into their household, and the scene was set for a curious love-triangle: the unfaithful husband, the wretchedly unhappy wife and the famous man of letters.
Henry admired Johnson, and he returned his regard. But with Henry often in London on business, Johnson became Hester's dearest friend.
He may have felt about her a slightly different way than she felt about him. Thirty years her senior, Johnson was not a seductive prospect. In an age when the average man stood just 5ft 5in in his stockinged feet, Johnson was an ungainly giant of nearly 6ft tall. He was clumsy and boisterous, physically imposing and when he laughed, the sound 'seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch'.
He was stocky, large-featured, ill-dressed and prone to bursts of vile temper or deep gloom. At periods throughout his life, he suffered depressive breakdowns - often triggered by guilt or grief - that incapacitated him for weeks.
The mental torments that divided Johnson against himself were matched by his physical disabilities. Scrofula in early infancy had left him more than half blind and nearly deaf; smallpox had scarred him and a botched, horrifically painful childhood operation to remove his tubercular neck glands had left great welts down the side of his face.
His physical mannerisms were no less striking. He seems to have suffered from what would nowadays be diagnosed as Tourette's syndrome - his speech distorted by whistles and clucks, his body convulsed with physical tics.
He may also have had obsessive compulsive disorder - he counted his steps before leaving a room, and would make sure one foot in particular crossed the threshold first. He also felt compelled to tap his cane on every single railing that he walked past.
Yet in the face of all this, and despite regarding himself as lazy, he was one of the most prolific writers in the language, churning out up to 12,000 words at a sitting or dashing off a 1,000-word essay in half an hour while a messenger boy stood waiting to bring it to the printer.
His fable Rasselas was written in a single week to pay the bill for his mother's funeral. It has remained continually in print for 250 years.
He was one of the first real literary celebrities: a prodigious poet, essayist, reporter, dramatist, biographer, editor and critic - even before you consider the achievement for which he is best known, his pioneering dictionary.
So Johnson was an adornment to the Thrales' household - his boorishness, fits of temper and personal foibles tolerated and even indulged. He responded to their kindness with deep gratitude, even calling Henry Thrale 'Master'. It was for his 'Mistress', though, that he had the strongest feelings.
But Hester was not Johnson's intellectual or spiritual match, and in later years she refused him the sexual release he craved. She became an alcoholic and latterly opium-addicted invalid, still affecting a girlish coquettishness which was sneeringly mocked by Johnson's friends.
This must have frustrated Johnson. He was a profoundly physical man - seeking to drive off his bouts of depression with 32-mile walks, or erupting into violence when angered (he once knocked a bookseller to the ground with a bound folio).
And he was a man whose tremendous appetite - he would gobble down huge meals with veins standing out on his sweatslicked forehead - was not confined to food.
'His amorous inclinations,' wrote Boswell, 'were uncommonly strong and impetuous.'
He once told his friend, the actor David Garrick: 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk-stockings and white bubbies of your actresses excite my genitals.'
On another occasion, asked what the greatest pleasures of life were, he said that the first was 'f****** and the second drinking'.
These were pleasures that, through sheer force of will, he denied himself for long periods of his life. He feared two things: madness in this life, and damnation in the next. The flames of Hell were never far from his mind.
So his feelings of attraction towards Hester - a married woman - would have been a source of torment to him. Physical restraint and chastisement were at once an outlet for, and a reproach to, those sexual feelings.
In 1771, Johnson wrote in his diary: 'De pedicis et manicis insana cogitatio' ('mad thoughts about fetters and manacles').
In one 1773 letter - written in elaborately formal French so that, if intercepted by servants, it could not be understood - he begged her: 'I wish, my protector, that your authority will always be clear to me, and that you will keep me in that form of slavery which you know so well how to make blissful.'
But there are signs that Hester - initially compliant - was an increasingly reluctant dominatrix. 'I will detain you no longer,' she wrote in reply, 'so farewell and be good; and do not quarrel with your Governess for not using the rod enough.'
Even so, power play was an integral part of their relationship. In 1779 Johnson told Hester: 'A woman has such power between the ages of 25 and 45 that she may tye a man to a post and whip him if she will.'
Hester later wrote: 'This he knew of himself was <cite>literally </cite>and <cite>strictly </cite>true I am sure.'
And in a diary entry about her relationship with Johnson - whom she called 'my slave' - Hester wrote: 'The fetters and padlocks will tell posterity the truth.'
The end of their story is a sad one. After Henry Thrale's death in 1781, many thought - and Johnson must surely have hoped - that she would become the second Mrs Johnson.
But after years of giving half her life to Johnson's demands, she fell in love with, and married, an Italian musician of her own age named Gabriele Piozzi.
Johnson sent her a vicious letter reproaching her for her 'folly' and 'wickedness', and begging to see her one last time. She replied that the ferocity of his letter meant she was 'forced to desire the conclusion of a correspondence which I can bear to continue no longer'.
His letter of apology came too late. Hester was gone. Johnson was 75 and he wrote to a friend: 'Wherever I turn, the dead or the dying meet my notice, and force my attention upon misery and mortality.'
Five months later, he died. His last years, Meyers reports, saw him racked with 'stroke, gallstone, gout, arthritis, bronchitis, emphysema, asthma, tumour and dropsy' and medicated with 'valerian, musk, hartshorn, squills, terebinth, ipecacuanha, Spanish fly and opium'.
He faced his ailments with extraordinary courage, demanding his squeamish doctors cut deeper into his legs to bleed out dropsical water. 'I will be conquered,' he insisted. 'I will not capitulate.'
When they opened him up postmortem they found his liver cirrhotic, one kidney exploded, and a stone the size of a gooseberry in his gall-bladder.
In his last week on Earth, Johnson burned many of his papers. Among them were two quarto volumes of his most private journal - volumes he feared terribly falling into the wrong hands. Had they been stolen, he said, he would have gone mad. Boswell burned the third volume after Johnson's death.
It is not surprising Johnson found his 'secret far dearer to him than his life' too painful even to confess to posterity. Yet knowing about it enriches our understanding of this great, and greatly agonised man.
His was a life in which desire and madness were at war with duty and reason, in which his sheer physical courage warred with the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
'The gradations of a hero's life,' he told Boswell, 'are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.'
Ford Madox Ford called him 'the most tragic of all our major literary figures' - and at the heart of the tragedy, it seems, lies his unlikely relationship with Hester.
Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers is published by Basic Books. Available from Amazon.co.uk: low prices in Electronics, Books, Music, DVDs & more
dailymail.co.uk
This is the dictionary in which he warned us that 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'; that 'no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money', and which informed readers that the oat is 'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'.
The abiding image of 'Dr Johnson' has been shaped by his friend James Boswell's Life Of Johnson. He is portrayed as a convivial public man - his loud voice booming in the coffee shops and taverns of 18th-century London, dispensing stinging putdowns, deft literary judgments and dazzling jokes.
However, a new biography of Samuel Johnson (in the year that marks the 300th anniversary of his birth) by the respected American literary historian Jeffrey Meyers makes the startling assertion that this towering figure in the history of English letters was tormented by a lifelong obsession with sadomasochism.
Meyers argues that this obsession was at the heart of Johnson's personality, and that it found its outlet in his 20-year relationship with Hester, the wife of his friend and patron Henry Thrale.
Revealed: Why the moralising Dr Johnson DIDN'T hold forth on his own love life
By Sam Leith
06th March 2009
Daily Mail
A sunny weekday afternoon in a well-appointed house in Streatham, South London.
A generous lunch has been served, and the dining room has echoed with laughter and conversation.
A distinguished male house guest is left alone with his younger and much more attractive hostess. He murmurs something. She flushes and assents. They retire to a private room and lock the door behind them.
She sits on a chair and slips off her shoes. He kneels before her and takes her foot on his lap. He fondles it in his big hands, then stoops to kiss it.
Soon, at his urging, she has bound him hand and foot with padlock and chains, and he - suffused with shame and delight - is submitting to be whipped.
Man of letters: Dr Samuel Johnson at work as his maid brings his meal
A lurid snapshot from Cynthia Payne's days offering 'personal services' from her Streatham brothel? Or a representative scene - 200 years earlier - from the startling secret life of one of history's greatest writers and wits?
Astonishingly, the second may well be the case. A new biography of Samuel Johnson by the respected American literary historian Jeffrey Meyers makes the startling assertion that this towering figure in the history of English letters was tormented by a lifelong obsession with sadomasochism.
Meyers argues that this obsession was at the heart of Johnson's personality, and that it found its outlet in his 20-year relationship with Hester, the wife of his friend and patron Henry Thrale.
It was an obsession that, arguably, played its part in destroying that relationship - yet has been all but overlooked by previous scholars.
'Despite the overwhelming evidence of Johnson's darkest secret,' writes Meyers, 'his modern biographers have not been able to reconcile his obsession with their exalted image of the great moralist and stern philosopher.'
The abiding image of 'Dr Johnson' has been shaped by his friend James Boswell's Life Of Johnson. He is portrayed as a convivial public man - his loud voice booming in the coffee shops and taverns of 18th-century London, dispensing stinging putdowns, deft literary judgments and dazzling jokes.
This is the Johnson whose aphorisms fizz from the pages of every dictionary of quotations: who warned us that 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'; that 'no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money', and who informed readers of his dictionary that the oat is 'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'.
The Johnson of this traditional version is a pious but irascible moralist. He is a man long on opinions and short on self-doubt; a man indulgent but disapproving of his friend's rakish escapades in the *****houses of London; a man, in short, entirely comfortable in his own skin.
Samuel Johnson's landmark Dictionary of the English Language
The Johnson who emerges from Meyers's gripping book, however, is one racked with self-doubt, tortured by sexual guilt and living under the dual terrors of earthly madness and eternal damnation.
Boswell came to know Johnson only late in the great man's long life. Johnson was flattered by Boswell, and amused by him, and perhaps conscious that it was through Boswell that he'd craft his own myth.
Boswell, though no prude himself, censored much of his story - ignoring Dr Johnson's drug use and mental illness, cleaning up his table-talk and, vitally, suppressing what if anything he knew of Johnson's sexual past.
If he hoped by so doing to spare Johnson's dignity, he ignored the precept that Johnson himself set out when writing his own Lives Of The Most Eminent English Poets. It was the job of the biographer, he said, to 'lead the thoughts into domestick privacies, and display the minutest details of daily life'.
It seems unlikely, though, that his biographer was the person to whom Johnson opened the innermost chambers of his heart. For that, we need to look to Hester Thrale, his confidante and comforter.
She was the woman with whom - more than his wife or his mother - he formed the most intimate spiritual connection of his life. When they first met, at the beginning of 1765, Samuel Johnson was a widower in his 56th year - his first and only wife, Elizabeth or 'Tetty', had died in the spring of 1752. Hester Thrale was then just two weeks shy of her 24th birthday.
She was only 4ft 11in tall, with chestnut hair, grey eyes and pretty features.
Vivacious and intelligent, she was full of curiosity and gossip, 'lively and chatty - all gay and agreeable'.
Her husband, Henry, a decade her senior, was a cold and selfish man of the world. Hester had married him when she was only 21 to please her mother.
Heir to a brewery fortune and MP for Southwark, he treated Hester with summary cruelty and humiliated her with his philandering. She, meanwhile, gave birth to 12 children in 14 years, of whom eight died in infancy or childhood.
The Thrales welcomed Johnson permanently into their household, and the scene was set for a curious love-triangle: the unfaithful husband, the wretchedly unhappy wife and the famous man of letters.
Henry admired Johnson, and he returned his regard. But with Henry often in London on business, Johnson became Hester's dearest friend.
He may have felt about her a slightly different way than she felt about him. Thirty years her senior, Johnson was not a seductive prospect. In an age when the average man stood just 5ft 5in in his stockinged feet, Johnson was an ungainly giant of nearly 6ft tall. He was clumsy and boisterous, physically imposing and when he laughed, the sound 'seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch'.
He was stocky, large-featured, ill-dressed and prone to bursts of vile temper or deep gloom. At periods throughout his life, he suffered depressive breakdowns - often triggered by guilt or grief - that incapacitated him for weeks.
The mental torments that divided Johnson against himself were matched by his physical disabilities. Scrofula in early infancy had left him more than half blind and nearly deaf; smallpox had scarred him and a botched, horrifically painful childhood operation to remove his tubercular neck glands had left great welts down the side of his face.
His physical mannerisms were no less striking. He seems to have suffered from what would nowadays be diagnosed as Tourette's syndrome - his speech distorted by whistles and clucks, his body convulsed with physical tics.
He may also have had obsessive compulsive disorder - he counted his steps before leaving a room, and would make sure one foot in particular crossed the threshold first. He also felt compelled to tap his cane on every single railing that he walked past.
Yet in the face of all this, and despite regarding himself as lazy, he was one of the most prolific writers in the language, churning out up to 12,000 words at a sitting or dashing off a 1,000-word essay in half an hour while a messenger boy stood waiting to bring it to the printer.
His fable Rasselas was written in a single week to pay the bill for his mother's funeral. It has remained continually in print for 250 years.
He was one of the first real literary celebrities: a prodigious poet, essayist, reporter, dramatist, biographer, editor and critic - even before you consider the achievement for which he is best known, his pioneering dictionary.
So Johnson was an adornment to the Thrales' household - his boorishness, fits of temper and personal foibles tolerated and even indulged. He responded to their kindness with deep gratitude, even calling Henry Thrale 'Master'. It was for his 'Mistress', though, that he had the strongest feelings.
But Hester was not Johnson's intellectual or spiritual match, and in later years she refused him the sexual release he craved. She became an alcoholic and latterly opium-addicted invalid, still affecting a girlish coquettishness which was sneeringly mocked by Johnson's friends.
This must have frustrated Johnson. He was a profoundly physical man - seeking to drive off his bouts of depression with 32-mile walks, or erupting into violence when angered (he once knocked a bookseller to the ground with a bound folio).
And he was a man whose tremendous appetite - he would gobble down huge meals with veins standing out on his sweatslicked forehead - was not confined to food.
'His amorous inclinations,' wrote Boswell, 'were uncommonly strong and impetuous.'
He once told his friend, the actor David Garrick: 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk-stockings and white bubbies of your actresses excite my genitals.'
On another occasion, asked what the greatest pleasures of life were, he said that the first was 'f****** and the second drinking'.
These were pleasures that, through sheer force of will, he denied himself for long periods of his life. He feared two things: madness in this life, and damnation in the next. The flames of Hell were never far from his mind.
So his feelings of attraction towards Hester - a married woman - would have been a source of torment to him. Physical restraint and chastisement were at once an outlet for, and a reproach to, those sexual feelings.
In 1771, Johnson wrote in his diary: 'De pedicis et manicis insana cogitatio' ('mad thoughts about fetters and manacles').
In one 1773 letter - written in elaborately formal French so that, if intercepted by servants, it could not be understood - he begged her: 'I wish, my protector, that your authority will always be clear to me, and that you will keep me in that form of slavery which you know so well how to make blissful.'
But there are signs that Hester - initially compliant - was an increasingly reluctant dominatrix. 'I will detain you no longer,' she wrote in reply, 'so farewell and be good; and do not quarrel with your Governess for not using the rod enough.'
Even so, power play was an integral part of their relationship. In 1779 Johnson told Hester: 'A woman has such power between the ages of 25 and 45 that she may tye a man to a post and whip him if she will.'
Hester later wrote: 'This he knew of himself was <cite>literally </cite>and <cite>strictly </cite>true I am sure.'
And in a diary entry about her relationship with Johnson - whom she called 'my slave' - Hester wrote: 'The fetters and padlocks will tell posterity the truth.'
The end of their story is a sad one. After Henry Thrale's death in 1781, many thought - and Johnson must surely have hoped - that she would become the second Mrs Johnson.
But after years of giving half her life to Johnson's demands, she fell in love with, and married, an Italian musician of her own age named Gabriele Piozzi.
Johnson sent her a vicious letter reproaching her for her 'folly' and 'wickedness', and begging to see her one last time. She replied that the ferocity of his letter meant she was 'forced to desire the conclusion of a correspondence which I can bear to continue no longer'.
His letter of apology came too late. Hester was gone. Johnson was 75 and he wrote to a friend: 'Wherever I turn, the dead or the dying meet my notice, and force my attention upon misery and mortality.'
Five months later, he died. His last years, Meyers reports, saw him racked with 'stroke, gallstone, gout, arthritis, bronchitis, emphysema, asthma, tumour and dropsy' and medicated with 'valerian, musk, hartshorn, squills, terebinth, ipecacuanha, Spanish fly and opium'.
He faced his ailments with extraordinary courage, demanding his squeamish doctors cut deeper into his legs to bleed out dropsical water. 'I will be conquered,' he insisted. 'I will not capitulate.'
When they opened him up postmortem they found his liver cirrhotic, one kidney exploded, and a stone the size of a gooseberry in his gall-bladder.
In his last week on Earth, Johnson burned many of his papers. Among them were two quarto volumes of his most private journal - volumes he feared terribly falling into the wrong hands. Had they been stolen, he said, he would have gone mad. Boswell burned the third volume after Johnson's death.
It is not surprising Johnson found his 'secret far dearer to him than his life' too painful even to confess to posterity. Yet knowing about it enriches our understanding of this great, and greatly agonised man.
His was a life in which desire and madness were at war with duty and reason, in which his sheer physical courage warred with the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
'The gradations of a hero's life,' he told Boswell, 'are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.'
Ford Madox Ford called him 'the most tragic of all our major literary figures' - and at the heart of the tragedy, it seems, lies his unlikely relationship with Hester.
Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers is published by Basic Books. Available from Amazon.co.uk: low prices in Electronics, Books, Music, DVDs & more
dailymail.co.uk
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