Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BRIAN YOUNG

T HE NATURE OF FRIENDSHIP has proved elusive to any general theory since long before Cicero pondered the theme in Laelius de Amicitia, and its mysteries are perhaps best explored by poets and novelists, although historians have conspicuously enjoyed its consolations. When exploring the streets of London with Thomas Carlyle, idolater of Oliver Cromwell, his biographer, James Anthony Froude, was often conscious of parallels in this discursive activity with that intimately shared by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in the eighteenth century. Carlyle had placed Dr Johnson alongside Jean-Jacques Rousseau as constituting the ‘Hero as Man of Letters’. Much though Rousseau is conventionally seen as the antithesis of Johnson, Hester Thrale Piozzi, who knew Johnson at least as well as many of his contemporaries, thought that they had two important things in common, a ‘keen sense of right and wrong, and a warmth of imagination little consistent with sound and perfect health’. And by a quirk of history, Rousseau, absconding from the largely imagined persecution of his fellow philosophes , had lived for over a year, between early 1766 and April 1767, at Wotton, in Derbyshire, only five miles west of Ashbourne, where resided Johnson’s lifelong friend, Dr John Taylor, with whom he regularly stayed. 1 An exceptionally fine essay on Taylor is to be found in the gallery of pen-portraits, In Christ Church Hall , written towards the end of his life by Keith Feiling, now himself perceptively appreciated by Richard Davenport-Hines in his subtle study, History in the House . 2 Taylor (1711-88), a pugnacious and litigious character, was the rector of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, a clerical pluralist prospering before the myth of a vocation turned a profession into a calling. Feiling had averred that ‘no one but Jane Austen could do full justice’ to ‘the very respectable Dr. John Taylor, known to us through Boswell’s pages as Samuel Johnson’s oldest friend’. 3 The techniques of the novelist had, however, already provided a parallel with clergy such as Taylor in the form of Parson Thwackum, Henry Fielding’s caricature of the type, in The History of Tom Jones , a Foundling, published in 1749, thirteen years after Taylor’s opportunistic ordination.

1 Hester Thrale Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., During the Last Twenty Years of His Life , in Arthur Sherbo ed., Memoirs and Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson (London, 1974), p. 66; Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings , (11 vols., London, 1909-52), vi. 126-27 and x. 156. 2 Richard Davenport-Hines, History in the House: some remarkable dons and the teaching of politics, character and statecraft (London, 2024). 3 Keith Feiling, ‘John Taylor’, In Christ Church Hall (London, 1960), pp. 63-4.

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