The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual (Volume 24)

By Jack Lynch, J. T. Scanlan, Stephen Clarke and 14 more

The move to a new publisher has given The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual the opportunity to recommit to what it does best: present to a wide readership cant-free scholarly articles and essays and searching book reviews, all featuring a wide variety of approaches, written by both seasoned scholars and relative newcomers. Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century.

For more than two decades, The Age of Johnson has presented a vast corpus of Johnsonian studies "in the broadest sense," as founding editor Paul J. Korshin put it in the preface to Volume 1, and it has retained the interest of a wide readership. In thousands of pages of articles, review essays, and reviews, The Age of Johnson has made a permanent contribution to our understanding of the eighteenth century, and particularly of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his interests, and has also served as an outlet for writers who are not academics but have something important to say about the eighteenth century.
 

ISSN 0884-5816.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781684483020

Stephen Clarke

Stephen Clarke (b. 1958) is the bestselling author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction that satirize the peculiarities of French culture. Born in St. Albans, England, Clarke studied French and German at Oxford University. After graduating, he took a number of odd jobs, including teaching English to French businessmen. In 2004, he self-published A Year in the Merde, a comic novel skewering contemporary French society. The novel was an instant success and has led to numerous follow-ups, including Dial M for Merde (2008), 1,000 Years of Annoying the French (2010), and Paris Revealed (2011). After working as a journalist for a French press group for ten years, Paris-based Clarke now has a regular spot on French cable TV, poking fun at French culture. 

Book preview

Preface

When Gabe Hornstein, our friend and longtime publisher, died on 17 February 2017, and when AMS Press itself folded shortly thereafter, the two of us received an outpouring of inquiries from contributors and readers of The Age of Johnson. We well understood this reaction. The Age of Johnson first appeared in 1987, and since then it has presented a vast corpus of Johnsonian studies in the broadest sense, as our founding editor Paul J. Korshin put it in the preface to volume 1, and it has retained the interest of a wide readership. In thousands of pages of articles, review essays, and reviews, The Age of Johnson has made a permanent contribution to our understanding of the eighteenth century, and particularly of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his interests. As we mourned Gabe’s death, we found it increasingly difficult to imagine Johnsonian studies without The Age of Johnson, and we were happy, at this sad time, that perhaps others felt the same way.

And so, after many months of discussions, and after much mollifying of concerned writers and readers, we are delighted to be able to announce, with the publication of this volume, our twenty-fourth, that The Age of Johnson is back and on solid footing. Our annual is now under the imprint of Bucknell University Press, with the volumes themselves to be produced by Rutgers University Press.

The move to a new publisher has given us the opportunity to recommit ourselves to what we do best: present to a wide readership cant-free scholarly articles and essays and searching book reviews, all featuring a wide variety of approaches, written by both seasoned scholars and relative newcomers. Professor Korshin was proud that The Age of Johnson was the first port of call, as he put it, for many young scholars, and we aspire to continue this tradition. And so we invite younger scholars and writers to submit their work to us. The Age of Johnson has also been an outlet for scholars at all stages of their careers, and for writers who are not academics. We welcome all manuscripts from those who have something significant to say about Johnson, his interests, or the eighteenth century generally.

We have also made some changes. Our editorial board has a few new members: Nancy Johnson, Devoney Looser, and Howard Weinbrot. And the size of our volumes is now more in line with most other scholarly books. We are open to further changes and welcome suggestions from our readers.

This volume presents a collection of articles on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. We also include articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform; Charlotte Lennox’s professional literary career; and the conjectural history of Homer in the eighteenth century.

And as usual, our reviews in this volume are longer and more detailed than standard book reviews. They are essentially literary essays on Johnsonian topics. In this volume we feature two especially searching review essays, one by a first-time contributor, Eric Bennett, who addresses two recent works of historical fiction on the eighteenth century, and another by a longtime contributor, David Venturo, who considers the three new volumes of the Lives of the Poets in the Yale edition.

As always, we gratefully acknowledge those who have offered advice and support of various kinds: Greg Clingham, former longtime director of Bucknell University Press; Suzanne E. Guiod, current director of Bucknell University Press; the Office of the Dean, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–Newark; Professor Hugh F. Lena, provost and senior vice president, Providence College; and Allison Schmidt, undergraduate student intern at Providence College.

JACK LYNCH

Newark, New Jersey

J. T. SCANLAN

Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Age of Johnson

Essays

Milton at Bolt Court

Stephen Clarke

Relicks are venerable things, and are only not to be worshipped.

—Thomas Tyers, Gentleman’s Magazine 53 (December 1784)

When Johnson’s Life of John Milton was published in 1779 with the first twenty-two of the Prefaces to the English Poets, it immediately attracted critical attention for the way Johnson balanced his reverence for much of Milton’s poetry with his distaste for Milton’s republicanism and private character. Some readers accepted that tension—James Beattie, for example, concluded that Johnson was more civil to Milton than I expected, though he hates him for his blank verse and his politics—whereas Horace Walpole’s more unreflective Whig response was to dismiss it as mere abuse: Johnson’s billingsgate on Milton.¹ Some attacks, such as the Reverend Francis Blackburne’s Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton (London, 1780), emphasized Johnson’s political antipathy, while others, such as Robert Potter in the Gentleman’s Magazine for October 1781 and in his Inquiry into Some Passages in Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (London, 1783), added to politics Johnson’s lack of sympathy with some of Milton’s poetry.

But there was also an awareness that amidst Johnson’s astringent asides on Milton’s surly republicanism and domestic autocracy were passages showing Johnson’s awed respect for Milton’s poetic achievement, and the consequent honoring of Milton the writer. One element of this is shared between Johnson and Milton. Johnson records that I cannot but remark a kind of respect, perhaps unconsciously, paid to this great man by his biographers: every house in which he resided is historically mentioned, as if it were an injury to neglect naming any place that he honoured by his presence.² Boswell quotes that passage, adding that I had, before I read this observation, been desirous of shewing that respect to Johnson, by various inquiries. Finding him this evening in a very good humour, I prevailed on him to give me an exact list of his places of residence, since he entered the metropolis as an authour, which I subjoin in a note.³ And in that note, the last of seventeen entries is 8 Bolt Court.

Johnson moved to Bolt Court in March 1776 and lived there until his death on 13 December 1784. Sir John Hawkins describes the establishment as follows:

About this time, Dr. Johnson changed his dwelling in Johnson’s court, for a somewhat larger in Bolt court, Fleet street, where he commenced an intimacy with the landlord of it, a very worthy and sensible man, some time since deceased, Mr. Edmund Allen the printer. Behind it was a garden, which he took delight in watering; a room on the ground-floor was assigned to Mrs. Williams, and the whole of the two pairs of stairs floor was made a repository for his books; one of the rooms thereon being his study. Here, in the intervals of his residence at Streatham, he received the visits of his friends, and, to the most intimate of them, sometimes gave, not inelegant dinners.⁴

Hawkins’s daughter Lætitia-Matilda, in her Memoirs, says that the domestic economy of Bolt Court "always exceeded my expectations, as far as the condition of the apartment into which I was admitted, could enable me to judge. It was not, indeed, his study, among his books, he probably might bring Magliabecchi to recollection; but I saw him only in a decent drawing-room of a house not inferior to others in the same local situation, and with stout old-fashioned mahogany chairs and tables."⁵ Boswell on 18 April 1778 adds the comment that He shewed me to-night his drawing-room, very genteelly fitted up (Life, 3:316).We have no detailed image of the interior of the house at Bolt Court, though a later engraving by E. Finden of Johnson and Boswell in Johnson’s sitting-room was based on a sketch by J. Smith that shows an old-fashioned, paneled room, presumably on the first floor. There are views of the exterior by George Shepherd (1784–1862) in the collection at Dr. Johnson’s House at Gough Square, and a generally similar engraved view, but with figures in the foreground, after J. T. Smith, as published in Johnsoniana (London, 1836). The back room on the first floor, where Johnson died, was subsequently taken into the adjoining premises of Bensley the printer (who had acquired them from Edmund Allen), following a fire at Bensley’s warehouse, variously given as 1807 and 1819; in 1837 it was said that nothing then remained of the house.⁶

One thing we do know of the interior comes from a letter from Johnson to Reynolds’s sister Frances. On 19 October 1779 he wrote to her: You will do me a great favour if You will buy for me the prints of Mr. Burke, Mr. Dyer, and Dr. Goldsmith, as You know a good impression. If any of your own pictures be engraved buy them for me, I am fitting a little room with prints.⁷ We do not know what prints Frances Reynolds may have procured, though some of her own paintings were engraved, in particular Elizabeth Montagu as engraved by Charles Towneley and John Hoole as engraved by Anker Smith, and it is possible that these images may have hung at Bolt Court—and in the case of Elizabeth Montagu very possible. The sale catalogue of Johnson’s library lists some sixty-one framed and glazed portrait prints along with his books, together with eighty-five further portrait prints. There were prints of Garrick and Reynolds, and the final lot, 662, included a framed and glazed print of Elizabeth Montagu.

The portrait prints formed the last twelve lots on the final, fourth day of the sale. They are generally listed simply as portraits, but the subject of one other is known. This is a print of Milton, a copperplate engraving by Jacobus Houbraken in 1741. It appears to have been taken from the portrait now at the National Portrait Gallery, which was mentioned by John Aubrey as being in the possession of Milton’s widow; the artist is unknown.⁸ Houbraken (1698–1780) was a Dutch portrait engraver, the son of the painter and writer on art Arnold Houbraken. The print had been published in the first volume of Thomas Birch’s Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain, Engraven by Mr. Houbraken, and Mr. Vertue: With Their Lives and Characters (London, 1743). The volume consisted of eighty copper-engraved portraits, mostly of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century subjects; a second volume followed in 1752 with an additional twenty-eight plates, which included such early eighteenth-century figures as Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, and the theologian Samuel Clarke. This example of the print, which has been darkened by exposure to light, shows the young Milton (who, Johnson records, had the reputation of having been in his youth eminently beautiful) in an oval frame above a grouping of lyre, serpent, book, and scroll, and was engraved from the painting, then in the possession of Arthur Onslow, speaker of the House of Commons (Lives, 1:273). It is contained in an eighteenth-century frame of what appears to be fruit-wood veneer over a pine carcass, and now resides at Dr. Johnson’s House (figure 1.1). How it arrived there is explained in three inscriptions on the back of the frame (figure 1.2).

The first is written in an eighteenth-century italic hand on a paper label pasted to the center of the pine back-piece to the frame. It reads:

formerly in the

possession of

Samuel Johnson

LL.D.

Beneath that is the second, longer inscription, written in ink directly onto the wood:

This engraving of Milton hung up in

Dr Johnson’s study. At his death, it was

purchased by John Hoole, who wrote the

above label on the back. From him, it came

to his Son, Rev. Samuel Hoole, & from him to

his Son, Rev. John Hoole. J. H.

[new hand] by whom it was given to William F. H. Attwood—3d March 18 [date obscured]

[further hand] After W.F.H. Attwood’s death, it passed to his sister,

Charlotte (Mrs Arnold Toynbee), who gave it to her

niece, Margaret Ruth Toynbee, Christmas 1924)

Figure 1.1. John Milton by Jacobus Houbraken, copperplate engraving. Courtesy of Dr. Johnson’s House, London.

Figure 1.2. Reverse of the frame.

The final brief inscription is on a slip of paper pasted to the passe-partout paper round the edge of the frame back. It reads:

This engraving is bequeathed to

DR JOHNSON’S HOUSE TRUST

1 [sic], Gough Square

Fleet Street, E.C.4

Margaret R. Toynbee 17/3/1952

These notes provide an unusually complete provenance, and invite a narrative that begins with John Hoole (1727–1803), translator of Tasso and Ariosto and long-standing friend of Johnson. Good Mr. Hoole (as he is at least four times described in Frances Burney’s Journals) was the son of Samuel Hoole, a successful Moorfields mechanician and watchmaker, who also assisted in creating the machinery for John Rich’s Covent Garden Theatre.⁹ Boswell records that in 1783 Hoole explained to Johnson that he was educated initially by his uncle, drawing the reply, "Sir, I knew him; we called him the metaphysical taylor. He was of a club in Old-street, with me and George Psalmanazar, and some others" (Life, 4:187). John Nichols records that the fondness of this benevolent Poet for literature shewed itself when he was a boy, so as to make him a favourite with his schoolmaster, while his harmless and gentle disposition caused him to be beloved by his schoolfellows.¹⁰ Hoole was a natural linguist, and, after learning Latin, French, and some Greek at school, he taught himself Italian; he also acquired a good clear italic hand, which is consistent with the handwriting of the short inscription on the label on the back of the Milton frame. He inherited a taste for the theater from his father’s involvement, and despite a career in the East India Office, where he was advanced to the auditors’ office and worked until his retirement, he wrote tragedies for the stage: Cyrus (1768), Timanthes (1770), and Cleonice (1775), all produced at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. But before that he had made his reputation as a translator, with Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1763), Metastasio’s Works (1767), and later Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1783).

In 1757 he married Susanna Smith (ca. 1730–1808), the handsome Quakeress, and through her family met John Scott of Amwell, whom he introduced to Johnson. Hoole had himself been introduced to Johnson by John Hawkesworth in 1761, and Johnson wrote dedications and made other contributions to his works. Johnson was fond of him; affectionate letters from Johnson to him survive from 1773, 1775, and 1776, and again from Johnson’s last visit to Ashbourne in 1784.¹¹ His profile was recorded by George Dance in 1793 and was etched by William Daniell in 1810.

Hoole was a habitué of Charles Burney’s house in St. Martin’s Street, and there are repeated references to him in Boswell’s Life as attending or hosting dinners where Johnson was present—though he is rarely recorded as an active participant in the conversation. Some decades later Lady Louisa Stuart recalled in a letter to Sir Walter Scott that he once fell in my way near thirty years ago. He was a clerk in the India House, a man of business of that ancient breed, now extinct, which used to be as much marked by plaited cambric ruffles, a neat wig, a snuff-coloured suit of clothes, and a corresponding sobriety of look, as one race of spaniels is by the black nose and silky hair, and in 1797 the young Charles Lamb found him more vapid than small beer, ‘sun-vinegared.’ ¹² Boswell himself reflected in 1776 that I could not help wondering tonight to think that Hoole had written tragedies, when I perceived so little fire in his conversation, and indeed so little imagery or genius of any kind.¹³ But Johnson saw him as a brother author, and Boswell records that Johnson would say to him Let you and I, Sir, go together, and eat a beef-steak in Grub-street (Life, 4:187).

It was Hoole who was instrumental in creating the Essex Head Club in 1783, toward the end of Johnson’s life, and it is Hoole who has provided us with the most detailed and sympathetic account of the last three weeks of Johnson’s life. The account was not printed until 1799, when it appeared in the European Magazine, but it had already been used by Boswell in the Life. Its detail and its sympathy have made it much quoted, with the result that Hoole has become a sort of gatekeeper to Johnson’s last days.¹⁴

Hoole’s narrative covers the period from Saturday 20 November to Johnson’s death on 13 December and reveals Johnson’s fervent belief and desire that those about him should take heed of his situation as a dying man and consider their own salvation. It shows Hoole as a close and valued friend of Johnson, and on a number of visits shows him accompanied by his son Samuel.

Samuel Hoole (1757/8–1839) appears to have had something of his father’s easy social manner, though there is one critical comment on him from Boswell; in 1776, when Samuel was about seventeen, he walked with his parents, Boswell, and Dr. Percy in the Mall (The number of beauties today was enchanting, noted Boswell), and Boswell recorded that, although Mrs. Hoole was a good-humored, talkative woman, he thought that young Hoole was an obstinate lad, so that he displeased me.¹⁵ Frances Burney does at one point in 1797 suggest to her brother James that Samuel was a trifle serious (or rather too much in the dumpus way as a candidate for matrimony, as she put it), but Samuel had by then not only published some poetry, but also been ordained. His Aurelia: or, The Contest: An Heroi-Comic Poem (1783) had included praise of Carter, Chapone, More, Montagu, and Burney herself (to whom he sent a copy of the poem), for her muse’s ability to lash unfeeling wealth, & stubborn Pride, and he was in orders by September 1784.¹⁶ He was with his father a regular visitor to the Burney household, and though he may once have displeased Boswell, he did not displease Johnson, who in November 1783 tried to secure him a place as reader to the Inner and Middle Temple, and in January 1784 sought the help of Bishop Percy in trying to get him a fellowship at Dulwich College. And so it was that in late November and early December 1784 Hoole father and newly ordained son attended the dying Johnson.

It is not the purpose of this essay to repeat Hoole’s account of Johnson’s last weeks, but some elements of it point to Hoole’s sense of awe before the failing Johnson—a Johnson, moreover, who challenged him on his faith and his need to pray and to read and meditate on the Bible. As Hoole explained to the young William Bowles (1755–1826) of Heale House, Wiltshire, to whom he wrote five letters between 30 November and the day after Johnson’s death, "I never passed such hours, so solemn and so affecting as I have now experienced with him. Oh my dear Sir! You know his greatness you know his goodness and will easily conceive what a friend must feel to be daily witness to the decline of such a man."¹⁷ On Sunday, 21 November, Johnson had given Hoole a copy of Fleetwood on the Sacrament. On 27 November, while seeking relief for his breathing in temporary lodgings in Islington, Johnson made his will, dictated by Hawkins and written by Hoole. On 28 November Johnson took by the hand Hoole’s wife (to whom he had stood as godfather when she was baptized into the Church of England) and gave her his blessing. On Sunday, 5 December, when Hoole’s son was of the company, Hoole recorded that Johnson had looked out a Sermon of Dr. Clarke’s ‘on the shortness of life’ for me to read to him after dinner but he was too ill to hear it.¹⁸ Johnson had asked that Hoole’s son should come and read him the Litany, and after a delay caused by a consultation with physicians, this took place on Wednesday, 8 December, in the presence of Hoole and his wife and John Nichols. Both Hoole and Nichols have left accounts of how Johnson urged the young clergyman to pray louder so that he could hear; Croker records that Samuel Hoole confirmed that, when he visited Johnson the next day, Johnson apologized for his peevishness (Boswell, Life, 4:409 and n2).

On Friday, 10 December, Samuel Hoole read prayers to Johnson; on Saturday John Hoole received Johnson’s affectionate blessing. He visited Johnson again on the evening of Sunday, 12 December, and the following morning; that evening, news of Johnson’s death was brought to father and son as they were having supper.

When Johnson’s will was read, both Hoole and his son were among those who were allowed to take a book of their choice from his library. We do not know what title either of them might have selected—but we do know what Hoole senior acquired when Johnson’s library was sold by James Christie two months later, on 16 February 1785 and the three following days.

The Beinecke Library copy of the sale catalogue is one of two copies that record all the buyers’ names and prices paid.¹⁹ This shows Hoole as the successful bidder for six lots, as follows:

242 8 Clarke’s sermons, &c. 6s. 6d.,

253 5. Publ. Pap. Statii opera, not. var. L.B. 1671 14s.

264 2. Lewis’s history of the English translations of the bible, &c. 7s. 6d.

439 Baretti’s Italian dictionary, 2 v. 1760 1.1.0

507 6. P. Ovidii Nasonis, 3 v. notis variorum, L.B. 1663, &c. 12s.

552 3. Aristotelis opera, &c. 4s.

It is surely no coincidence that Hoole should have bought the set of Clarke’s sermons, one of which Johnson had asked him to read to him little more than ten weeks before. As a translator from the Italian, he would have found Baretti’s Italian dictionary a useful text, and the other titles are editions of Ovid, Aristotle, and Statius, and the Reverend John Lewis’s history of translations of the Bible into English, first published in 1731.

As for the print of Milton, we have already seen Hoole’s inscription on its back; his name does not appear as one of the buyers for the framed and glazed prints that formed the last nine lots of the sale, but that part of the second inscription on the back of the frame that is written and initialed by his grandson the Reverend John Hoole clearly identifies him as purchaser of the print, stating that this engraving of Milton hung up in Dr. Johnson’s study. At his death, it was purchased by John Hoole, who wrote the above label on the back. It is relevant here that three of those last nine lots, consisting of twenty unspecified portraits, appear to have been bought by the trade, under the customary name of Money, and it may be that Hoole purchased the print from its unknown trade buyer—though another possibility is that he may have taken one of the eight framed portraits bought by his friend Burney as lot 657.

This is not the full extent of Hoole’s acquisitions from Johnson’s study. Thomas Tyers, the son of the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens, in his Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1784, wrote that Johnson

had a large, but not a splendid library, near 5,000 volumes. Many authors, not in hostility with him, presented him with their works. But his study did not contain half his books. He possessed the chair that belonged to the Ciceronian Dr. King of Oxford, which was given him by his friend Vansittart. It answers the purposes of reading and writing, by night or by day; and is as valuable in all respects as the chair of Ariosto, as delineated in the preface to Hoole’s liberal translation of that poet. Since the rounding of this period intelligence is brought that this literary chair is purchased by Mr. Hoole. Relicks are venerable things, and are only not to be worshipped.²⁰

So Hoole was given two books by Johnson, one shortly before his death and one in his will, and bought six more at his sale, as well as obtaining the Milton print and Johnson’s chair. But if we turn to Hoole’s will, there is more, as he left to his son Samuel all my prints pictures and drawings framed or otherwise … likewise … the writing desk that formerly belonged to my dear and most respected friend Dr Johnson.²¹ Hoole venerated Johnson, and that respect seems to have been shared by his descendants, as in 1901 they presented to the Birthplace Museum at Lichfield Johnson’s desk and chair, a mourning ring with a lock of Johnson’s hair, and the two books chosen by Hoole and his son under Johnson’s will. John Hoole had chosen a Lucretius (Leiden, 1725) and Samuel had chosen Terence’s Comedies (The Hague, 1726). The inscription in John Hoole’s book consists of an extract from the relevant passage of the will concluding This edition of Lucretius chosen by John Hoole; Samuel’s inscription is similar.

As for the Milton print, Hoole presumably kept it at his house at 56 Great Queen Street, where he wrote up his notes for the Narrative of Johnson’s last days, and where in 1783 Frances Reynolds had lodged with his family; in that year the engraving after her portrait of him appeared as the frontispiece to his translation of Orlando Furioso.²² Hoole retired from the India House late in 1785, and in April 1786 removed with his wife and son Samuel to the parsonage at Abinger in Surrey. The next tenant of the house in Great Queen Street was none other than Boswell, to whom Edmond Malone had written on 1 February 1786, I have seen Hoole’s house, and tho’ it is old, it has some advantages, and I think will suit you for one year at least. There is an excellent drawing room, and a study formed exactly for writing the life of Dr. Johnson. The next day Boswell noted in his journal heard all about Hoole’s house, which I inspected; and though I found it old-fashioned and part of it dark, resolved to fix it. Rev. Mr. Hoole went with me to Mr. Bang’s in Lyon’s Inn, the attorney who was to let it.²³

Samuel had a curacy at Abinger Wootton, and the following year published the sentimental tragedy of Edward; or, The Curate. In 1791 he married Elizabeth, the second daughter of Arthur Young (a great friend of Burney, to whom he was related by marriage), but Elizabeth was to die of consumption three years later. John Hoole himself had moved to Tenterden in Kent, and in 1803 died on a visit to Dorking. That same year Samuel was appointed the rector of Poplar Chapel in Middlesex, and in December married Catherine Wainford of Dorking. They had a son, John, who, after studying at Oxford, became in 1827 his father’s curate at Poplar; this is the Reverend John Hoole who annotated and initialed the inscription on the back of the frame of the Milton print. His father, Samuel, from whom he inherited it, died aged eighty-one in Tenterden in 1839.

The inscription then notes that the Rev. John Hoole gave the print at an unspecified date to William F. H. Atwood, after whose death it passed to his sister Charlotte (1841–1931). She was the indomitable wife of Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883), the social reformer and political economist, who was eleven years her junior. She was for many years honorary house treasurer of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford’s first women’s college, and was a passionate educationalist, with strong views on welfare and the local heritage, though her natural conservatism did not allow her to support either the idea of women taking the Oxford BA or women’s suffrage. Her nephew, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975), wrote of her with due deference that her heart was always kind, but her personality was commanding.²⁴ As recorded on the inscription, Charlotte at Christmas 1924 passed the print to her niece Margaret Ruth Toynbee (b. 1900), one of the sisters of the historian. Margaret never married, and in later life lived in Oxford with her elder sister Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee (1897–1985), who had been the Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge. As recorded on the slip of paper glued to the back of the frame, it was Margaret who bequeathed the print to Dr. Johnson’s House in 1952.

We should not be surprised that Johnson chose to hang a portrait print of Milton in his house, despite his having accused Milton of malignity, self-interest, petulance, and pride—and having claimed he would, but for Paradise Lost, have ranked among only the minor poets.²⁵ As Christine Rees has shown in Johnson’s Milton, he was immersed in Milton’s poetic achievement.²⁶ For all his abhorrence of Milton’s politics, his criticism of Milton’s Latinate diction, his lack of sympathy for blank verse, and his distaste for Milton’s domestic character, Johnson’s admiration for Milton the poet breaks through again and again. As with his equally controversial Life of Gray, unmeaning over-praise was as much his target as the status of the poet himself, and Milton’s reputation was above any intemperate criticism; as he concluded Rambler 140, The everlasting verdure of Milton’s laurels has nothing to fear from the blasts of malignity.²⁷ At dinner at Topham Beauclerk’s house on 30 April 1773, Johnson acknowledged that I think more highly of him now than I did at twenty. There is more thinking in him and in Butler, than in any of our poets (Life, 2:239). Milton is copiously quoted in the Dictionary, and in its preface Johnson claimed that "I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble … if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle."²⁸ It was also long believed that Johnson himself kept a relic of Milton, being a lock of his hair, once owned by Addison and later by Leigh Hunt and Robert Browning.²⁹ If, as Johnson suggested, none ever wished Paradise Lost longer than it is, his Life of Milton nonetheless concludes with the resounding acclamation that as an epic it is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first—and of Milton himself, asks what other author ever soared so high, or sustained his flight so long? (Lives, 1:290, 295,