'Beautiful, Elegant, Talented, Dutiful'

A reader suggests I read “Mrs. Johnson,” a piece by Alice Meynell collected in her Essays (Burns & Oates, 1914). Gallantly, Meynell defends the honor of Dr. Johnson’s wife and the sincerity of Johnson’s love for her:

“I have called her his only friend. So indeed she was, though he had followers, disciples, rivals, competitors, and companions, many degrees of admirers, a biographer, a patron, and a public. He had also the houseful of sad old women who quarrelled under his beneficent protection. But what friend had he? He was ‘solitary’ [Johnson’s word] from the day she died.”

That Johnson loved his wife, Elizabeth Porter Johnson (1689-1752), known to him always as “Tetty,” seems indisputable. When they married in 1735, he was twenty-five and she was forty-six. Tetty is said to have told her daughter after first meeting Johnson, “That is the most sensible man I ever met.”

Sniggering began almost immediately after the wedding. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate notes that when older women married younger men in eighteenth-century England, the male partner was judged “an unaggressive type of man—rather mousy, dependent, perhaps slightly infantile. Certainly the idea of such a marriage did not fit one’s notion of Johnson, with his huge, unwieldy frame, his immense physical strength, his courage and rhinocerine laughter, his uncanny incisiveness of mind.”

And yet Johnson told his friend Topham Beauclerk: “It was a love marriage upon both sides.” Meynell is especially offended by Macaulay’s portrayal of Tetty as “a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces.” His verdict was influential and remains so, particularly among those offended by Johnson’s eminence. Defaming a man in matters of love and sex is a favorite tactic of the petty and unimaginative.

Johnson composed the inscription on Tetty’s tomb: Formosae, cultae, ingeniosae, piae – “beautiful, elegant, talented, dutiful.” John Hawkins says in his 1787 biography of Johnson: “The melancholy, which seized Johnson, on the death of his wife, was not, in degree, such as usually follows the deprivation of near relations and friends; it was of the blackest and deepest kind.” In 1764, twelve years after his wife’s death, Johnson wrote in a diary:

“Having before I went to bed composed the foregoing meditation and the following prayer, I tried to compose myself but slept unquietly. I rose, took tea, and prayed for resolution and perseverance. Thought on Tetty, dear poor Tetty, with my eyes full.”

Some cling to a romantic understanding of love and marriage, and are offended by couples who fail to conform to their idealization. Some, out of envy and bitterness, mock all such partnerships, happy or otherwise. Others are simply dirty-minded. Meynell defends Tetty and her husband:  

“No slight to him, to his person, or to his fame could have had power to cause him pain more sensibly than the customary, habitual, ready-made ridicule that has been cast by posterity upon her whom he loved for twenty years, prayed for during thirty-two years more, who satisfied one of the saddest human hearts, but to whom the world, assiduous to admire him, hardly accords human dignity. He wrote praises of her manners and of her person for her tomb. But her epitaph, that does not name her, is in the greatest of English prose.”