'Thought on Tetty, Dear Poor Tetty'

History is dense with peripheral people who would likely be forgotten but for their lives having intersected, often briefly, with some historically memorable figure. After all, most of us are peripheral and will soon be forgotten. Take Henry Porter (1691-1734), a Birmingham mercer or woolen draper, a dealer in textiles. John Wain writes of him in Samuel Johnson (1974): 

“Porter seems to have been a decent man, an industrious though not particularly successful merchant, coming from a sold middle-class background – his father had been a governor of King Edward’s School, Birmingham – and doubtless a pleasant and welcoming host to the young prodigy from Lichfield.”

 

That is, Dr. Johnson. We remember Porter because he died, leaving his wife, Elizabeth Jervis Porter, a widow. The Porters married in 1715 and had three children. Johnson had known them since 1732. On first meeting Johnson, Elizabeth told her daughter Lucy: “That is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.” Soon Johnson was courting Elizabeth and they married ten months after Henry Porter’s death. The groom was twenty-five, the bride forty-six. No one but the principals seemed happy about the union. Sniggering in literary London was common. W. Jackson Bate writes in Samuel Johnson (1977):

 

“Marriages in which the wife was so much older were not unheard of. But, rightly or wrongly, the popular mind associated the husband in such cases with 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.”

 

Johnson would always refer to his wife as “Tetty” and told his friend Topham Beauclerk: “It was a love marriage upon both sides.” Tetty died at age sixty-three on this date, March 17, in 1752. She never got to meet Boswell or read her husband’s Dictionary, Rasselas or Lives of the Poets. Johnson never stopped grieving. Her epitaph, composed by Johnson, reads “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.”

 

Thanks to Henry Porter and his timely death, Johnson came to know all of this joy and grief.