'His Generous Humanity to the Miserable'

Our guests for Thanksgiving dinner will be my oldest son and daughter-in-law and two women, acquaintances of my wife, both recently divorced. The latter would likely otherwise spend the holiday alone. The only serious expression of gratitude is welcoming others and sharing your good fortune with them. In return, I expect some interesting dinner-table conversation. 

Among his other distinctions, Dr. Johnson was a gracious host, welcoming people into his home who might otherwise have been homeless. He makes our attempt at hospitality seem almost trivial. Among Johnson's lost souls, the strays he accumulated, were the blind poet Anna Williams, his Jamaica-born manservant Frank Barber and Dr. Robert Levet, a modestly gifted physician or quack. Johnson often chose his friends selflessly, without regard for what they could do for him. Williams lived with Johnson for almost thirty years; Levet, on and off, for thirty-six years; Barber, for thirty-two years. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate writes of Levet and the others:

 

“Johnson’s house had more than ever taken on the appearance of an informal home for the destitute and infirm. The inmates during these years [the 1770s], apart from others who came and went, consisted of a steady corps of six to eight people, including two elderly servants whose duties were light and who themselves could be viewed as pensioners.”

 

Johnson wrote one of his best poems about Levet after his death. In his life of Johnson, John Wain refers to “Johnson’s odd collection of friends” and Jeffrey Hart writes in his essay “Samuel Johnson as Hero”:

 

“Though he was a stern moralist, Johnson was also an exemplar of charity in the old sense of the word, caritas. His Fleet Street menage was a sort of zoo: the blind Mrs. Williams; the negro servant, Francis Barber; Hodge the cat; and the quack, Dr. Levitt [sic], who very likely ministered, perhaps with narcotics, to Johnson’s neuroses. Boswell writes persuasively: ‘His generous humanity to the miserable was almost beyond example.’”

Happy Thanksgiving.