Mrs. Piozzi, by her second marriage, was by her first marriage the Mrs.
Thrale in whose house at Streatham Doctor Johnson was, after the year of
his first introduction, 1765, in days of infirmity, an honoured and a
cherished friend. The year of the beginning of the friendship was the
year in which Johnson, fifty-six years old, obtained his degree of LL.D.
from Dublin, and--though he never called himself Doctor--was thenceforth
called Doctor by all his friends.
Before her marriage Mrs. Piozzi had been Miss Hesther Lynch Salusbury, a
young lady of a good Welsh family. She was born in the year 1740, and
she lived until the year 1821. She celebrated her eightieth birthday on
the 27th of January, 1820, by a concert, ball, and supper to six or seven
hundred people, and led off the dancing at the ball with an adopted son
for partner. When Johnson was first introduced to her, as Mrs. Thrale,
she was a lively, plump little lady, twenty-five years old, short of
stature, broad of build, with an animated face, touched, according to the
fashion of life in her early years, with rouge, which she continued to
use when she found that it had spoilt her complexion. Her hands were
rather coarse, but her handwriting was delicate.
Henry Thrale, whom she married, was the head of the great brewery house
now known as that of Barclay and Perkins. Henry Thrale's father had
succeeded Edmund Halsey, who began life by running away from his father,
a miller at St. Albans. Halsey was taken in as a clerk-of-all-work at
the Anchor Brewhouse in Southwark, became a house-clerk, able enough to
please Child, his master, and handsome enough to please his master's
daughter. He married the daughter and succeeded to Child's Brewery, made
much money, and had himself an only daughter, whom he married to a lord.
Henry Thrale's father was a nephew of Halseys, who had worked in the
brewery for twenty years, when, after Halsey's death, he gave security
for thirty thousand pounds as the price of the business, to which a noble
lord could not succeed. In eleven years he had paid the purchase-money,
and was making a large fortune. To this business his son, who was
Johnson's friend, Henry Thrale, succeeded; and upon Thrale's death it was
bought for 150,000 pounds by a member of the Quaker family of Barclay,
who took Thrale's old manager, Perkins, into partnership.
Johnson became, after 1765, familiar in the house of the Thrales at
Streatham. There was much company. Mrs. Thrale had a taste for literary
guests and literary guests had, on their part, a taste for her good
dinners. Johnson was the lion-in-chief. There was Dr. Johnson's room
always at his disposal; and a tidy wig kept for his special use, because
his own was apt to be singed up the middle by close contact with the
candle, which he put, being short-sighted, between his eyes and a book.
Mrs. Thrale had skill in languages, read Latin, French, Italian, and
Spanish. She read literature, could quote aptly, and put knowledge as
well as playful life into her conversation. Johnson's regard for the
Thrales was very real, and it was heartily returned, though Mrs. Thrale
had, like her friend, some weaknesses, in common with most people who
feed lions and wish to pass for wits among the witty.
About fourteen years after Johnson's first acquaintance with the
Thrales--when Johnson was seventy years old and Mrs. Thrale near
forty--the little lady, who had also lost several children, was unhappy
in the thought that she had ceased to be appreciated by her husband. Her
husband's temper became affected by the commercial troubles of 1762, and
Mrs. Thrale became jealous of the regard between him and Sophy
Streatfield, a rich widow's daughter. Under January, 1779, she wrote in
her "Thraliana," "Mr. Thrale has fallen in love, really and seriously,
with Sophy Streatfield; but there is no wonder in that; she is very
pretty, very gentle, soft, and insinuating; hangs about him, dances round
him, cries when she parts from him, squeezes his hand slily, and with her
sweet eyes full of tears looks so fondly in his face--and all for love of
me, as she pretends, that I can hardly sometimes help laughing in her
face. A man must not be a _man_ but an _it_ to resist such artillery."
Mrs. Thrale goes on to record conquests made by this irresistible Sophy
in other directions, showing the same temper of jealousy. Thrale died on
the 4th of April, 1781.
Mrs. Thrale had entered in her "Thraliana" under July, 1780, being then
at Brighton, "I have picked up Piozzi here, the great Italian singer. He
is amazingly like my father. He shall teach Hesther." On the 25th of
July, 1784, being at Bath, her entry was, "I am returned from church the
happy wife of my lovely, faithful Piozzi. . . . subject of my prayers,
object of my wishes, my sighs, my reverence, my esteem." Her age then
was forty-four, and on the 13th of December in the same year Johnson
died. The newspapers of the day dealt hardly with her. They called her
an amorous widow, and Piozzi a fortune-hunter. Her eldest daughter
(afterwards Viscountess Keith) refused to recognise the new father, and
shut herself up in a house at Brighton with a nurse, Tib, where she lived
upon two hundred a year. Two younger sisters, who were at school, lived
afterwards with the eldest. Only the fourth daughter, the youngest, went
with her mother and her mother's new husband to Italy. Johnson, too, was
grieved by the marriage, and had shown it, but had written afterwards
most kindly. Mrs. Piozzi in Florence was playing at literature with the
poetasters of "The Florence Miscellany" and "The British Album" when she
was working at these "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson." Her book of
anecdotes was planned at Florence in 1785, the year after her friend's
death, finished at Florence in October, 1785, and published in the year
1786. There is a touch of bitterness in the book which she thought of
softening, but her "lovely, faithful Piozzi" wished it to remain.