It was not long before Johnson began spending part of each week at the Thrales’ country estate, Streatham Park. McIntyre quotes judiciously from Hester’s now published notebooks, the Thraliana, without adding his own commentary. This can be frustrating, but it’s a relief when he glosses over the infamous letters in French which Johnson wrote to Hester in 1773, not deigning to speculate what they might imply about this oddly unequal friendship. The Doctor had been unwell for some weeks, and had turned up at Streatham, uninvited, just as Hester’s mother was in the terminal stages of breast cancer. Johnson was neglected; he felt affronted and even though he was staying in the same house wrote letters to ‘ma patronne’, asking her (in French) ‘to hold me in that bondage which you know so well how to render agreeable’. Many years later, after Hester’s death, a padlock was found among her belongings with a label attached, ‘Johnson’s padlock’. Hester herself wrote, ‘Poor Johnson! I see they will leave nothing untold that I laboured so long to keep secret; & I was so very delicate in trying to conceal his fancied Insanity, that I retained no Proofs of it — or hardly any’.
That ‘hardly any’ is revealing; Hester knew that her friendship with Johnson, her loose thoughts and casual hints about those years of her life, would be of more value to us than any of her own literary productions. When she died neither her daughters nor her adopted son (from Piozzi’s family) took the trouble to raise a stone to her memory. q
Kate Chisholm is the author of a biography of Fanny Burney.
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