James loved the books of Charles Dickens. He adored all the nineteenth-century British writers. Growing up in Trinidad, in a poor, middle-class black family, living on the edge of the local cricket pitch, he devoured Keats and Shelley, Arnold and Austen, Collins, Dickens and Thackeray (especially him; Vanity Fair was his bible, he read it dozens of times, and he was still amazed, despite his underlying realism, to arrive in England for the first time in 1932 and find everything not quite as expected). ‘People educated as I had been’, he wrote, ‘could move rapidly from uncritical admiration of abstractions to an equally uncritical hostility to the complex reality.’
It was cricket that shaped his politics, although he didn’t realize it at the time. In the 1920s there was blatant racism at home in Trinidad, dictating who could play for which club, and this was what had driven Constantine, a dark-skinned man, away from the islands to play in the Lancashire League. James just wanted to watch him bat – or field in the covers, where he transformed our idea of what is possible. He was also a penetrating fast bowler, and was the first West Indian to take a wicket in a Test match against England.
And it was cricket, not politics, that got James his first job in Britain. He saw the incomparable Sydney Barnes playing in the League in 1932, already nearly sixty years old, and he interviewed him and sent the article to the Guardian. Their cricket correspondent, Neville Cardus, hired him on the spot. And so round it goes: my father, born in 1912, used to rave about Sydney Barnes’s off- and leg-cutters: ‘He tore them from the sky’, he would say to me, ‘he tore them down from the sky.’ And he would hold the cricket ball in his large hand, fingers either side of the seam, and demonstrate how Barnes had got the ball to fizz and spit from the pitch. Learie Constantine reckoned the finest innings of his career was played against the sixty-year-old Sydney Barnes. ‘To score’, wrote James, ‘he had to get the leg-break away through two short-legs and force the off-break through two gulleys. Against the break all the time. I did not see the innings, but I can visualise the billiard-like precision and concentration with which it was done.’ That was against overarm bowling, of course, something Dickens never mastered … and we do need to get back to him, tempting as it is to linger with James and Constantine in the long-ago summers of the Lancashire League.
What, I wonder, did Nelly Ternan make of Dickens’s attentions? She was only eighteen. She had two older sisters, whom Dickens was helping, and would continue to help, in their acting careers. Her mother was on hand and was not about to let her throw herself at a middle-aged married novelist, even though discrepancies in age were not so remarkable then; but the pre-existing marriage was rather more to the point. Dickens burned thousands of his letters in a huge fire one day in September 1860 at his home in Gad’s Hill. Nelly destroyed her letters from Dickens before she died. And ever since biographers have argued about Nelly and Dickens, and many refuse to believe that they ever had a sexual relationship, but the facts are these: she gave up acting, moved to France for a while (where he visited her frequently), was put up by Dickens in a country cottage near Slough (where he visited her frequently) and, according to Claire Tomalin in what feels like the definitive account, she probably had a baby in France, who died when he was only a few months old. She was on her way back to England when her train went off the rails at Staplehurst. Six years after Dickens died she married George Wharton Robinson, and had two children.
After ‘the Doncaster unhappiness’, as he called it to Wilkie, Dickens went back to London aflame with an unrequited obsession with Nelly – and set about tearing his own and other people’s lives apart. He treated Catherine viciously, forcing her to call on the Ternans, apparently to prove that his relationship with Nelly was innocent, and accusing her of ‘not understanding’ him (when Dickens had a mid-life crisis, he raced through all the clichés and then multiplied them by ten). He pressed for divorce and moved Catherine out of their home. He cut anyone dead who didn’t back him. He blocked Catherine from their daughter’s wedding. He gave up his charities, lost many friends, and left Household Words to set up a new weekly magazine, All the Year Round, because he’d fallen out with the publishers. He sold the house in London and launched his career of public readings, feasting on the rapturous crowds. He wrote some of his best books, even as the darkness spread. But we know all this. He was still incomparably the best.
‘A man writes much better than he lives’, wrote Samuel Johnson, one hundred years earlier, although we should not ‘wonder that most fail, amidst tumult, and snares, and danger’. And welcome back, Enid. But Dickens tried, hard, to live up to what he knew to be right and true, and his novels, it is good to remember, are full of moments of redemption and forgiveness.
Here’s a song he knew and loved and must have sung many times.
Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day,
Were to change by to-morrow, and flee from my arms
Like fairy-gifts, fading away!
Thou wouldst still be ador’d as this moment thou art,
Let thy loveliness fade as it will …
And who was on his mind as he sang? Not Catherine, not by the time he left Doncaster. He couldn’t even bring himself to write to her. And Nelly? They must have stayed close, even if they never married nor acknowledged any kind of relationship. It was in truth Dickens who was fading, although that’s an absurd word to use about him. He fought every inch of the way and blazed through every minute of every hour of the thirteen years he had left. But even so, from our perspective, looking back at this moment from the improbable future, it is quite clear that it is Dickens who is faltering, who is no longer so easily, so abundantly certain about the best way forward.
We will see him in Kent. But now here is Sam Johnson, riding the coach north from London, heading for Scotland in the year 1773, passing by Doncaster, just three years before the first St Leger Stakes was run. And what larks it all is, Pip, what larks!
Nine
A Wilderness
‘All change is of itself an evil.’
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson & James Boswell,
Edinburgh to Skye and back, August to November 1773
To the North! And the wild lands beyond the wall. Ice mountains and savage peoples loom and gnaw at the troubled dreams of the south, although I think by now we can safely agree that any dread of what might lie beyond the border should rightfully have been flowing the other way. Even so, when Celia Fiennes made her Great Journey around England in 1698, she would not venture into Scotland without an armed guard. ‘Their miles are soe long in these countrys’, she wrote, and she had heard there are no towns where you can get a bed, other than Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Kerk, and most travellers have to ‘go from one Nobleman’s house to another’ and those houses are mostly castles and the people there ‘live in so nasty a way … one has little stomach to eate or use anything as I have been told by some that has travell’d there; and I am sure I met with a sample of it enough to discourage my progress farther in Scotland’. The problem was the people – idle for the most part, she decided – but as she skirted tentatively along the border (on the Scottish side, rather bravely) she did come across the finest French claret she’d ‘dranck this seven year’.
Seventy-five turbulent years after Celia had reined back at the border, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made their own celebrated journey to the Highlands and Islands. Boswell, a Scot, had been trying for years to persuade his friend to come on a tour with him, but Johnson was always too busy (or so he liked to think), and sometimes too depressed, or he was short of money, and anyway ever since 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charlie and his alarmingly (romantically) feral Highlanders had marched into England, all the way to Derby, and even threatened London, before sloping back to Scotland to be butchered like cattle at the Battle of Culloden, ever since then it had been hard to choose a good time to head into the unknown. Especially since Johnson was known to be a Jacobite sympathizer. B
ut in 1773 Johnson decided that it was probably now or never. The Highlands were being sanitized, stripped of their customs and emptied of their people. He was sixty-three years old. And although he might have preferred to hang around in Streatham with his beautiful young friend Hester Thrale (whom he loved, even though she was married to Henry, a brewer), she urged him to make the trip. So to everyone’s surprise he fired off a message to Boswell in Edinburgh and told him to start planning their route. No doubt he hoped to impress Hester with a flow of gripping and insightful letters, but he was also genuinely excited about the prospect of encountering the last of Britain’s untamed wilderness.
One last awkward fact: Johnson was presumed to hate the Scots and Scotland. There were his famous sayings (best read out loud, slowly, as he spoke, with thunder on the mountain): ‘Sir, the noblest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to London.’ AND ‘Knowledge was divided among the Scots, like bread in a besieged town, to every man a mouthful, to no man a bellyful.’ Johnson, like Jack Priestley, was a tease, but much more than Jack, what he really liked to do was argue. When his friend and sparring partner Gilbert Walmesley died, a ‘Whig of great malevolence’, Johnson wrote that ‘after his death I felt my Toryism much abated’. Johnson became morose if he didn’t have someone to argue with – to ‘toss and gore’ – and depressed if he spent too long alone. But it didn’t always mean very much. Most of the time he just enjoyed holding a contrary view and wrestling an adversary to the ground. Sometimes literally. He was a big man and he liked to show it.
So: he was easily bored, restlessly clever, he had to talk – and he loved the idea that someone was taking notes. Before Boswell, it was (among others) his great friend and one of the only pupils in his hopeless school, the actor David Garrick. After Johnson’s school near Lichfield had failed, burning through his wife’s inheritance, he left for London with Garrick, both of them hoping to make their fortunes. Johnson was twenty-six, Garrick twenty. They remained life-long friends, tinged (at least on Johnson’s side) with a whisper of jealousy. Garrick is full of gossipy tales, including the time when Johnson told him that life’s greatest pleasures were (and remember – out loud, with a s-l-o-w rumble): ‘Fucking, [Sir], and the second is drinking.’ ‘And he wondered why there were not more drunkards, “for all could drink though not all could fuck.”’ He must have been some schoolteacher.
Both Johnson and Boswell published accounts of their journey, Johnson in 1775 (he needed the money, and Boswell was always going to defer to the great man), and Boswell in 1785, one year after Johnson’s death. Put them together and you have the authentic Johnson, the man who shocked Lady MacLeod at dinner in her castle in Skye by telling her that men and women had no more natural goodness than wolves, but who also delighted almost everyone he met with his kindness and deep interest in their affairs.
In Inverness Johnson held forth about the benefits of conquest. The Romans, he wrote, had spread civilization to England, and Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers had brought shoes to the Scots (as well, it seems, as a recipe for cooking kale). Most importantly, the Acts of Union between England and Scotland in 1706 and 1707 had been a wonderful thing for the untamed and under-civilized North:
Till the Union made them acquainted with English manners, the culture of their lands was unskilful, and their domestick life unformed; their tables were coarse as the feasts of Esquimaux, and their houses filthy as the cottages of Hottentots.
Raw colonialism, you see. And yet Johnson hated what was being done at that time to the Native Americans, some of it perpetrated by Highlanders fleeing the depredations of the English and their own feudal lords, and he was also unflinching in his denunciations of slavery. His servant, Frank Barber, was a freed slave, originally from Jamaica, who had been with Johnson since the age of eleven, given (yes, given) to him in 1752 by a friend, Richard Bathurst, who thought Johnson needed cheering up after the death of his wife, Tetty. It would do him good to look after someone, his friends felt. And so he did: when Johnson died it was found that he had left everything he owned to Frank Barber, a fact that outraged some, in particular Sir John Hawkins, the fussy and unimaginative man who was Johnson’s first biographer and also in charge of his funeral, which he seems to have skimped on in sulky protest. But it suited Boswell, who got on well with Barber and was able to persuade him to part with, or sometimes sell, Johnson’s journals, letters and other effects, all of which ended up in his monumental Life of Johnson. Barber wasn’t on the trip because Johnson was trying to save money; but Boswell’s servant, a tall Bohemian man called Joseph Ritter, came along, as well as two Highlander guides.
Johnson liked to joke and shock, but only in person. His writing, as displayed in Journey to the Western Isles, is weighty, sometimes hobbled by a desire to deliver the definitive aphorism, but packed with observations. There’s a tension between his innate conservatism, his distrust of change, his dislike of Whigs and their endless improvements, and his delight in happy anarchy. You can see it in his monumental Dictionary of the English Language, which took him nine soul-sapping years to complete. He wanted to fix every word in its place – and everything else – but he was too thoughtful and melancholic not to know that he would always be undone by the essential slipperiness of language and life.
Johnson also had a terror of going mad. People say that is why he was always trying to clamp order onto what could not be contained, including himself. He did appear mad. When the artist William Hogarth first met him, taking tea at Samuel Richardson’s house, he assumed that the large man in the corner, who was grinning and gurning and rolling about, and stamping his feet, and puffing and snorting, was ‘an ideot’ who had been taken under the care of the kindly Mr Richardson. Until, that is, Johnson spoke and ‘displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired’. This was Sam Johnson, whose appearance in 1773 is best described, of course, by Boswell:
His person was large, robust, I may say approaching the gigantick, and grown unwieldy from corpulence. His countenance … was somewhat disfigured by scars … His sight had always been somewhat weak. His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy; he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions …
He also had a weird habit of thrumming his feet up and down when he was seated, and although his friend, the artist Joshua Reynolds, thought that he was quite capable of restraining himself, Boswell was not so sure. ‘He was’, adds Boswell, slyly, ‘somewhat susceptible of flattery’.
Boswell was waiting for Johnson in Edinburgh. He had married four years earlier and was now living in the city, making frequent trips to London. When he was younger, he had spent a couple of years in Edinburgh studying to be a lawyer, before he had managed to persuade his father to send him to London to join the army. Not that he had any intention of becoming a soldier; he just wanted an allowance and to get away from his father, an overbearing Presbyterian judge. If you read his journals of the time, they are full of a young man’s longing for sex and approbation (sometimes the two combined: ‘I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour [a condom]. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak’). And so on. The journals are extraordinarily frank and self-knowing. When he was only twenty-one he wrote this: ‘I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose.’
The character Boswell had chosen to pursue was that of literary superstar. He was still only thirty-two years old in 1773 and was the author of the well-received Tour to Corsica. Once again, the best person to describe how he was in those days is Boswell himself: ‘He had travelled a good deal … He had thought more than any body supposed … He had all Dr Johnson’s principles, with some degree of relaxation. He had rather too little, than too much prudence, and, his imagination being lively, he often said things
of which the effect was very different from the intention.’ He was clever and bumptious and underestimated by most of Johnson’s friends.
Boswell had first managed to meet Johnson on 16 May 1763, ten years before their Scottish tour, at Davies’s in Russell Street, where he was drinking coffee when Johnson walked in. ‘Don’t tell him where I come from,’ he shouted at Davies, but too late. ‘“Mr Johnson,” said I, “indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” “Sir,” replied he, “that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help”.’ And how the company laughed. Once he had Johnson’s attention, Boswell didn’t ever let go, following him around, feeding him lines, writing down whatever came back out. On this trip around the Highlands (which was the longest time they ever spent together) he worried that he was running out of topics. As for Johnson, he was thrilled that someone was on hand to write him into posterity (he must have known he couldn’t do it himself), even if at times Boswell’s eager attentions proved too much. There’s a telling moment in Skye when Johnson sends Boswell to his room to spend more time polishing his journal (‘my Journal is really a task of much time and labour, and he forbids me to contract it’). It sounds like a parent sending his children out into the garden to count the leaves.
Footnotes Page 23