The Stolen Christmas Box is a fictitious adventure of real people, Dr. Johnson’s Mrs. Thrale and her relations by marriage. Boswell did not like Mrs. Thrale; he considered her his rival for “that great man.” The portrait here given as from his pen must be taken with a grain of salt. The “new book of cyphers” is a real book, The Art of Decyphering and of Writing in Cypher, by Philip Thicknesse, London, 1772. Though the cipher messages and the missing diamond are fictitious, they are woven into the real romance of Fanny Plumbe and Jack Rice; and the final and most unbelievable detail, the elopement à trois, is a matter of history.
The Conveyance of Emelina Grange to St. Kilda actually predated Boswell by quite a bit. It has been laid at the door of that wicked old rake-hell, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. The fact that the abducted lady with her clew of yarn ended up in the Hebrides has caused me to flout chronology and Johnsonize the tale.
The disappearance of The Great Seal of England from the house of Chancellor Thurlow is one of the great classic mysteries. The circumstances of its disappearance are faithfully reproduced, although Boswell was actually not by to record them. In the light of those circumstances the solution here offered is a good guess, made better by the fact that Lee the receiver not only got off, but later sued his captors for false arrest, and made it stick. The tantalizingly respectable reticence of contemporary chroniclers about Thurlow’s irregular household has forced me to invent his daughters, known to me by name alone, out of whole cloth. Ned Durban and Tom Mannering are cut from the same bolt; “the last of the Tyburn hangings” had taken place some months earlier, on November 7, 1783.
In this story Dr. Sam: Johnson, detector, was first presented to the world by Fred Dannay, with a loyal faith and enthusiasm which place me deeply in his debt. Six of the nine tales first saw the light under his cordial sponsorship in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
De La Torre’s Life of Johnson
Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in the English Midlands, on September 18, 1709. His father was a bookseller, and Samuel, although he managed to study at Oxford for a while before poverty put an end to it, got the most of his great store of knowledge by reading his father’s stock.
In 1732 his father died, leaving him to make his own way. Sam was a raw-boned, ungainly youth, with congenital bad health and a nervous tic, and he found it hard to establish himself in any learned calling. In 1735, at the age of 26, he found and married the love of his life, Elizabeth Porter. Mrs. Porter was a widow some 21 years his senior; but they suited each other very well. She thought he was the most sensible man she had ever met. He thought she was the most enchanting creature that ever existed, and he thought so to the end.
Once more failing as a schoolmaster, the bridegroom soon set off for London to seek his fortune. He found 25 years of literary drudgery. He tried his hand at every kind of writing, gaining a good deal of admiration but very little cash. He wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine. He produced satires in verse, and a sensational biography, and a tragedy called Irene. For two years he published a weekly essay called The Rambler, which was highly prized for its sage observations and stately prose; but it brought him very little money.
Johnson’s great life work was his Dictionary, a landmark in the history of the English language. In 1746, when he was 37, a coalition of booksellers commissioned him to produce this work; but the advance they gave him barely supported the crew of thread-bare scholars he put to work on it in a garret in Gough Square. In the midst of his labors, Elizabeth died, and left him to life-long mourning.
At last, in 1755, the Dictionary appeared, winning Johnson his place as the undisputed “Great Cham of Literature.” But he angrily repelled patronage, and remained as poor as ever. When in 1759 his aged mother died, he had no money to settle her affairs. He had to dash off a novel, Rasselas, to raise the cash he needed. At his mid-century point, after years of literary achievement, Johnson was as impecunious as ever.
Three years later, all that changed. The government granted Johnson a pension. Thus freed from the wolf at the door, he settled back to enjoy what he loved best in life—good friends and good talk. His writings, wise and humane, had brought him many friends. Soon they brought him one more, James Boswell, a Scottish youth who came to London determined to win the friendship of the “Rambler,” won it, and became his biographer.
So Samuel Johnson lived out his remaining years at his ease. He founded the Literary Club. He travelled, visiting the Hebrides with Boswell and France with his wealthy friends the Thrales. He published an edition of Shakespeare and a set of Lives of the Poets. In 1784, valiantly as he had lived, he died.
Addendum: The Great Cham
Cham, pron. kam, variant of khan, as in Genghis Khan, Turkish. Current in Johnson’s day, both for the Cham of Tartary and fig. for any big shot.
It was Tobias Smollett the novelist who applied the term to Dr. Johnson. The circumstances form a little human interest story. On March 16, 1759, Smollett wrote to his friend, the politician John Wilkes:
“I am again your Petitioner in behalf of that great Cham of Literature, Samuel Johnson. His Black Servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has (218) been pressed on board the Stag Frigate, Capt. Angel, and our Lexicographer is in great distress …” (Lewis M. Knapp, Tobias Smollett, Doctor of Men and Manners, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949, pp. 217–218)
Wilkes quickly rescued the lad from a servitude which Dr. Johnson regarded with horror as being in jail with the prospect of being drowned.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Dr. Sam Johnson Mysteries
THE TONTINE CURSE
(London & Bath, 1779)
“There’s a curse on the tontine,” said the brewer’s wife, and wept.
“Ma’am,” replied Dr. Sam: Johnson positively, “there’s a curse on every tontine.”
Mr. Hosyer the portly brewer breathed hard through his jolly red nose. Mrs. Hosyer, buxom and motherly, buried hers in her kerchief and sobbed.
’Twas an unexpected prelude to what I had thought would be a purely legal confabulation. We sat in the dark-panelled inner room of Lloyd’s Coffeehouse, awaiting the others of the Hosyer tontine. At the head of the table, smiling to himself and saying nothing, sat the Hosyer lawyer, Theophilus Sedge, a pleasing little man, as rosy and round as a winter apple.
Seated next him, to support his legal opinion with my own, behold myself, James Boswell of Auchinleck, attorney and observer of mankind, being (I flatter myself) a not unpleasing personage with a swart complection, a long nose, and black hair tied back in the latest mode.
By the mantelpiece, staring sombrely into the glowing coals, stood my penetrating friend, Dr. Sam: Johnson. The firelight fell on his heavy, deep-cut features, softening the old scars of the King’s Evil. It glanced on his large bushy grizzle wig, and on the silver buckles of his square-toed shoes; it ruddied the plain brown stuff of his full-skirted coat; it glittered on his thoughtful light-grey eyes. Such was Dr. Sam: Johnson in the year 1779, being then seventy years of age.
Looking up at him across the table, I congratulated myself once more that I, though a Scot, and some thirty years his junior, had by my address and assiduity won the friendship and confidence of this extraordinary man. To the universal respect accorded him as the literary dictator of London, was added the admiration I felt for his less bruited exploits as a detector of crime and chicane. Over the years of our friendship, I had watched him, fascinated, as he detected the Flying Highwayman, the maker of the WaxWork Cadaver, and many other practitioners of fraud and felony; and I had long since inly resolved one day to record for posterity, not only the life, but the detections of Dr. Sam: Johnson.
To this end ’twas ever my care to observe his proceedings, and still more, to be the cause of such further proceedings as might, by calling forth his powers, serve to enrich my record.
Such an occasion, I knew, must be offered by this curious affair of the Hosyer tontine; and accordingly, at my urging, hither he was co
me to make one at the counsel table. Now, in his manly, resonant, positive voice, he was making abundantly clear his adverse philosophy of the tontine.
“A curse on every tontine?” I repeated, willing to draw him out further. “How do you make that good?”
“Consider, Mr. Boswell.” He took the chair nearest the fire, put his feet under the table, and squared himself to have his talk out. “Consider the very nature of a tontine. I say nothing to your Irish tontine; ’twill do as well, I suppose, as any other form of publick lottery. But permit me to characterize to you the vicious nature of a private tontine such as this one.”
Lawyer Sedge, who had drawn up the Hosyer tontine in the first place, raised his frosty thistledown brows; but his smile was as bland as ever.
“To make such a tontine,” pursued Johnson, “you gather together ten or a dozen infants of tender years—”
“Twenty,” said the brewer.
“Twenty infants of tender years. For each infant let the parent stake, say, one thousand pounds—”
“Five thousand,” said the brewer.
Dr. Johnson blew a soundless whistle through his pursed lips.
“Whoo! You set the temptation high! Twenty infants at five thousand pounds—one hundred thousand pounds. Invest it in the funds—”
“My brother has the handling of it.”
“Put it out at interest, and leave it there until nineteen of your twenty die. Then the whole sum becomes the property of the survivor. To the gouty, toothless, sapless, gustless twentieth old man falls a noble fortune, say eight hundred thousand pounds, if it be true as they say that money at interest doubles every twenty years.”
“My brother has already doubled the fund.”
“Bravo, Mr. Hosyer! In what business?”
“Ship insurance. My brother is one of the gentlemen yonder.”
The brewer nodded his head toward the outer room of the coffeehouse, where the gentlemen of Lloyd’s sat at the bare scrubbed tables and wrote insurance on the ships that ply out of London. Johnson looked at the lined faces, bent over their ciphering or frowning in close converse or just staring.
“A calling not without hazard,” he remarked, “especially with the reverses of the American war. Well, well, let your brother’s luck still hold, sixty or eighty years hence, some old gaffer, his relation, will be enriched with a princely fortune he’ll never live long enough to enjoy. And the medium of his enrichment will be death, Mr. Boswell—death to his brothers and sisters, death to his cousins, his neighbours, his friends. Between each child and that fortune stand nineteen lives.”
Mrs. Hosyer shuddered violently.
“And though no one of the twenty grow up so lost to virtue as to hasten his fortune by imbruing his hands in blood—yet consider what must be the effect of constantly wishing nineteen deaths? No, sir, there was never a private tontine but had a curse on it.”
“If we but had back our ten thousand pounds!” cried Mrs. Hosyer. “It would stand between us and present ruin.”
“No more o’ that,” cried Hosyer roughly. “The brewery will be very well.”
“The tontine,” said Lawyer Sedge smoothly, “was made Michaelmas four years ago, at the house of Mr. Breed Hosyer the ship-broker at Bath. He having made a second marriage, desired thus to provide for the sons of his first. The families of the tontine …”
I own I lost the thread. The families of the tontine had had ill luck, being swept by the small-pox, the colick, and the like.
“Alack!” said Dr. Johnson, “how many of these little creatures perish in their innocence! They are but lent to us. If we can raise one in three, we may call ourselves fortunate. Of twelve, Brewer Thrale has but four surviving.”
“Of the tontine’s twenty,” said Hosyer grimly, “but four survive.”
“But four!” cried Johnson aghast. “This is beyond the rule of nature! Who are the four?”
“My girl Sally, and Sister Macklin’s Susan, and Mr. Sedge’s boy, and my brother’s heir.”
“Pray, how has this come about?”
“The curse,” muttered Mrs. Hosyer, and wrung her fingers.
“Sir,” her husband began, “the children, them that lived through the small-pox, went on merrily enough, till a year gone we lost our eldest girl.”
“By what means?”
The Hosyers spoke together. He said:
“An accident.”
“She destroyed herself,” said the wife. “She destroyed herself for love. Her marriage portion was lost—” some hidden bitterness burst forth, “and when the match she desired was broken, so was her heart; she hanged herself in her garters.”
“I had reverses,” muttered Hosyer pitifully.
“I wish we had never heard of the tontine! I wish we had our ten thousand pounds back!”
Hosyer looked baited. I thought how many times before he must have heard that whine. Sedge, still smiling, pulled forth a handsome repeater watch and looked from it to the outer door. A line between his frosty brows denied the smile.
Mrs. Hosyer sniffed back old grief and took up what was clearly an oft-rehearsed tale:
“We lost poor Annie in June. In July we went to Bath, to brother-in-law’s. Brother-in-law lives like a nabob. His wife is the relict of a lord—if he has the brass, she knows how to spend it—and high though she holds her head, he’s good to his own, and in the hot weather we were all there together.”
Johnson: “All?”
Hosyer: “All—my wife and I, Sister Macklin, Lawyer Sedge, and brother-in-law and his new wife, and all the children. There was five in the schoolroom and the rest in the nursery—” Mrs. Hosyer: “And in the stables Bob Hosyer, who at sixteen has set up for a rake on the nabob’s money, and if my Lady don’t ruin brother-in-law Hosyer, ’tis my belief Bob will.”
Hosyer rebuked her with a look and went on in his heavy voice:
“To be brief, sir, the schoolroom and the nursery had liberty to play in the grounds, and thence came the tragedy. They set sail on the millpond in a leaky old tub that foundered under them, and we were nigh to losing them all. My Sally, who is of intrepid mould, drew her cousin Susan to shore. Sedge’s Clem was cadging sweetmeats in the buttery, and Bob Hosyer was lounging with the grooms. Sister Macklin thought it a mercy that she was dandling the littlest ones in the morning-room. But of that boatload of seven, five sank, and rose no more.”
Mrs. Hosyer looked back on the tragedy:
“And we were like to lose Sally, for she lay like one dead till we nigh despaired of restoring her.”
Hosyer: “’Twas that that saved her.”
Johnson: “How mean you?”
Mrs. Hosyer: “While the pond was dragging, the children got some spoiled food, it being very hot summer weather. They was taken with the gripes and the flux, and fast did it carry ’em off. Sally and Susan had none, being put to bed with a posset; Bob Hosyer lived, for he dined with his elders; and as to Sedge’s Clem, ’tis my belief that nothing can kill him.”
Sedge acknowledged this compliment with a radiant beam.
“Fourteen children,” concluded Mrs. Hosyer solemnly, “went down to Bath in July. Four came back. Is not this a curse?”
“Ma’am,” says Johnson, “I devoutly hope so. Better a supernatural than a human agent.”
“Be easy, ma’am,” says Sedge soothingly. “I grieve with the bereaved, ma’am, in these horrid mishaps; but I see in them nothing more than the grief that flesh is heir to. As to the boat, ma’am, a leaking skiff will sink, and a child that cannot swim will sink with it; and as to the gripes and the flux, ma’am, ’tis my belief the little ones had somehow got at my Lady’s white lead; for your sister-in-law’s unnatural white, ma’am, to speak plainly, and past question ’tis paint, and will one day carry her off like the late lamented Countess of Coventry.”
“Psst,” hissed Hosyer, heralding by this undignified means the impressive entrance of Mr. Breed Hosyer and his consort, my Lady Rivers that was.
Mr. Bree
d Hosyer would have been impressive in any gathering. He wore the finest of sombre stuffs, set off at the throat with a fall of cobwebby lace; his buckles were set with brilliants, and he wore a priceless ring on his finger. His face was thin and worn in an agreeable way, as unlike his brewer brother as possible. He handed his lady to an armed chair with studied courtliness.
The nabob’s wife was an edged beauty, thin and very fair. Her unnaturally white skin was carmined over her sharp cheek-bones. She wore an enormous head, and patches. She arranged her laced ruffles, and inclined the towering wig a fraction off the vertical to the company in general.
“Now, then,” said Breed Hosyer in a sharp voice that smacked of the City, “what’s to do here? Where’s Sister Macklin? If I can fetch my Lady from St. James’s, surely she can on with her pattens and step hither on time. No matter, brother, what’s the cause of this meeting?”
Hiram Hosyer looked mighty put about at this abruptness, but he answered bluntly:
“To break the tontine and part the money among the children.”
I was surprized enough; I had never heard of the breaking a tontine once regularly entered into. But two of our members fairly rose from their places in horror—the lawyer and the broker.
“Impossible!” they cried as one man.
“Do,” says my Lady languidly, “break the tontine, Mr. Hosyer, and then you may make such a settlement upon my daughter as is right and proper for the child of the late Lord Rivers; for a dowerless female may hang herself these days, she can hope for no better fate.”
“Unless she’s the relict of a lord—” began Mrs. Hosyer angrily.
Breed Hosyer had recovered his suavity. Without paying the least mind to the glowering females, he leaned forward and addressed his brother patiently:
“Look you, brother, ’tis beyond possibility. It strikes at the very basis of the tontine, if it may be abrogated at will. Sedge will bear me out.”
Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector Page 21