Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. During the Last Twenty Years of His Life
- Pages
- about 180
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 3.3 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
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.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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