"I refute it THUS..."

Just when you may be forgiven for thinking there is nothing else left to write about Dr. Johnson, this:

At the Menil Foundation, a huge Renzo Piano-designed museum in Houston, Texas, there hangs a painting by Joshua Reynolds of “A Young Black”. The sitter has high cheekbones and a face that is dignified, solemn, even sad. The image is often reproduced and is widely believed to be a likeness of Francis Barber, who is today known for having been the manservant of Samuel Johnson and the chief beneficiary of his will. 

In his lifetime Barber was regarded as the great lexicographer’s chattel, rather than as a person of interest in his own right. He was referred to as “the Doctor’s negro servant”; among the nicknames foisted on him were “poor Blacky” and “the Ethiopian”. Modern accounts tend to be hazy or wayward. In Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, an impressive history of British anti-slavery, Barber is described as Johnson’s “valet-butler-secretary”, and in Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners he is “a poet and protege of Johnson”. Michael Bundock sets out to correct such narrow or inexact senses of Barber’s existence. His crisply written, empathetic biography scrupulously documents Barber’s life and illuminates the experiences of black Britons in the 18th century. 

Johnson and Barber were, as Bundock says, a “conspicuously odd” couple. When Barber arrived at Johnson’s household, in April 1752, he was 10 years old and had just emerged from two years at an obscure Yorkshire boarding school. Johnson was 42 and intimidating – a man of large stature and intellect. His wife had died the previous month, and he was making only fitful progress with his Dictionary of the English Language. Childless and prone to debilitating bouts of melancholy, he was not an obvious candidate to take charge of a 10-year-old boy. What was more, his four-storey house in Gough Square off London’s Fleet Street was a kind of drop-in centre for local unfortunates, and Barber had to share living space with several difficult individuals, among them the irascible blind poet Anna Williams...

Related articles

• The Fortunes of Francis Barber by Michael Bundock review - saved by Samuel Johnson
• Book Review: The Fortunes of Francis Barber