Dr. Johnson and the Quakers

DR. JOHNSON AND THE QUAKERS By Helen Pennock South * The renewal of interest in Dr. Samuel Johnson and his biographer caused by Colonel Isham's several acquisitions of Boswell papers and their purchase and publication by Yale University seems to justify the study of any segment of Johnson's wide and varied circle of friends. It has been noted by many, but especially by A. G. Matthews and G. F. Nuttall,1 that the Doctor, although a stanch member of the Church of England, did have among his acquaintances and even close friends a number of Nonconformists, such as Thomas Gibbons and Henry Mayo, Congregationalist ministers. Usually intolerant of their views, he nevertheless admitted them to friendship, an attitude similar to that which he maintained toward a few members of the Society oí Friends. He had, as Boswell tells us, no love for the sea as such, but was fond of individual Quakers.2 His acquaintance with Friends ranged from the little Quakeress of whom "he was much enamoured "3 when he was a schoolboy at Stourbridge to the great painter, Benjamin West, later President oí the Royal Academy.4 I have been able to collect material on a dozen such associations, *Assistant Professor of English, New York University. 1 "Dr. Johnson and the Nonconformists," Congregational Historical Society Transactions, XII (1936), 330-334. 2 The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, revised by Lawrence F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), II, 458. References throughout are to this edition. 3 Ibid., I, 92. Johnson wrote a poem to Olivia Lloyd, the young Quakeress, but Boswell said he had not been able to recover it. For further details about her see Aleyn Reade's Johnsonian Gleanings, Part III, pp. 159-160, where she is described as a young girl with a taste for the classics, youngest child of Sampson Lloyd and Mary Crowley Lloyd, and later the wife of Thomas Kirton. Her interest in Latin and Greek was passed on to her nephew, Charles Lloyd the philanthropist, whose son, Charles Lloyd the younger, was a minor poet and the friend of Charles Lamb. A portrait of Olivia still exists. 4 George Birkbeck Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies (New York, 1897), I, 131, n. 5; II, 426. Boswell, in The Private Papers, makes many references to West after the latter became President of the Royal Academy in 1792 on the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 19 20Bulletin of Friends Historical Association several of which are especially revealing of certain angles of Johnson's personality. As for actual Quaker influence on his thinking, I dare make no definite claim. The Doctor's independence of mind makes proof difficult, and yet in at least one case there is a possibility of it. Johnson 's strong antislavery sentiments at an early date for this conviction may have been nurtured or at least strengthened by a Quaker friend who freed his own slaves in Tortola, at great personal cost. The story of the gradual awakening of the Quaker conscience with regard to slavery is familiar. It was five years after London Yearly Meeting passed its first formal minute against holding Negroes in bondage that Johnson expressed the same conviction. Boswell, in the Life, gives an argument dictated to him by Johnson in 1777 in favor of a Negro, Joseph Knight, then claiming his freedom in the Court of Session in Scotland. After an exposition on the legal and social conditions in Jamaica, Johnson concludes: The sum of the argument is this:—No man is by nature the property of another: The defendant is, therefore, by nature free. The rights of nature must be some way forfeited before they can be jusdy taken away: That the defendant has by any act forfeited the rights of nature we require to be proved; and if no proof of such forfeiture can be given, we doubt not but the justice of the court will declare him free.5 Boswell adds an argument of his own for slavery, which, if it represents any widespread thinking in this period, makes Johnson's and the Quakers' opposition all the more striking. Says Boswell: To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man...