If walls could talk, Dr Johnson’s House would be a great storyteller. There would be many stories to tell: the one about the struggles of the man of letters who wrote the first great dictionary there (a feat that took him nine years); the one about the blind poetess; and the one about the lay medical practitioner, providing services to the poor who paid him the only way they could – in gin.
But the House has one remarkable story which resonates in Black History Month and is still not as well known as it deserves: it is about the life of Francis Barber.
Painting of a Young Black Man
I often visit Dr Johnson’s House, and when I do I always gravitate towards one picture: a painting of a young black man. It’s an eighteenth-century copy of a portrait by Joshua Reynolds and almost ever since it was painted around 1770 there has been debate about who the sitter was. One of the strongest candidates is Francis Barber, who lived in this house in the 1750s.
Barber had been born into slavery in Jamaica in about 1742 and brought to England in 1750. After Johnson’s wife Tetty had died in 1752 he filled the House with people who were in need and who, in turn, could provide him with some company. Francis Barber was one of these, arriving in Gough Square just a few weeks after Tetty’s death.
As a small boy, Barber took his place in Johnson’s crowded and sometimes argumentative household. He began there as a servant, but was to become almost an adoptive son to Johnson: when Johnson died, many years later, he made Barber his heir. You can still see Johnson’s will, hanging on the wall in Dr Johnson’s House, providing a silent witness to the relationship between the young black man, not long out of slavery, and the much older Johnson, an opponent of slavery.
Fragments of Paper Survive
There’s another link between Barber and Dr Johnson’s House, and it’s a rather touching one. In the period when Johnson was at work on his Dictionary of the English Language, he was paying to have Barber educated. Some fragments of paper survive on which Barber practiced writing his name, over and over, as any child does when they learn to write. If you stand quietly in the atmospheric garret of Dr Johnson’s House, it is hard not to see two figures there: the large, shambling, ungainly man, labouring over his books and papers and, somewhere nearby, a slight young black boy, concentrating intently on his handwriting.
There was much more to Barber’s life: his time serving in the British Navy, his return and marriage to a white woman – and the hostility and support he experienced. He and his family lived with Johnson for many years and were with him when he died in 1784. I have tried to tell the full story in The Fortunes of Francis Barber.
At one point this year the famous picture was on show in three places in London. The original painting was on display at the Royal Academy and a copy was in an exhibition at the London Archives. It’s well worth seeing wherever it is. But to see it in Dr Johnson’s House is to be reminded of the young black boy who lived there and of the wider black community in eighteenth-century London.
Michael Bundock
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