In The Mind Of Dr. Johnson Poem by gershon hepner

In The Mind Of Dr. Johnson



In the mind of Dr. Johnson Hester Thrale’s
was lost completely, swallowed up;
this sort of things occurs to females who pour males
their font of wisdom loving cup.

Once twenty, women, she would quip,
until they’ve reached the ripe old age of forty-five,
can tie men to a post and whip
them till they cry for mercy, if they’re n

Dr. Johnson asked her to keep him in fetters,
a literary bondage that
excited him so much, his private letters
that begged this had a French format.



Inspired by an article by Helen Deutsch on Hester Thrale, reviewing Ian McIntyre’s “Hester: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Johnson’s ‘Dear Mistress, ’” in LRB, May 14,2009:

In the DNB Hester Lynch Piozzi (as they call her) is identified as a ‘writer’, but for the past two centuries she has been a heroine of old and new-fashioned marriage plots and a source of critical controversy. A brilliant conversationalist and an innovative recorder of her own life, she was dull only on the subject of her genealogy: her parents (who were cousins) were descended from Catrin of Berain, Mam Cymru (‘Mother of Wales’) . Naming her is problematic. Ian McIntyre, in his imaginative and generous biography, simply omits surnames altogether. His subtitle, however, foregrounds a further complication. Hester Salusbury married first the wealthy brewer, MP, womaniser and ‘Southwark macaroni’ Henry Thrale, with whom she had 12 children, only four of whom survived, and then the Italian music master Gabriel Piozzi, for whom she pined passionately at the ripe old age of 40, and scandalised her circle by not only marrying but happily introducing him into British society. But neither man has claimed her for posterity. When a memorial to her was finally put up in 1909, it was to ‘Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale’…
Hester’s adult writing life, Normal Clarke has observed, could be said to have begun at the dinner table, where she first met Johnson in January 1765. ‘He has fastened many of his Notions on my Mind…that I am not sure whether they grew there originally or no: of this I am sure, that they are the best and wisest Notions I possess; and that I love the author of them with a firm Affection, ’ she declared in Thraliana, her husband’s name for his gift to her of six calf-bound quarto volumes in which she invented a new suspended between diary and anecdotal compendium. In old age she put it differently; in that mind ‘of Doctor Johnson’s mine was swallowed up and lost’.
Johnson’s description of Hester as his ‘dear mistress’ is given new resonance by the padlocks with which he entrusted her, in a letter written in French so that the servants could not read it, asking her to ‘hold me in that bondage which you know so well how to render agreeable’, and by Hester’s comment in her journal that she knew only too well the truth of Johnson’s remark that ‘a woman has such power between the ages of 20 and 45 that she may tie a man to a post and whip him if she will, ’


5/22/09

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