Samuel Johnson and the Epitaph on a Duckling

“To adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious and troublesome; it requires indeed no great force of understanding, but often depends upon enquiries which there is no opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand.”¹ Samuel Johnson’s notorious sentence, often used out of context as a salve for the scholar’s conscience, has provided me little consolation. After all, I have puzzled over a small bit of literary history—a duckling—for almost two decades. After teaching at The University of Iowa for the first time in the summer of 1965, I went to Yale University to work on some now-forgotten scholarly project. While there I met Herman W. Liebert, librarian of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and collector of the works of Samuel Johnson. Following a visit to his Johnson collection I found that I had agreed to edit all of the biographies about Johnson which appeared before James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Liebert mentioned that he had discussed this project earlier with another young man but could not remember his name. In the spring of 1966 the Department of English hired an assistant professor, Robert E. Kelley, and over lunch in late summer I discovered to my amazement that he was the young man working on the early biographies. We joined forces, assisted with characteristic generosity by Frank Paluka and Frank Hanlin in acquiring needed materials, eventually completing a monograph about the early biographies and an edition of them, both published by the University of Iowa Press.

But even after the publication in 1974 of the Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson, a few problems remained to be resolved, one the story that as a young child Johnson had composed an epitaph on a duckling.²

In spite of a number of contemporary witnesses, there is little agreement as to how much of it is by Johnson, if any. No effort has been made to sort out the various texts or to suggest which version might be closest to the original. In the process of collecting the early biographies, Kelley and I discovered a biography of Johnson prefaced to James Harrison’s edition of the Dictionary (1786). Although the biography is heavily derivative, it contains a few bits of new information, and these details almost certainly came from Charlotte Lennox (c. 1729/30-1804), author of The Female Quixote (1752) and friend of Johnson for more than 30 years. It is her version of the epitaph which seems to come closest to reflecting the original.

The few sentences, which introduce the anecdote of the epitaph on a duckling in the Harrison biography, provide an initiation into the problems this essay attempts to resolve.

Only one story of this kind, however, is extant, which deserves to be particularly recorded; and that has been so often repeated, and every time in a form so different, that the authenticity of the whole account might be fairly doubted, if the fact had not been indisputably established.³

Best known is the account given in the Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell, on whose authority the epitaph has been rejected as being not by Johnson but by his father. Behind this account is the earliest known written version of the epitaph, with the circumstances surrounding its composition, entered by Boswell in his notebook on March 25, 1776, or some unknown time shortly thereafter but unpublished until 1925.

Using these notes as the basis of what he writes in the Life, he rejects the epitaph but, curiously, gives a different version of it.

The epitaph did not appear in print until after Johnson’s death. Anna Seward (1749-1802), poet and granddaughter of Johnson’s old schoolmaster at Lichfield Grammar School, Reverend John Hunter, in a letter dated February 5 in the February 1785 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine (p. 100), gave the following account:

In the 1784 Supplement to the Gentleman’s Magazine (p. 982), Thomas Tyers (1726-87), one of Johnson’s early biographers, comments

Add, He composed a poetical stanza at three years old, on the death of a duck; an infantine subject for an infantine mind. If it is to be given to the publick, it ought to be with authentication. He was Hercules in his cradle. Could Lopez del Vega, or Cowley, or Milton, or even Pope, have asserted more truly that they “lisp’d in numbers”?

Mary Adey (1742-1830), daughter of Joseph Adey (1704-63), town clerk of Lichfield, does not question the authenticity of the anecdote when she writes to Boswell February 26, 1785: “Miss Seward I hear has sent you his Epitaph on his Duck, it is needless in me to repeat it.”⁸ Although Seward’s letter of March 25, 1785 cannot be entirely trusted, she apparently tried to persuade Boswell that

There can be no doubt of the authenticity of that little anecdote of Johnson’s infancy; the verses he made at three years old, on having killed, by treading upon it, his eleventh duck. Mrs. Lucy Porter is a woman of the strictest veracity; and a more conscientious creature could not live than old Mrs. Johnson, who, I have heard Mrs. Porter say, has often mentioned the circumstance to her.⁹

Then on January 20, 1794 Boswell reiterated his position in another letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine.

In the period between Seward’s first publication of the epitaph and Boswell’s Life, several other biographers became involved. In 1786 Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi included it in her Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, calling it “His epitaph upon the duck he killed by treading on it at five years old” and describing it as “a striking example of early expansion of mind, and knowledge of language.”

Sir John Hawkins in his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787) publishes yet another version, although he appears indebted to Anna Seward.

The next publication of the anecdote presents further difficulties. This is the life of Samuel Johnson, supposedly written by James Harrison, which appears in 18 unnumbered pages at the beginning of an edition of the Dictionary published by Harrison and Company (London 1786). For the most part it is an abridgement of Hawkins’ Life with an occasional look at Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes and several other early lives. When the author did have new information, however, he inserted it in the proper place in the narrative. There are only two important additions: a new version of the epitaph on a duckling and information on Johnson’s writings for Charlotte Lennox. The account of the epitaph is worth quoting at length. After the two paragraphs quoted earlier, the author begins to argue:

He then gave his first indication of poetical genius, by prompting an Epitaph . . . [Hawkins’ version is quoted, followed by Mrs. Piozzi’s].

Some readers may perhaps think that the manifest awkwardness still unfortunately subsisting in this poetical effusion, has been moulded by Sir John and Mrs. Piozzi, to their respective ideas of what ought to have been, rather than what actually was, dictated by the child. To those who love truth and simplicity, and who do not expect metrical perfection in an infant, the lines in their original state will be far more acceptable, than with any adventitious ornaments, however successfully laboured. The genius of Johnson is to be looked for, on this occasion, and not the ingenuity of his biographers. This wonderful Epitaph, then—and wonderful it was for a child of five years old, miraculous for one of three—in its simple original state, appears to have run thus—

According to The House of Harrison (1914), published anonymously by Cecil R. and H. G. Harrison, James was born in 1765 and died in 1847. Just exactly what he was doing between these dates has confused his own family.

Admittedly there is some room for doubt that “Mr. Harrison,” the reputed author of our sketch, is James Harrison. As the authors of The House of Harrison point out

In any case, did James Harrison take time from his publishing and printing activities to write the Life himself or did he hire someone to do it? His method in the Memoirs of Charles Frederick, King of Prussia. By Samuel Johnson, LL.D. with Notes, and a Continuation, by Mr. Harrison, Editor of the British Classicks, Dr. Johnson’s Folio Dictionary, &c. &c. (London, 1786) was to reprint Johnson’s Memoirs in the first 86 pages (with a few fatuous and argumentative notes), write the next 137 pages himself, and have the remaining 248 pages written by a “Literary Friend.”¹⁵ Whether or not he wrote Johnson’s Life or simply provided the materials may not ever be known. The important thing is the source for his new information.

Harrison had some interest in Johnson—perhaps only commercial but maybe not. No doubt he would have liked some new materials for his Life, if for no other reason than it would sell dictionaries; but little came his way. The little new information that he did find appears to have come from Charlotte Lennox. The clue is the phrase: “Mrs. Lennox has been lately heard to declare.” What Mrs. Lennox had declared was that the famous literary party given for her by Johnson was somewhat less elaborate than the celebration described by Hawkins: “she can by no means remember what is so ingeniously represented as a coronation, though she perfectly well recollects the circumstance of receiving a sprig of laurel stuck in her glass of jelly” (Early Biographies, p. 273).

It is likely that Mr. Harrison heard Mrs. Lennox declare this to him personally, since Harrison & Co. published several of her works about this period. The relationship began in 1783 with the publication of The Female Quixote separately and in volume 12 of the Novelist’s Magazine.¹⁶ Harrison & Co. later published Henrietta in 1787 (and in volume 23 of the Novelist’s Magazine—in the same volume with Rasselas). The business connection with Charlotte Lennox also explains the proprietary interest in her works shown in the biography of Johnson.¹⁷ The author also states that Johnson “favored her with a few essays for the Lady’s Museum, and wrote a paper of the Trifler in that respectable miscellany” (p. 273). This bit of information does not appear in any of the earlier lives of Johnson, and since the contributors are not indicated in the Lady’s Museum, it is probable that Harrison learned it from Mrs. Lennox.

Let us return to the epitaph and the question of why Harrison is so certain that he is presenting it in its “simple original state.” No evidence exists that Harrison had met Johnson. Had he met Johnson late in life he might be expected to have added a few personal observations, as William Cooke and William Shaw did in their biographies, but there are none. All the other extant versions of the epitaph have come from persons close to Johnson. Admittedly the evidence is slender, but since Harrison knew Mrs. Lennox, and Mrs. Lennox knew Johnson with some degree of intimacy, and since the only other important new information in the Harrison biography (the Lady’s Museum contribution) must have come from Mrs. Lennox, she would appear to be the most plausible source for this version of the epitaph.

Anna Seward provided the first printed version of the epitaph. Among the difficulties of accepting her account is the very early age at which she says Johnson is supposed to have written the verses. Tyers, Murphy, Harrison, Boswell, and undoubtedly others, thought it unlikely that such a poem was written at the age of three. “The great infant” seems remarkably like the elder Johnson with his tics—“shaking his head.” The allusion to Pope reinforces the impression that Seward was more concerned with literary effect than with truth. Tyers, although uncertain about the anecdote’s authenticity, decided on the basis of new information or common sense that five would be the more likely age of composition. Hawkins, trusting Seward (“it is well attested”), reprints the anecdote but makes a few changes in the verses, probably on his own authority. But even before Seward’s account was in print, Samuel Lysons secured a different version of the epitaph by a five-year-old Johnson. He mentions that the verses had “just arrived from Litchfield” but his letter provides no hint as to who sent them or to whom. When Mrs. Piozzi included the verses in the Anecdotes, she made several revisions. The change of “more” luck to “good” luck suggests that she may have seen Seward’s version. Harrison probably received the “simple original state” of the epitaph from Charlotte Lennox, but the first two lines are the same as those in Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes and the third line follows Hawkins.

The variant versions of the epitaph can be accounted for by the different sources which have not, and probably cannot, be identified, and by the fact that the epitaph appears to have had an oral history until late in Johnson’s life. In addition some of the variation may be the result of editorial license common in the period—Mrs. Piozzi’s changes in the verses sent her by Lysons, for example (although the possibility of her having had another source, perhaps Johnson himself, cannot be dismissed). Next to the anecdote in her 1807 copy of the Life she wrote: “& now all is over!! I do protest he told them to me himself as I printed them; & I believe he made them.”¹⁸ Perhaps Johnson gave a version of the epitaph from memory to Mrs. Lennox, and Harrison’s account is the way she recollected it; her recollection influenced, perhaps, by the accounts already in print.

All surviving versions of the epitaph can be traced back to persons who might be expected to have heard accounts of his childhood from reliable sources or Johnson himself. Yet the assumption that Johnson composed all four lines of the epitaph raises some question about the reliability of all these versions. The numerous variants, some the result of an oral tradition or of compositors’ errors but others, undoubtedly, the result of editorial tampering to add a new lustre to the genius of the boy Johnson, make it difficult to establish a text.

The version which would appear to be closest to the source, Johnson’s mother, did not appear in print until this century. It was given to Boswell by Lucy Porter, citing the authority of Johnson’s mother. Johnson was present and maintained that his father had written half of the epitaph, but Boswell was inclined to believe Lucy’s secondhand report of Mrs. Johnson’s claim that he had written all of it. During a visit to Ashbourne the following year, however, Boswell questioned Johnson and wrote a brief entry in the same notebook: “But he assures me 21 Septr. 1777 that he remembers his Father’s making it. So I am convinced.” When Boswell came to write up his account of the epitaph for the Life, he interpreted this entry as meaning that Johnson had told him that his father had written all four lines, and most scholars have concurred. Aleyn Lyell Reade, however, when he published his account in Johnsonian Gleanings in 1922, thought that “it seems, from Boswell’s note-book, that Johnson admitted being responsible for half the epitaph—of course the first half.”¹⁹ As Donald Greene has pointed out, Boswell misread his own memorandum.²⁰ What Johnson assured Boswell on September 21, 1777 was that his statement on March 25, 1776 was accurate—his mother was wrong in saying that he wrote it all—his father made half of it. That he misunderstood his own memorandum is clear from his letter of January 20, 1794, to Anna Seward in the Gentleman’s Magazine: “The refutation does not rest on Johnson’s recollection of his childhood; but on telling me, in Mrs Lucy Porter’s presence, that his father had owned to him that he had made them, and wished to pass them for his son’s.” That is not what Johnson said.

Apart from Boswell’s shaky physical and mental health at the time he was writing the Life, several reasons may explain why he misinterpreted his memorandum. Boswell received on February 11, 1785, from Anna Seward a packet of anecdotes, including the epitaph, and on February 15 wrote enthusiastically requesting more stories of Johnson’s “boyish years” (Waingrow, p. 55). On his way to London he stayed March 26-27 in Lichfield and received another packet, which Seward was just preparing to send to him. It was in this second packet of March 25 that she attested to the anecdote of the duckling on the authority of Lucy Porter, “a woman of the strictest veracity.” But it also contained the erroneous story refuted by Edmund Hector that the “Sprig of Myrtle” verses, which were to cause the vituperative exchanges of letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine discussed above,²¹ had been written by Johnson as a love poem to Lucy Porter. This anecdote and that on the duckling became in Boswell’s mind linked to the controversy and both were rejected. Having caught Seward in one egregious error, her anecdotes had to be examined “with much caution.” Also, since his rivals for biographical eminence, Piozzi and Hawkins, included the epitaph, he could laud his own accuracy at their expense. By beginning the anecdote with “It is told” and citing Piozzi and Hawkins in a footnote, he disassociates himself from the anecdote. By printing a version drawn largely from Seward, he obscures the fact that he too had written down the epitaph and had believed it to be true.

Johnson’s authorship of half the epitaph is confirmed by his own testimony and those of Piozzi and Lennox. Reade is undoubtedly right in suggesting that Johnson wrote only the first two lines, since it is difficult to imagine that the verses could be composed in alternate rhymes by a young child.²² Understandably, Boswell thought that “from internal evidence it is impossible they should, without a miracle.” Discovering that the child Johnson wrote only the first half of the epitaph—and did not therefore compose rhyming lines—eliminates one of the major objections to the authenticity of the anecdote. Another objection was the age at which the verses were composed. When Boswell recorded the anecdote in his notebook, he mentioned Johnson was in petticoats. Since young boys often wore petticoats until they began school at age six or seven, age is not much of a factor in Boswell’s note. But when Anna Seward first published the anecdote she said Johnson was “about 3 years old.”²³ Although this very early age did not bother Seward or Hawkins, others objected, as we have seen. On some basis Tyers decides to change the age from three to five in his account and Lysons says specifically “at five years old.” While both three and five would be covered by Boswell’s “in petticoats,” the latter age would be the more likely.

Now, just which version of the opening two lines of the epitaph did Johnson compose at about the age of five? The version in Boswell’s notebook—“Under this stone lyes Mr Duck / Whom”—is the most elaborate and does not sound like the composition of a young child. Seward’s version with its “good master Duck” repeated by Boswell in the Life also seems a bit contrived. Only the versions by Mrs. Lennox and that sent by Lysons to Mrs. Piozzi with their unmetrical “Here lies poor Duck” have the simplicity of a child’s verse and I suggest this line is probably the closest to what the young Johnson actually said.

Since the last two lines are, so far as I know, Michael Johnson’s only claim to being called a poet, some effort should be made to determine his contribution. In order to do this, it is necessary to determine the meaning or meanings of the poem. It should be recalled that Boswell, in his notebook, states that there were 13 ducklings. Seward, and her followers, including Boswell in the Life, says that there were 11 ducklings; the Lysons-Piozzi version confuses the reader by failing to mention the number. An odd number of ducks is absolutely essential to deriving any meaning from the poem.

The version with the richest texture and, in my judgment, the furthest removed from Samuel and Michael’s original composition, is that in Boswell’s notebook. Clearly the key word is “odd.” On the simplest level if the duckling had been lucky enough to live, he would have been the thirteenth, “odd” in the sense of “not even; not divisible into equal numbers,” which is Johnson’s first definition in the Dictionary (1755). It might also be odd in the sense of “particular,” “not like the others,” “strange.” As Harrison suggests, there is an allusion to an old proverb, “odd things are lucky,” or “there is luck in odd numbers.”²⁴ Perhaps in this case there is also an allusion to the “odd trick” in whist, the thirteenth trick, won by one side after each side has won six.

The third line presents few problems. The version in Boswell’s notebook says, “if he had luck,” Lysons has “more” luck, but five versions agree in having “good” luck. In the case of the last line no two versions agree exactly with each other, although Lysons and Seward are close, and Hawkins follows them but omits “then.” I am inclined to accept the version in the Harrison biography, “Because it was an odd one,” as the least contrived.

Harrison describes his version from Mrs. Lennox as “simple”—“plain; artless; unskilled; undesigning; sincere; harmless” is Johnson’s first definition in the Dictionary (1755). Mrs. Lennox had known Johnson since the late 1740s and must have heard this anecdote (“something yet unpublished; secret history,” Johnson defines it) on several occasions. Perhaps she wrote it down, but if she did the record is lost. Perhaps she remembered it, as Mrs. Piozzi appears to have done. In any case two close friends of Johnson thought the four-line verse worth remembering, and it was seized upon avidly by others who saw no reason to question its authenticity. That a five-year-old child, or an occasional three-year-old child, can make doggerel verses will come as no surprise to anyone who has spent time around children. The verses, however, are likely to be in couplets, not alternate rhymes. But this objection is overcome by remembering that Johnson composed only the first two lines. When Lucy Porter told the anecdote in front of Johnson on March 25, 1776, he did not protest vigorously that it was impossible. In fact Johnson shared with his contemporaries a love of early signs of genius. He laments in the Life of Sir Francis Drake that there is no knowledge of “any disposition to hazards and adventures which might have been discovered in his childhood, or of the education which qualified him for such wonderful attempts” and in the Life of Dr. Thomas Sydenham that “under whose care he was educated, or in what manner he passed his childhood, whether he made any early discoveries of a genius peculiarly adapted to the study of nature, or gave any presages of his future eminence in medicine, no information is to be obtained.”²⁵ Johnson also shows an interest in youthful genius in An Account of the Life of John Philip Barretier. Who was Master of Five Languages at the Age of Nine Years. Boswell, in his memorandum of March 25, 1776, says “But I trust to his mother’s relation of what happened in his childhood rather than to his own recollection.” But in an autobiographical fragment called Annals, parts written between 1765 and 1772, when Johnson was in his late fifties and early sixties, he records his memories of his trip to London to be touched for the King’s Evil by Queen Anne. Although “but thirty months old,” “I seem to remember, that I played with a string and a bell . . . and that there was a cat with a white collar, and a dog, called Chops, that leaped over a stick.” Uncertain “whether I remember the thing, or the talk of it,” he certainly remembered the placement of a counter in a shop and other things from his childhood.²⁶ It is interesting that Johnson thinks these little details worth recording. On the basis of the evidence from the Annals, there is no reason to think that Johnson would not have remembered this small event from his childhood. As valuable as Boswell’s Life is, it is unfortunate that it has become the final authority for all matters Johnsonian in the minds of most people, for as hard as he tried to gather information, much eluded him. Neither Boswell nor Hawkins, for example, knew of Annals, owned by Johnson’s servant, Francis Barber, and not published until May 1805. Often Boswell’s rivalry with Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Piozzi as to who would produce the most authoritative account, hurt his judgment.²⁷ For after careful weighing of the evidence, Johnson’s own testimony supported by Mrs. Lennox and Mrs. Piozzi combined with the secondary authority of Johnson’s mother and Lucy Porter, it must be concluded that Johnson composed the first two lines of the epitaph on a duckling.