Lord Monboddo's African manservant

 

 

 

On the famous tour of Highland Scotland taken by Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in 1773, the pair stopped off at the estate of jurist Lord Monboddo [aka James Burnett], located in the Mearns [Kincardineshire] south of Aberdeen.    They left on 21 August, according to  Boswell’s journal:

Gory, my lord’s black servant, was sent as our guide, to conduct us to the high road [to Aberdeen]  The circumstance of each of them having a black servant was another point of similarity between Johnson and Monboddo.   I observed how curious it was to see an African in the north of Scotland, with little or no difference of manners from those of the natives.  Dr Johnson laughed to see Gory and Joseph riding together most cordially.  ‘Those two fellows’ said he, ‘one from Africa, the other from Bohemia, seem quite at home’.

Joseph was presumably manservant to either Boswell or Johnson or maybe to both for this excursion.  ‘Gory’ – named from Goree Island, Senegal, one of the slave-trading sites in West Africa -  was employed by Monboddo, who was known for the ‘magnetism of his conversation’ and his ‘paradoxes’ or eccentric opinions, which included pre-Darwinian speculation over the relationship between primates and humans.   The conversation at Monboddo House involved a sort of debate comparing or contrasting the capacities of  ‘the savage and the London shopkeeper’.  To Monboddo citing ‘the savage’s courage’, Johnson responded, ‘it was due to his limited power of thinking’.

With his notorious toast ‘to the next insurrection of the Negroes in Jamaica’, Johnson was of course a notable opponent of enslavement on the grounds of natural justice, though evidently unpersuaded of natural equality.

When Gory was about to part from us, Dr Johnson called to him. ‘Mr Gory, give me leave to ask you a  question! Are you baptized?’  Gory told him he was and confirmed by the Bishop of Durham. [Johnson] then gave him a shilling.