The Fortunes of
Francis Barber: the true story of the Jamaican slave who became Samuel Johnson’s
heir
By Michael Bundock
Yale University Press 2015
 |
| Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, 1755-6, NPG |
About half way into this biography of one resident in eighteenth-century
London is a glimpse of his social circle when in the early 1760s a young student
called to find the famous author was away from the dingy lodgings he currently
occupied. ‘The Doctor was absent’ wrote the visitor, ‘and
when Francis Barber, his black servant, his black servant, opened the door to
tell me so, a group of his African countrymen were sitting round a fire in the
gloomy anti-room.’ All turned to the white visitor, who was disconcerted by the
sudden stares of ‘their sooty faces.’
Historians have found other, albeit fragmentary evidence of a
thriving Afro-Caribbean community in Georgian Britain. ‘On Wednesday last’
reported one newspaper, fifty-seven members of a social club, ‘supped, drank
and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins,
French horns and other instruments, at a public-house in Fleet Street, till
four in the morning. No Whites were allowed to be present, for all the performers
were Blacks’. As well as conviviality,
the community organised mutual assistance for those in need or sickness, for
most were employed as domestic servants, and if left without a place could
seldom claim parish relief; furthermore, the servants’ network formed the best
opportunity for finding a new position.
Very little is known about these networks and clubs, so even brief
glimpses are useful in figuring the diversity of London in the 1700s. In this new book Michael Bundock pulls together
all the recorded scraps of information about Francis Barber, who stands out from his fellow-servants, male
and female, by having been the protégé and eventual beneficiary of Samuel
Johnson, whose writings, lexicography
and eccentric personality made him one of the celebrities of the age. Those penning their own accounts of Johnson’s
life, or their acquaintance with him, incidentally also recorded aspects of
Barber’s life, which Bundock has woven together with strands of contemporary
history, notably the legal cases involving the civil status of formerly
enslaved Black individuals. How were differing
laws and property rights in the colonies to be reconciled with those in the
metropolis?
Barber was born in Jamaica, probably in the early 1740s, probably
on a plantation owned by Richard Bathurst.
His original name may have been ‘Quashey’ or Sunday-born, for a child
so-called was among four slaves not sold with the plantation in 1749, and young
Barber travelled to England with Bathurst the following year, to join the many
other blackamoor servant boys in London.
Here he was re-named, and sent to school in north Yorkshire. In 1752 he
was ‘given’ by Bathurst’s son to the recently-widowed Johnson, who to all intents
and purposes adopted him, as it might be an indigent nephew. There were more attempts at education but
fairly soon Barber’s role was as house servant, answering the door, running
errands, among a group of elderly dependents whom Johnson maintained partly out
of charity.
In 1755 when Bathurst died, his will gave Barber ‘his freedom and twelve
pounds in money’, probably the first cash the teenager had ever possessed. Aged
about 15 he decamped, to work for an apothecary in Cheapside and then, to
Johnson’s dismay, he joined the navy, having, in his own words, ‘an inclination
to go to sea.’ (This episode
incidentally coincided with time that Olaudah Equiano spent on warships as
slave/servant to Lieutenant Pascal) Barber’s
naval career, chronicled in the fleet’s muster books, lasted just two years: in
1760 Johnson successfully petitioned the powers-that-be, through an elaborate
system of interest and favours, to obtain his discharge. On
behalf of ‘that great Cham of Literature’, Tobias Smollett applied to the Admiralty,
on the grounds that ‘our lexicographer is in great distress’ and the lad was ‘particularly subject to a malady his throat
which renders him very unfit for his majesty’s Service.’
Bundock infers that Barber returned reluctantly to Johnson’s
household and this meticulous reconstruction of his career provides insight
into the general experience of rootless Londoners with no family to return to,
as well as the unusual relationship between two men so very different in age,
background and status. The question of
race, or colour, is hard to analyse: several of Johnson’s close friends wrote
insultingly about Barber, with malice that may have been augmented by their
disapproval of Johnson’s legacy (in trust) for Barber; others like Boswell regarded
him with apparent affection. As Bundock
explains, no very firm inferences of Barber’s opinions and emotions can be
drawn from the scattered surviving hints.
At around the age of thirty he married
Elizabeth ball, whose ancestry is almost as obscure as her husband’s,
and they had several children, the first (short-lived) and second sons were
named Samuel, as was conventional, Johnson being Frank’s surrogate father. They moved to Lichfield, where Francis died
in 1801, retaining to the end a measure of personal celebrity as ‘Dr Johnson’s
negro servant’.
Bundock has tracked his descendants. One born in 1930 recalls that when his father
mentioned Francis, his mother would say ‘don’t talk about that Black man in
front of the children’, but that he and a cousin find the ‘black roots’ in
their family history fascinating and wonderful and 'very emotional.'
In a postscript, the identification of Joshua Reynolds’ heroic head
study of a young Black man against blue sky and clouds as a portrait of Barber
is firmly rejected in favour of the sitter being Reynolds’ own servant (name as
yet unknown) as stated by the picture’s first owner. Though
good art history, this is also a pity, for there is no portrait – not even a
sketch or caricature – of Barber, to
accompany this painstaking biography.
