Bainbridge's Johnson.(According to Queeney)(Book Review)

According to Queeney, by Beryl Bainbridge; Penguin, 2002, $22.

ACADEMIC BOOKS about Samuel Johnson are something of a minor industry. But an equally powerful indication of the enduring influence of the eighteenth-century critic, poet, moralist, lexicographer and conversationalist is the fact that once a decade or so, some reputable writer decides to tackle him for the general reader. Usually these are biographical works. In the 1970s we had the superb biography by poet and novelist John Wain, which has gone through three editions. Wain, like Chesterton before him, also depicted Johnson in a play. In 1993 we had Richard Holmes' Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, and last year Adam Sisman described the writing of Johnson's life in Boswell's Presumptuous Task.

But this new book by distinguished British writer Beryl Bainbridge, now published in paperback, will probably represent the highest the Johnsonian circle has penetrated into the best-seller lists for a few centuries. According to Queeney is a novel, but it is also a work of deep reading and research. All readers of Johnson and Johnsoniana will recognise on every page Bainbridge's debt to the biographical sources, but her way of handling the material brings characters and scenarios before us more vividly than ever before.

No doubt Bainbridge anticipates that much of the contemporary novel-reading public will not know these stories and anecdotes. They may, in fact, find the book a bit confusing. Bainbridge gives us little by which to distinguish between historical characters such Goldsmith, Garrick or Levet, and Johnson's neighbour Mr Phipps, his Lichfield friend Mrs Scase, or the Thrales' old servant, Muggeridge, all of whom will be unknown to seasoned Johnsonians and must be fictions. In some ways, who Johnson was himself is not really made clear--I noticed an American reviewer who described him as an "inventor, philosopher and philanthropist".

But for the Johnsonian, the pleasure of familiarity is far from detracting from the pleasure of this short, vivid book. Bainbridge weaves her materials into a series of dated chronological vignettes, depicting Johnson's relationship with the family of the wealthy brewer Henry Thrale, from when he first visited them in 1765, until his death in 1784, shortly before which the intimacy, long under a variety of pressures, had evaporated.

Thrale encouraged his mildly artistic and intellectual wife Hester to assemble something of a salon, focused on their estate, Streatham Park, just out of the metropolis of London. Johnson found Mrs Thrale, thirty years younger than himself, very attractive, and referred to her (with fewer sexual overtones, but not without any) as his "dear mistress". She advised him, fed and soothed him, rebuked and flattered him, and after he died, wrote (before Hawkins or Boswell) the first book-length biography of him, her Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson.

The Thrales' eldest daughter, Hester Maria (or "Queeney", as Johnson dubbed her), is not in fact the narrator or main character of this novel. The action of the book commences when she is two years old, and when Johnson, then aged fifty-five, begins to occupy--for periods long and short--a room in the Thrales' various homes. The two share a birthday. The child's view is not the main focus of the novel. But the letters at the end of each chapter, which Queeney, as a middle-aged woman, sends to Laetitia Hawkins (another daughter of a biographer of Johnson), draw our attention to the way in which history and memories are partial, and subject to distortion.