55 - To Hester Thrale, [London, c. 12 April 1773]

Summary

Hester Thrale (1741–1821), writer, was introduced to Dr Johnson through their mutual friend the playwright Arthur Murphy in 1765. Stuck in a loveless marriage and burdened by a state of almost constant pregnancy in the late 1760s and 1770s, Thrale took great pleasure and inspiration from Johnson's friendship, while he derived equal enjoyment and gain from her conversation and literary prowess. Thrale undertook some significant translation tasks as well as making an important contribution to Johnson's Journey to the Western Isles and his Lives of the Poets. She also provided Johnson with a safe refuge when his mental and emotional health deteriorated. Thrale, with Johnson's assistance, was soon hosting a vibrant salon at her home in Streatham where guests included members of the Club, including Goldsmith; she was largely unimpressed by his ‘anomalous Character’.1 The death of her ne’er-do-well brewer husband liberated her financially as well as personally. She later married a Catholic Italian singer, Gabriel Piozzi, and her most serious period of literary activity ensued, including Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786), Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson (1788) and Retrospection (1801), before her death from gangrene.

The copy-text is a facsimile of the letter in a sales catalogue cutting in the New York Public Library. It was first published in A. M. Broadley, Doctor Johnson and Mrs. Thrale (1910). According to Balderston, it is addressed ‘To Mrs. Thrale’. It is endorsed by her ‘a Letter from Dr. Goldsmith’. Balderston established the date of the letter from the sale catalogue of William Evarts Benjamin, March 1886: ‘Hester L. Thrale (Mrs. Piozzi). 12th April 1773. A.L.S. 1 p., 4to. To Doctor Goldsmith, urging him to let her have the fourth and fifth volumes of his book (she does not say which one), and couched in terms of much stately courtesy’ (BL, 121).