Johnson and Barber: A Story of Teaching
- Samantha Stagmier
- Jul 3
- 14 min read
Updated: Jul 8
Explore Samuel Johnson’s flawed yet determined efforts as a teacher, beginning with his short-lived school, Edial Hall, and later in his own household, focusing especially on his education of Francis Barber, the Black child he helped raise and who would become England’s first Black schoolmaster.
I first approached the subject of Johnson and teaching with an interest in Francis Barber, a Black boy who joined Johnson’s household between 1752 - 1754, and the cycle of teaching that persevered despite Johnson’s failings as a teacher. His school, Edial Hall, would fail by 1737, and he would flee to London with hopes of becoming a great playwright, and in the meantime, find work as a translator. He would do neither. But twenty years after he stopped teaching professionally, Johnson would instruct Francis Barber in reading and writing in Latin, Greek, and other European languages, whether Barber wanted to or not, and set him on a path for becoming the first Black schoolmaster in England. Despite this accomplishment, little is known about Barber’s school at Burntwood, near Lichfield, or what Barber was actually like as a teacher. Such is the burden of archivists to merely construct stories based on the pieces left behind, and it was my hope that by observing Dr. Johnson in his teaching days before the fame brought by his writing and dictionary, that we could construct a story of Francis Barber as well.
“The truth, however, is, [Johnson] was not so well qualified for being a teacher…” - Boswell, Life of Johnson
Edial Hall
Dr. Johnson began construction of Edial Hall in 1735, after yet another rejection from another school to serve as their schoolmaster. He decided to build his own where he could instruct his pupils “in a method somewhat more rational than those commonly practiced.” With this intention, he sent out inquiries for the schemes (the classroom agendas) of Charter-House and Westminster to study in crafting his own class scheme. I don’t know if he received their schemes in reply. Johnson was about 26 at the time, with experience assisting teachers at his previous schools, and most to his advantage, the experience of studying Greek at Pembroke College in Oxford, if only for thirteen months before his family’s finances prevented him from continuing. His wife, Elizabeth “Tetty” Johnson, paid for the school’s construction out of her dowry; the school was to be their home, and home to the estimated seven pupils who would be boarded there.
“At Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are boarded and taught the Latin and Greek languages, by Samuel Johnson.” - an advertisement appearing in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1736 for Johnson’s school
Lesson Plan
We have the scheme recorded by Boswell, Johnson’s friend and biographer, from a letter Johnson wrote to his cousin, Rev. Samuel Ford, outlining his lesson plan for the students. They would begin by ‘perfectly mastering’ the Latin nouns and verbs, followed by translation as a means of learning syntax, examinations twice a week, and only when Latin was mastered would they move onto Greek. The scheme contained a list of books he intended to teach from, and books he recommended to his cousin for his own study, which included seven works written across three Greek dialects.
We can estimate the mixed success of Johnson’s school from the success of his students. Of the few we know about, one Mr. Offley was accepted, following Johnson’s instruction, to study at Cambridge. David Garrick, the most famous of Johnson’s pupils who would go on to be a lifelong friend and a famed Shakespearean actor, was said by Johnson to be lacking in Latin.
"Young Rogues"
Garrick’s family was connected to the Johnsons from Lichfield, and was likely sent to Edial Hall with his younger brother at the Johnsons’ recommendation. The brothers and Mr. Offley would be the first pupils boarded there. Garrick was around 18 at the time, Dr. Johnson’s junior by seven or eight years, and not yet his friend. We can only imagine what Garrick was like in the classroom, though I like to assume he was a talented speaker; when speaking to Boswell about the school, he didn’t give the impression that he or the other “young rogues” boarded at Edial Hall had much respect for their schoolmaster, or that they could at an age when Johnson’s gesticulations and twitching, indicative of Tourette’s syndrome, was an easy source of teasing. Garrick was known, in addition to his acting, to be talented with impersonations, and I have a hard time believing he didn’t start his mimicry of the great doctor in the classroom.
We don’t know when Johnson and Garrick became friends; sometime before they would journey together to London, or perhaps sometime during their journey. They had a mutual friend, Mr. Gilbert Walmsley, who wrote a letter of introduction for them to a Mr. Colson who ran an academy in London where Garrick was to continue his studies with the intention of pursuing a degree in law. This was before he was swept away with a love for theatre. It’s reasonable to believe if Johnson was aware of this intention, that he helped Garrick specifically in the classroom up until the failure of Edial Hall to prepare for studying law, but we can’t be certain. We can only conjecture, for example, that if Johnson did teach beyond the confines of the Classical languages, he would have been tempted toward theology, his lifetime devotion, or metaphysics, the study of the nature of being itself, which had enamored him in his Pembroke days.
Uncouth Gesticulations
There is similarly conjecture surrounding the reason for Edial Hall’s failure; on starting my
research, I found an article without citations that claimed the reason for the school’s failure was Johnson’s Tourette’s syndrome, that his ‘uncouth gesticulations’ were off-putting enough to parents and students as to pull them out of school. I find this plausible, but I don’t believe it’s the full story. Johnson himself during his lifetime claimed to be a poor businessman, which I’m sure contributed to the school’s lacking success. We also have to consider Johnson’s temperament beyond his disabilities, which seemed to convince his friends that he was not suited for teaching. To bring back my earlier quote from Boswell’s Life of Johnson in better context:
“The truth, however, is, [Johnson] was not so well qualified for being a teacher of elements, and a conductor of learning by regular gradations, as men of inferiour powers of mind. His own acquisitions had been made by fits and starts, by violent interruptions into the regions of knowledge; and it could not be expected that his impatience would be subdued, and his impetuosity restrained, so as to fit him for a quiet guide to novices… a mind gloomy and impetuous like that of Johnson’s, cannot be fixed for any length of time in minute attention, and must be so frequently irritated by unavoidable slowness and errour in the advances of scholars, as to perform the duty, with little pleasure to the teacher, and no great advantage to the pupils.
Good temper is the most essential requisite in a Preceptor… Johnson was not more satisfied with his situation as the master of an academy, than with that of the usher of a school ; we need not wonder, therefore, that he did not keep his academy above a year and a half.”
This analysis by Boswell, although made of Johnson later in his life, is supported by the young Johnson’s attempt before constructing Edial Hall to apply for a schoolmaster’s post at Solihull Grammar School, again with the recommendation of Mr. Walmsley who would receive his rejection. The school did raise a concern that Johnson’s facial distortions, though they acknowledged he had no control over them, could negatively effect the students, but their other reason for dismissing him as a candidate, while acknowledging Johnson’s knowledge far exceeded that of someone who should be teaching grammar schools, was his haughtiness. This seems accurate from what we know of Johnson’s opinion on education. In fact, it brings to mind another anecdote of Boswell’s from his conversations with Johnson, on his surprise to learn that Johnson did not consider himself well-studied:
“I [Boswell] always thought [Johnson] did himself injustice in his account of what he had read, and that he must have been speaking of with reference to the vast portion of study which is possible, and to which a few scholars in the whole history of literature have attained ; for when I once asked him whether a person, whose name I have now forgotten, studied hard, he answered, ‘No, Sir. I do not believe he studied hard. I never knew a man who studied hard. I conclude, indeed, from the effects that some men have studied hard, as Bentley and Clarke.’”
For further context, one must understand that “Bentley” likely referred to Rev. Richard Bentley, considered the “founder of historical philology” and “the greatest scholar that England or perhaps Europe ever bred.” To the pupils of Edial Hall, I must think, those poor boys.
But Johnson’s school did fail, and although he applied to other schoolmaster posts for want of employment after his move to London, we have no reason to believe he worked again as a teacher, professionally or otherwise, until Francis Barber.
Francis Barber
Barber was a born into enslavement in Jamaica under the ownership of Colonel Bathurst, and was brought with the colonel and the colonel’s son, Dr. Bathurst, to London where former was to retire after selling his property and the majority of the people enslaved on his plantation. Dr. Bathurst was a friend of Dr. Johnson’s, and like Johnson, abhorred slavery. Though Barber was owned by his father at the time, I suspect it was Dr. Bathurst who sent young Barber—we believe that Barber was about eight-years-old—to school at Barton in Yorkshire under Rev. Jackson. What comes next is more conjecture than history. The school at Barton was considered a cheap school by Johnson’s circle who knew of Barber’s history, likely a charity school that taught reading and writing from the Bible, and perhaps basic maths. Schools at this time taught reading writing separately, and we can’t be sure
how proficient Barber was with either by the time he came to live with Johnson. I would
conjecture, however, that his writing was not proficient, as we possess a paper Barber wrote on after coming to live in Gough Square with Johnson, on which he practiced writing his name and the word “England.”
Imagine, for moment, this young boy, about ten if our timing is right, sitting beside Johnson in a room of letters with papers dedicated to words and their definitions, learning to write his name.
Dependents
Johnson took his sudden responsibility for a child very seriously. Barber had been brought to him by Dr. Bathurst in wake of Elizabeth Johnson’s death, when Johnson was so melancholic that his close friends were concerned for whether or not he was eating. Barber, in all likelihood, had been raised in Jamaica to be a house slave, so he had the skills required to look after Johnson, predominantly by purchasing food and bringing it back to the house. Furthermore, Dr. Bathurst and his father were no longer financially able to easily support a child, and Dr. Bathurst wanted Barber to stay with a good friend. In less than a month following his wife’s death, Johnson had gone from being a childless, servant-less widower to having two dependents under his roof, the second being Anna Williams. He made the effort to pull himself together, continued his essays for the Rambler to make an income, and began teaching Barber to write.
Johnson’s house was often remembered by its guests for being loud, and I believe it. Johnson was hard of hearing and Anna Williams, already known for her temper, was only recently blind and newly familiar with the home; I can imagine the yelling and miscommunication volleyed back and forth across the many floors, and Barber in the middle, perhaps being shouted at in Latin by a former teacher who believed in “how much easier it is to learn language by ear, than by mark.” The household was in constant fluctuation of members, and nearing the completion of Johnson’s Dictionary, hosted a small team of clerks to assist the great doctor in the same room where Barber was called on to observe—perhaps to be of help, perhaps for his education—Johnson’s lifetime work.
Blackfriars School and Smallpox
Not the most suitable place for a child to learn, even when surrounded by the components that would make up Johnson’s Dictionary, and especially when considering that all Johnson’s melancholy, impetuosity, and impatience as noted by Boswell was probably heightened in the months that followed his wife’s passing. Nonetheless, Johnson was determined to make Barber a scholar, and soon learned of a local school called Blackfriars founded by Peter Joye, a man of Dutch descent, whose school gave preference to children of the poor and of foreign extraction. Barber met the description and needed only to be boarded within the limits of the school’s parish, and so Johnson sent Barber to live with a local woman whose family was closely connected to the school.
The school taught roughly forty boys and thirty girls between the ages of six and twelve, most of whom would go on to become domestic servants, and possibly a few who, like Barber, were Black. The students were given a pretty standard education, learning “to read English, to write and to cast accounts.” Not to doubt that Barber’s time would have been spent valuably there, but he, on the first day of school, contracted smallpox. It may interest some of you to know that, prevalent as smallpox was at the time, it was apparently not uncommon for parents interviewing schools to ask for their procedures should a child in the school become sick, in the same way parents today might ask schools about their procedures for removing children from the building in case of a fire.
Barber survived the smallpox with facial scarring, echoing Johnson’s own scars from surviving childhood scrofula. When he was well again, Johnson made the decision not to send him back to Blackfriars and to instead send him to study with Jacob Desmoulins, a writing-master walking distance from Gough Square who was married to Johnson’s God-sister. We don’t know how long this schooling went on before Barber took on the role of Johnson’s house servant in greater earnest, but it couldn’t have been more than two years, and likely was not that long. Johnson personally instructed Barber in matters of theology, and the two would often pray together. From what I could tell of my reading, especially toward the end of his life, praying with Barber brought Johnson a great comfort.
Apothecary
At the age of twelve (again, we’re pretty sure), Barber took his education into his own hands
some months after receiving the inheritance left to him by the late Colonel Bathurst, which
included twelve pounds and his freedom. Following an argument with Johnson or Williams or both, Barber ran away to Cheapside, to a successful and wealthy apothecary owned by Edward Ferrand, and took a job as an assistant during a time when when many young men had gone off to war and assistants were needed. He wanted to be an apprentice, and may have studied somewhat under Ferrand and alongside Ferrand’s apprentices with whom Barber likely shared a room during the two years he worked there. However, the laws of the time prevented a Black man from becoming an apprentice or owning his own apothecary, and even if that weren’t so, Barber was unable to raise the funds he needed to purchase an apprenticeship, and during the apprenticeship, he would have found it necessary to prove proficiency in Latin which, despite Johnson’s instruction, he had not mastered.
After two years of working in the apothecary during which he often visited Johnson, Barber
agreed to leave his work and come home. Then, to Johnson’s horror and anxiety, Barber changed his mind and instead ran away again to join the British navy.
Many side adventures make up the storied lives of both Dr. Johnson and Francis Barber, but as the purpose of this article is to focus on teaching and education, I will swiftly move on and allow my readers to imagine for themselves Francis Barber on the high seas, or to read about it at their own leisure in such books as The Fortunes of Francis Barber by Michael Bundock.
Making a Scholar out of Barber
It would be many years before Johnson tried again in a significant capacity to make a scholar out of Barber, though we can imagine that Barber was reading pretty extensively during this time; we have an anecdote of Johnson telling a friend how Barber wanted to read the book Evelina, written by another friend of Johnson’s and another Francis, Frances Burney. Johnson paid three-hundred pounds for Barber to go to Bishop Stortford Grammar School in Hertfordshire where he boarded with the late schoolmaster’s wife, likely upstairs in the old Tudor house from where the classes were held. Once a respectable school for the sons of country gentlemen preparing for university, Bishop Stortford had fallen to financial distress and general insignificance. Although there were some gentle sons among the students, many pupils were of the lower class attending at a reduced fee. Barber would have been the eldest among them, a man between twenty-five and twenty-eight in a classroom of children.
In some ways, Barber’s life at this time resembled that of a modern college student who’s left home for their studies. He regularly exchanged letters with Johnson who often checked in as would a parent, asking after his classes and sending clothes. Francis was studying the Classical languages that Johnson once sought to teach, and at the considerable expense that Anna Williams was often fond of reminding Barber when he was home during their arguments. She would pause to yell at Johnson, “This is your scholar! Your philosopher! Upon whom you have spent so many hundred pounds.” At least we can be assured that Barber had a smart mouth on him if that was her response. The irony is that in all likelihood, Williams was the person who introduced Johnson to Bishop Stortford Grammar School in the first place.
Barber's School
Barber wouldn’t immediately put his education to use as a scholar, and continued living as Johnson’s servant even after he’d married and started his own family who would live with Johnson as well. It would be thirteen years in fact after Johnson’s passing that Barber would
open his school in a town called Burntwood, near to Johnson’s hometown of Lichfield. Nothing is definitively known about the school, except that a successful charity school was already being run in the area. Competition would have been steep unless, as most historians on the subject have guessed, his school catered to much younger children by helping them to prepare for entering the charity school. We also know that his wife, Betsey Barber, considered a “sensible and well-informed” woman, likely helped him to run the school and would open her own day-school with one of her daughters after her husband’s passing.
Barber was about fifty-two when the school opened. He was poor, somewhat deformed from illness (the scars from the smallpox I mentioned, coupled with another illness later in life that stole some of his teeth), and in a last effort to earn a steady income, opened a school that was destined to fail. Which is to say, he was just like Dr. Johnson when Johnson opened his school, just twice his age. Despite the impressive education both could boast, both struggled with discrimination that made teaching difficult; Johnson probably wouldn’t lose the nickname “Blinking Sam” in reference to his Tourette’s until he became “Dictionary Johnson,” and Barber would long be known as “Dr. Johnson’s Negro Servant.”
Readers, I can feel you pitying Francis Barber. Don’t. I’m not telling you this story so you can
pity him. In the modern day, no one would want to be pitied for being poor, deformed, or ill. I am telling you this story because Francis Barber existed; it is enough that he is remembered for trying to live the most normal life afforded to him at the time. He valued education, as did his wife, and in spite of their poverty, they sent their sons to be boarded at a school in Lichfield. His eldest surviving son, Samuel Barber, would leave school to find work as a servant, and in quitting that, apprentice to a famous potter and become the first of generations of Barbers who worked as pottery printers. Barber has great-great-great-grandchildren surviving to this day.
School Stuggles
Just as the failure of Johnson’s school was attributed to the off-putting nature of his Tourette’s syndrome (some who met Johnson saw these ticks and gesticulations as a sign of insanity), the failure of Barber’s school is often linked to the fact that he’s Black. I have no doubt that this is part of the story, that some parents didn’t want their children to learn from a Black schoolmaster, but as in Johnson’s case, I don’t believe that’s the full story. Like Johnson, and for Barber, perhaps because of Johnson, Barber did not have a good sense of accounts and money. Accounts are ironically one of the things he would have been taught had he been able to attend school in Blackfriars. A struggling business sense contributes to any school struggles, and at this time of his life, Barber probably didn’t have anyone he could turn to for good advice. In addition, as the war started in France, the price of goods in England rose, even for food and other necessities, which would have contributed to the families of his pupils affording to send them to school.
So, what can we imagine of Francis Barber as a teacher then? How do we imagine the first Black schoolmaster of England? I imagine Barber with a pocket-sized edition of Johnson’s dictionary in his coat, kneeling down to help a boy in a room full of noisy children learning to write their names. To me, that seems pretty close to the truth.
A guest blog by Samantha Stagmier
Samantha Stagmier
Samantha joins us this summer on apprenticeship following her graduation from the University of Iowa. She has studied English lit from the medieval period to the modern day, and came to Dr. Johnson’s House to practice her archival skills in drawing out information from 18th century British literature in order to construct stories of the lives of the people who lived then.
