History through two prisms
No, I haven’t misspelt “Queeney” – that is correct spelling of the nickname of a well-bred eighteenth-century lady, properly known as Miss Hester Thrale. Her mother, another Hester, was the wife of wealthy brewer Henry Thrale, MP for Southwark, where his brewery and spacious house were situated. The family also owned a large country estate, Streatham Park, in rural south London. The Thrales might have remained unknown to us but for their enduring relationship with Dr Samuel Johnson, famous as the compiler of the first comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755.
Johnson and the Thrales were introduced in 1765, when Johnson was 56, Henry Thrale 41, and Hester 24. Johnson, picky about his friendships, was lured in by reports of Henry Thrale’s exceptionally fine table. He was not disappointed: Thrale could afford gluttony on a gargantuan scale. Furthermore, he was no less carnal than carnivorous, so that, like a lady of much more recent times (also married to an overweight MP), Hester might have described sex with her husband as “like having a wardrobe falling on me – with the key still stuck in the door!”
Friendship between Johnson and the Thrales ignited immediately. Indeed, for Johnson, a brilliant conversationalist and writer, the Thrales quickly became his surrogate family. He acted as near grandpa to the Thrale children, especially to young Queeney. But despite his generally kindly disposition, Johnson had his faults. He could be a bully; he took little care over his appearance; and he suffered grotesque facial and bodily tics which today we recognise as Tourette’s Syndrome. Henry Thrale, though good-natured and generous, neither loved nor was loved by Hester; he was slightly stupid and dangerously inept with money. Hester, best balanced of the circle, was vivacious rather than beautiful, a capable writer sharp enough to hold her own with Johnson; but on the debit side she could be bitchy, especially towards Queeney, who was her eldest daughter. And Queeney could let rip with teenage bolshiness, though she would usually soften it towards Johnson.
The Thrales generously provided Johnson with permanent, comfortable accommodation in both their houses, and a library in each. They took him on their travels, too: to Brighton, to Wales, to Lichfield (Johnson’s hometown) and to Paris, where they watched from a gallery as King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette dined. The Thrale/Johnson household members learned to laugh, snap and snarl at each like an eighteenth-century version of Eastenders for over fifteen years. Then in 1781 everything fell apart when Henry Thrale died from a stroke brought on by his colossal over-eating.
The world assumed that Hester and Johnson would marry. But no. Although there was well-attested affection between them, it was not sexual, at least not for Hester. Johnson was then a somewhat repellent seventy-two and she an attractive forty. And she had already fallen for Queeney’s Italian music teacher, Piozzi. Soon after Henry Thrale’s death Hester sold the brewery and decided to give up Streatham Park too. Thus, Johnson quickly lost his surrogate family and the two homes that went with it. So he returned to his modest London lodgings and to the servants who had kept his household going. Hester continued to treat Johnson kindly, but at a distance. She offered him accommodation, but things were never the same again. One cannot say that he died of a broken heart, but after 1781 his morale and his health began a steady decline. He succumbed to asthma, dropsy and strokes, and died in December 1784, aged 75. He was buried that same month in Westminster Abbey.
Beryl Bainbridge’s spell-binding book, published in 2001, is a novel based on known facts. It captures the interactions of her disparate characters throughout their near-twenty years together. Flavoured not only with Johnson and the Thrales, the narrative is spiced with other notables too, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick and in small measure Johnson’s Scottish travelling companion, James Boswell. The originality of According to Queeney – and it is truly original – is that history is unfolded twice over: once by the omniscient author and again by Queeney (thus According to Queeney) in letters to friends. Each chapter in the book covers either one or two years, and Queeney offers variant accounts of events already described that year or reveals something previously untold. She writes, often waspishly, two decades after Johnson’s death. Thus we get a blend of epistolary and conventional novels. So rewarding, and what a technical accomplishment!
Commentators with far more expertise than mine regard According to Queeney as Beryl Bainbridge’s best work. It is also her last. All in all, she published nineteen novels (a friend completed her unfinished twentieth), plus three short story collections and four works of non-fiction. She was nominated, unsuccessfully, five times for the Booker prize, but in 2001 was honoured as Dame Beryl Bainbridge. A lifelong heavy smoker, she died of lung cancer in 2010 at the age of 77. One obituary recorded that “Her face [was] ravaged, with wide eyes that looked as if they have seen something ghastly”.
Another obituary reported that “she was a great talker, a likable and amusing woman famed for falling over at parties”. I like that. Shades of Samuel Johnson, perhaps?
