Samuel Johnson's circle

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"We suffer from Johnson" - those words come in a poem written by his friend, the diarist Hester Thrale Piozzi (who died May 2nd 1821). Patience Agbabi's new novel time travels back to eighteenth century London and takes its teenage heroes to a tea party at Samuel Johnson's house. Thomas Lawrence sketched his biographer Boswell. His Jamaican servant Francis Barber inherited his watch. So Laurence Scott convenes his own virtual tea party to look at Samuel Johnson's world.

New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau is co-organiser of the first international conference on Hester Thrale Piozzi and will share her findings from her research into Piozzi's life and works. As an exhibition of Lawrence's portraits prepares to open at the Holburne Museum in Bath, we hear from curator, Amina Wright, about the young artist. Patience Agbabi's novel is called The Time-Thief and she explains why she was drawn to depict Samuel Johnson. And, New Generation Thinker Jake Subryan Richards writes a postcard reflecting on ideas about slavery, abolition and the law in eighteenth century England.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn academic research into radio. You can find a playlist of discussions, features and Essays on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35

Producer: Ruth Watts

Image: Patience Agbabi Credit: Lyndon Douglas

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds,
0:34.5	music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Scott, and in this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, I can promise you some new thinking,
0:43.3	as me and my guests time travel back to Samuel Johnson's London to meet his unlikely protege,
0:48.4	the woman rumoured to have broken his heart, and a painting prodigy discovered in a pub.
0:54.7	Are you curious? You know, intellectually curious. If I say art, if I say culture, if I say
1:02.4	Marlena Dietrich's Feather Boa, do you think I fancy a bit of that? Well, that's how we feel
1:09.0	on free thinking. We want to know what motivates the cartoonist Alison Bechdel.
1:14.4	It's quite unseemly my need to expose myself to the reading public.
1:19.2	What haunts the Booker Prize winner Marlon James.
1:22.2	One of things that blew my mind was the idea of African vampires.
1:27.6	Subscribe to Free Thinking on BBC Sounds.
1:33.7	I'm especially glad you've joined us for today's program.
1:37.4	One of our subjects has an absolute horror of being left alone.
1:41.4	He's Samuel Johnson, the 18th century essayist and author of the first English
1:45.3	dictionary to use quotations as proof of a word's meaning. You might remember him being spoofed
1:50.9	by Robicletrain in Blackadder III. Ah, Dr. Johnson. Damn cold day. Indeed it is, sir, but a verified
1:57.7	one. For I celebrated last night the incitlcyclopedic implementation of my premeditated orchestration
2:03.5	of Dermotic Anglo-Saxone.
2:08.0	No, it didn't catch any of that.
2:10.4	Hugh Lorry there is the baffled Prince Regent, with Robbie Coulterian's Dr. Johnson in the 1980s
	...

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