Lady Fantasma Tunskull
Mrs. Thrale of Streatham. By C. E. Vullianly. (Cape-. 12s. 6d.) THE biographer of the egregious Mrs. Thrale of Streatham Place cannot expect to please everybody. Sooner or later he is bound to say something that will infuriate either the Johnsonians, Or the Boswellians or the Thralites. Mr. C. E. Vulliamy has taken what is perhaps the wisest course : he is content to please himself. And the chances are that his pleasure will be shared by the unbigoted,' for he has produced a very lively, very entertaining and eminently readable book, which bears all the marks of having been written with unqualified gusto. There are passages in it which might well have been irspired by the "giddy exuber- ance" of Mrs. Thrale herself in her Piozzi days. Boswell would have been horrified at the spectacle of her whirling and twirling her way through the pages of her latest biography. But then Mr. Vulliamy is not a Boswellian. His book is incidentally a contribution to what he calls "the interesting and inevitable process of de-Boswellising Johnson." The ' process is a salutary one, though Mr. Vulliamy's share in it will probably be resented by the hypersensitive John- sonisms. The trouble is that Boswell seems posthumously determined to have the last word. There is no knowing what new revelations about Mrs. Thrale and Dr. Johnson may be concealed in the collection of his papers which have recently been unearthed in Scotland.
Whatever they may contain, they are unlikely to make Mrs. Thrale seem more or less peculiar than she is already,
or more extraordinary than she appears in Mr. Vulliamy's story of her life. She is a woman—one hesitates to call her a lady—whom one cannot confidently identify with any known variety, ..of the female ;species. .Almost any label will fit her. Lord Lansdowne called her "vain, vulgar and false " ; Mr. Vulliamy describes her variously as artless, vivacious, jocular, frisky, "a product of decaying elegance," "a phenomenal egoist " ; Dr. Johnson, who lived in her house, on and off, for some fifteen years when he was at the height. of his fame, once remarked that to see and hear her was "always to .hear wit and to see virtue." For him the creature who' had been held up to ridicule in one of the many thinly veiled satires with which the age pursued her as Lady Fantasma Tunskull was Thralia Dulcis. Who on earth—what on earth, was she ?
She was a brewer's wife, but unlike Mrs. Bung, was not the centre of a happy family. Her husband was a torpid glutton, a kind of negatively amiable nonentity ; her children —the survivors of incessant pregnancies—went unmothered and ultimately left her. As a mother and a wife she is not unfairly summed up in Mr. Vulliamy's comment that "within a few days of Mr. Thrale's funeral she wrote a humorous French poem on her eldest daughter's intestinal troubles." Her widowhood had scarcely begun before she was hot on the trail of Signor Piozzi, an Italian singing master, whom she inveigled into marriage and with whom she began life anew, touring the continent, scribbling her reminiscences, entertaining anyone who was not too shocked to be asso- ciated with her extravagant enterprises. At the age of 79 she was the life and soul of a bathing-party at Weston- super-Mare; she died reluctantly at Clifton a year later.
So much for her life, to the vulgarity, vitality and pic- turesqueness of which Mr. Vulliamy does ample justice. Such as it was, it would have meant very little to the world in her own time, even less to posterity, if it had not been for the presence in it of Dr. Johnson. Apart from him Mrs. Thrale has no claim to fame greater than that of any other irrepressible, self-advertising bourgeoise, sexually thwarted and emotionally unsatisfied. It was he that attracted to
her table at Streatham such men as Goldsmith, Garrick . and .Burke, though it is only :fag. to add that he was Well_ 'Compensated for doing -so. Mrs. Thrale certainly did her best to give her pet lion a comfortable den and she can hardly be blamed for finding the task of -hotising a lion in bear's clothing a thankless one. Mr. VUllianay is sym- pathetic to her in this respect. The devout Johnsonian will protest ; but it cannot be denied that the Doctor's behaviour was frequently . insufferable. Mr. Vulliamy frankly admits as much and concludes that he must have been in love with Mrs. Thrale—a conclusion to which recent evidence lends some support. Unfortunately for her reputation (though she never seems to have laid much store by it) Mrs. Thrale was far too stupid, self-centred and insensitive to realise this, with the result that nothing Johnson _ever did to her was as unpardonable as her behaviour towards him after her husband's death. Even now it is difficult to discover the truth about their relations. Like everything else in her life, they are woven into an inextricable web of falsehood, fancy and exaggeration. "Poor thing !" someone was heard to remark in Mrs. Montagu's salon in the 1790's, " hers has been a lamentable story." Lamentable indeed ! But it has made her famous and we may be sure that this is precisely what she wanted—at all costs.
JOHN IlAYWAHH,
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