‘Poor Bear'

This chapter considers a virtually unknown acquaintance of Johnson in the person of Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard, whose artistic and biographical engagements with Johnson between the 1770s and 1820s illuminate his reception. Johnson’s circle of men and women of letters is larger than the orbit that features in most discussions of his life and writings. Lady Anne was a prolific writer of (largely unpublished) letters, diplomatic correspondence, diaries, travelogues, poems, romances, and a memoir, and the creator of hundreds of drawings and watercolors, mostly of indigenous people (both enslaved and ‘free’) at the Cape during a five-year period of residence as part of the first British government at that Colony. There is only one definitively recorded social meeting between Johnson and Lady Anne, documented at length in her letter to her sister and written up in her (unpublished) memoir. This social event was also the occasion on which Lady Anne took a drawing of Johnson and Boswell that she later included in her memoir. This chapter draws on these texts, as on later fragments and allusions (including allusions to Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast in her Cape Diaries ), which suggest how deeply buried in her mind Johnson’s verbal formulations and critical judgments were.