DR. JOHNSON AND THE OLD BAILEY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 132, 5 June 1937, Page 27

DR. JOHNSON AND THE OLD BAILEY

On two occasions when Doctor Johnson was drawn Into close contact with the Old Bailey and its propensity for sending its prisoners to the gallows, he was strongly moved, according to Theobald Mathew ■■ in "For Lawyers and Others," says "John o' London's Weekly." In 1769, one of his close friends, Giuseppe Baretti, the Italian critic and secretary to the Hoyal Academy, was arrested and charged with murdering a certain Evan Morgan. It appeared that one afternoon Baretti was set upon by some roughs in the Haymarket calling him a "Damned Frenchman," and a "woman-hater," and chased him along Panton Street and Oxenden Street. Apparently Baretti, whose sight was very bad, had been terrified for his life, and was genuinely astonished to be told that he had killed one of his assailants. with his fruit knife, which, he protested in his defence, he wore "to carve fruit and sweetmeats, and not to kill my fellow-creatures."

It is interesting to note that the Magistrate he was haled before in the first instance was Sir John Fielding, whom Mr. Mathew might have noted as the brother of the author of "Tom Jones." The bullies of the Haymarket were notorious, Baretti was obviously a harmless little man, and there appeared in Court to give evidence of his good character not only Dr. Johnson but Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith. It is not surprising that he was acquitted, although Johnson and Burke played Job's comforters and, visiting the poor man before his trial, "bade him not to hope too strongly."

Another Old Bailey unfortunate in whom Johnson interested himself was the Rev. Dr. William Dodd, known to students of English literature courses as the editor of "The Beauties of

Shakespeare." Johnson had met him only once, but he felt called on to make several efforts to prevent the execution of a man whose crime was admit* ted but who had behaved more foolishly than wickedly. Dr. Dodd, in fact, who exhibited a greater talent for spending money than for earning it, had endeavoured to rid himself of a temporary embarrassment by forging a bond for £4200 in thg name of Lord Chesterfield, a former pupil of his. He seems to have been quite sincere in his hope and intention of returning the money within a few months, but the forgery was detected through a blot. Although he was quickly found guilty, sentence was deferred on a legal point.

Dr. Johnson was then approached as a man of eminence believed to be in favour of mercy for Dodd, and he wrote an address, in prose of characteristically Johnsonian sonority and balance, for the wretched forger to deliver before the Court —"I am sunk at once into poverty and scorn," part of it runs; "my name and my crime fill the ballads in the streets; the sport of the thoughtless and the triumph of the wicked." Dodd was nevertheless sentenced to death, and although Johnson prepared several letters and a petition for him, he was hanged, and made an edifying end. Johnson took his failure to gain an amelioration of sentence with characteristic philosophy, but it is strange to discover that one of his most famous dicta was in effect an equivocation. For it was when he was asked if Dodd had really written the final "Address to the Convicts," that Johnson declared (knowing he had himself written the speech), "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

From such obscure passages of legal and literary history, Mr. Mathew has for the most cart made his book.