This month’s blog post takes us behind the scenes at the Birthplace and down into our basement. As visitors to the Museum will know, one room of the basement is usually available to visit: the Johnson family kitchen. However, this year the basement has been closed to the public since February, when we had a small flood in an adjacent room. The area dried out and thankfully no damage was done, but the kitchen display remained closed as part of our covid-secure social distancing measures after the Museum reopened in July.
Our team has used the closure as an opportunity to take care of some of the items in the display. Although the majority of items in the tableau are reproductions, there are a few collection items in the scene including the Conduit Lands Trust Chest. This large oak chest would have contained the funds and papers of the Trust. It was transferred to the Johnson Birthplace Museum from the Lichfield Museum in the 1970s, and is of Johnsonian interest because Johnson’s father Michael would have used the chest during his time as a Trustee of the charity, which is still in operation today. He would likely have been the holder of a key to one of the three locks, which ensured that nobody could access the contents without fellow trustees present.
Another collection item hidden amongst the clutter of the Johnson’s kitchen is a little 18th century painting by an unknown artist, also transferred from the Lichfield Museum in the 1960s. It doesn’t have a Johnson connection but the image is typical of a classical idyllic scene, and family servant Kitty Chambers may well have dreamed of far-away places like this while she stirred the family’s stew.
The family kitchen is watched over by a young Samuel Johnson, and he has also received some care and attention this year. At the start of the latest lockdown, Museum Attendant and talented sewist Sarah Dale took home Samuel’s nightshirt to wash and repair, but unexpectedly ended up undertaking some fascinating research into 18th century fashion.
Sarah discovered that it looked as though the nightshirt was adapted from a woman’s nightdress, and it had plastic pearl style buttons glued on. She tells us more:
“An 18th century shirt would have used thread buttons (also called Norfolk buttons, because this is where a lot of them were made). Thread buttons were practical because they were cheap to make, comfortable next to the skin, and able to stand up to the ferocious washing techniques that 18th century under garments were subject to”
You can see read a step by step account of how Sarah made the thread buttons here:
One of the things that visitors often ask us is: “Did the Johnsons really cook and spend time down there?” It is not an easy question to answer because the layout of the basement and ground floor of the building has much changed since Samuel’s day. In the late 1960s the staircase that now takes us down into the basement was built. Before that, steep steps under a trapdoor led down to the basement from inside the house. There were also steps leading down from the yard behind the building. A plan of the building from 1925 even shows a scullery at the back of a neighbouring building across the yard from the back door of the Birthplace (now The Bureau café). Descriptions of the house at auctions in 1785 and 1887 describe ample cellars and place the kitchen on the ground floor, but we do not have enough information to know for certain what the Johnson’s layout would have been.
Johnson, of course, would not have called this floor of the house a basement. The word does not appear in his Dictionary, it would rather have been a Cellar, defined as ‘a place under ground, where stores are reposited’.
So why do we show the kitchen in the cellar? Well, it is due to a passage in Hester Piozzi’s Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786), where she recalls:
I have heard him relate another odd thing of himself too, but it is one which everybody has heard as well as me: how, when he was about nine years old, having got the play of Hamlet in his hand, and reading it quietly in his father’s kitchen, he kept on steadily enough till, coming to the Ghost scene, he suddenly hurried upstairs to the street door that he might see people about him.
Here Johnson hurries upstairs, and as this is the only account that gives a glimpse into the domestic layout of the building in Johnson’s youth, it provides an evocative basis for the atmospheric tableau.
For more atmospheric stories from the Birthplace from the comfort of your home, join us for our first online event on Monday 21st December 2020 in partnership with Lichfield Storytellers. More information and tickets available here https://www.wegottickets.com/event/509252