Under the Glass: On Houses

 

"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.” - Samuel Johnson, Rambler 68, November 10th 1750

There’s a reason I called this site The Grub Street Lodger besides my interest in Grub Street. I was a lodger, one of those strange, single men who pay to live in someone’s spare room or attic, which  I then filled beyond bursting with books. I have had six addresses since setting up this site, and one of those was for almost ten years. 

I wasn’t the only one. My three big Grub Street heroes were all lodgers. 

Oliver Goldsmith never owned property. Famously, it was whilst lodging in Wine Office Court when he was dunned by his landlady and called on his near neighbour, Samuel Johnson for help. Johnson then rooted through Goldsmith’s papers, found a finished novel, The Vicar of Wakefield and sent it out, selling it to John Newbery’s nephew for sixty pound. (Despite not thinking it worth printing for two years, it ended up being a steal, becoming a highly successful work). Goldsmith also lived in Arbour Court, where there are stories of him helping the landlady hang up the washing and entertaining the children with magic tricks. Another time, he lodged with John Newberry himself in Cannonbury House, where he strode the fields of Islington, seriously trying to think of funny things for his comedies.

Another lodger of Cannonbury House was Christopher Smart, who remembered those days as a time of domestic bliss with his wife and children. He remembered this in less salubrious lodgings in Mr Potter’s private mad house, which was a lodging paid for him. Whilst there, he felt himself emasculated because he had to formally renounce his future claims on his mother’s property and any future property of his wife. He later died in another rented dwelling in the Liberty of the Fleet Prison, where he lived as a debtor.

Samuel Johnson himself has two house museums dedicated to him, the on in Gough Square and his birthplace of Breadmarket Street in Lichfield. He did own the Lichfield house for a short while but had to put it in trust when he couldn’t pay the upkeep. When he visited, he never stayed there but put himself up in guest houses. 

Owning a house wasn’t the aspiration in the eighteenth century it is now, but I found comfort in being like them, and so many other fascinating people and writers who had no place to call their own. I am, however, no longer in their number. I am a homeowner (as long as I keep up mortgage repayments, but my name is on the deed). 

It’s a phrase that sits strange with me. I never exactly did a moonlight flit, I’ve carried too many books around with me to do that but I could be gone within a weekend, and had to a couple of times. Now  am fixed, tied to a place and address in a way that I never have before. It’d feel an odd thing to say that the house has become part of my identity, I haven’t even moved into it yet, but I am a part of its identity, another name in a long list of owners. 

My new house is not an eighteenth century house, built, probably at the beginning of the twentieth century (or a smidge before), but there was something about it that appealed to me. Pretty narrow, the house reminded me of a London town house in miniature, with red bricks that put me in mind of Gough Square. Rather like Gough Square when Lord Harmsworth bought it, my house has been neglected for the past few years and I have been working incredibly hard to make it a comfortable place for me and my books, because, as Johnson said, “

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.