rcuit of the County the next day, he was asked by my mother, 'Whom he would invite to the Riding?' and answered 'All the town now.'" Michael had married late. He was fifty-two and his wife forty when their first son was born on 18 September 1709 (N. S.). She was Sarah Ford, of a family of tradesmen and small landholders who thought themselves socially superior to the lowly Johnsons. "My father and mother had not much happiness from each other," Samuel recorded. "They seldom conversed, for my father could not bear to talk of his affairs, and my mother, being unacquainted with books, cared not to talk of any thing else." In spite of her no doubt strongly expressed advice, Michael's business deteriorated, and he died in the poverty from which he had briefly arisen. Sarah then took over the bookshop and ran it competently for the rest of her life. It was not a happy family. Sarah's bourgeois values were at odds with Michael's and Samuel's more intellectual interests, and recent scholars have attributed some of Samuel's later psychological problems to her lack of understanding or affection for the boy. A younger brother, Nathanael, seems to have suffered also; almost all that is known of him is a pathetic letter to Sarah written when he was twenty four, accusing Samuel of turning his mother against him and giving a most gloomy picture of his own prospects. He died shortly afterward, and suicide has been suspected. From childhood Samuel suffered from various physical ailments that plagued him throughout his life--near blindness in one eye, the tubercular infection scrofula (the "King's E...
