But Boswell repeatedly minimizes Johnson’s abiding opposition to slavery-even that startling toast is characterized as an attempt to offend Johnson’s “grave” dinner companions rather than as genuine support for the enslaved. Thirty years later, Johnson died and left Barber a sizable inheritance. Some of the surviving pages of Johnson’s notes for his famous dictionary have Barber’s handwriting on the back there are scraps on which a twelve-year-old Barber practiced his own name while learning to write. In the course of more than a thousand pages, little mention is made of Johnson’s long-term servant, Francis Barber, who came into the writer’s house as a child after being taken to London from the Jamaican sugar plantation where he was born into slavery. The veracity of Boswell’s biography-including its representation of Johnson’s position on slavery-has long been contested. “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies,” Samuel Johnson once toasted at an Oxford dinner party, or so James Boswell claims.
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