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Stories Before 1850. 0161: Richard Johnson, Letters Between Master Tommy and Miss Nancy Goodwill

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Introductory essay

The attribution of Letters Between Master Tommy and Miss Nancy Goodwill to Richard Johnson comes from his day-books, ledgers containing details of the income received for writing during the period 1770 to 1793. At the beginning of the first book, Johnson summarised the money he had received before 1770. Letters Between Master Tommy and Miss Nancy Goodwill was listed as having earned him £5.5s., a tidy sum which he had received from Mr. Carnan, the publisher, in 1769. This makes the work their first known collaboration. There were to be many more, such as Juvenile Trials for Robbing Orchards (0167), until 1788, when Carnan died. Thomas Carnan was John Newbery's step-son, and after Newbery's death in 1767, Carnan and John's son, Francis, carried on the business until it wound down in the late 1780s. By then John's nephew, also called Francis, had built up his own publishing business which fared more successfully, surviving, in the hands of his wife, Elizabeth, and her manager, John Harris, well into the nineteenth century. Johnson also wrote for Francis (the son) and Elizabeth Newbery. Indeed, in 1787 her entire list, save only five titles, consisted of books written by Johnson. Letters Between Master Tommy and Miss Nancy Goodwill, though, was one of the rare successes of Carnan and Newbery. Johnson was paid to revise it in 1775 (for which he received £1.11s.6d.), and this 'Third Edition, Corrected' appeared in 1776. There was a fourth edition in 1779 and a fifth, further revised, in 1786. The version in the Hockliffe Collection is apparently a second issue of the first edition. Both bear the date 1770, but there are some slight differences - the Hockliffe edition is recorded as being printed for 'Carnan and Newbery', for instance, not 'T. Carnan and F. Newbery' as appears on the title-page of the first issue. (Roscoe 1973: 163; see Weedon 1949 for details of Johnson's business dealings, especially pp.50-51).

Weedon records that Letters Between Master Tommy and Miss Nancy Goodwill consists 'chiefly of transcriptions from Sarah Fielding's Governess' (Weedon 1949: 31). Although both Fielding and Johnson used a sometimes rather clumsy frame to contain their edifying stories and fables, the material contained here does not seem at all like that which Fielding produced. What is perhaps most striking about Johnson's Letters are the woodcuts which display a death-bed (p.99), a tomb (p.79), a murder (p.107), and Death himself, about to plunge his dart into a praying man (p.70).