Reality check- Duplicity and disinformation?

In late June 2024, Professor Lynda Mugglestone and Marianna Spring, the BBC’s Disinformation Correspondent, joined forces in a lecture delivered at the Pembroke Festival of Research.

While Marianna focussed on reality checks amid the complexities of modern fake news, Professor Mugglestone turned to Pembroke’s own history and its long-cherished relic of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Desk. A brass plaque attached to the desk by the College in the late nineteenth century gives an apparently definitive history. But whether this is a literally brazen lie can, as the lecture explores, swiftly take us into the realm of Victorian disinformation and spin.

Johnson certainly had a deal dictionary desk on which he worked in the Dictionary garret in Gough Square in London between 1747-1755. But whether this is the one given to the College in 1867, and which had suddenly reappeared in the possession of Johnson’s goddaughter Ann Lowe in 1855, remains a conundrum.  Ann had been left some money— but not a desk — when Johnson died in 1784. By 1855, she was living in apparent poverty in Deptford, with her sister Frances. The desk was in the parlour. A national and international charity campaign on their behalf was spear-headed by the writers Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens almost as soon as Ann sent the first of a series of desperate begging letters, carefully timed with the centenary of Johnson’s Dictionary.

It's tempting nevertheless to wonder whether Dickens and Carlyle were heroes or victims in what they tried to accomplish. On one hand, as Carlyle declared, Ann was ‘Johnson’s god-daughter fallen old and indigent’ while the ‘poor fir desk’ was that ‘upon which Samuel Johnson wrote the English Dictionary, the best Dictionary ever written, say some’. 

But on the other hand, a further cache of begging letters written by Ann in the 1820s have recently been recently discovered in the archives of Southampton University. These repeatedly state that, in the family’s poverty and distress, all their furniture and possessions had been sold. There is no mention of Samuel Johnson or a dictionary desk.

Reality check: while Ann is clearly lying to someone, was it the recipients of her letters in the 1820s — which include the king and the Prime Minister — or was it Dickens and Carlyle, and eventually Pembroke, too?

You can find the full lecture on YouTube here