Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale

An exploration of the history of British sport, viewed through the lens of the life and work of Samuel Johnson and his friend and correspondent Hester Thrale.In Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale, Julia Allen takes a sideways look at sport, health and exercise in the eighteenth century, and in so doing reveals unfamiliar sides of the eponymous characters she uses as guides and commentators. Samuel Johnson does battle with the rough breakers at Brighton as energetically as he did with any of his verbal opponents; and Hester Thrale – herself ‘a good waterspaniel’ – provides wry observations, notably on what men decided women might decently be allowed to do in that foreign country that is the past.Allen starts with the medical theories underpinning notions about exercise, the role of the physician and the surgeon, the conditions in which exercise was taken, its place in child-rearing and education, and its efficacy as a remedy for depression. Chapters on the various sports and forms of exercise associated with Johnson and Mrs Thrale follow, from boxing and swimming to dancing and coach travel, including biographies of the star performers, and eye-witness accounts of the events they took part in. This book offers a wealth of research for anyone interested in peering into some of the obscurer recesses of eighteenth-century life.