'Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale' challenges the popular image
of Samuel Johnson as a man who favoured energetic discussion over
physical exercise, enthroned in an armchair peering short-sightedly at a
book. Thanks to the diarist and author Hester Thrale we have many
anecdotes that connect Dr Johnson to a variety of sports, and Julia
Allen, following Lytton Strachey's advice to attack her subject in
unexpected places, uses entries from Dr Johnson's dictionary and
anecdotes about the great man as her window into the world of
eighteenth-century sport and exercise. Revealing a world both foreign
and familiar, Allen takes the reader through a range of sports and
activities, from boxing and cricket to dancing and coach travel to
swimming, riding and skating. She reasserts women's place in eighteenth
century sport, especially the luckier ones such as Mrs Thrale, and draws
on medical treatises and reports to show how dangerous these sports
could be, and to explore the theories upon which contemporary notions
about health and exercise were based. Combined with fascinating
biographies not only of Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale, but also of a host of
eighteenth-century sporting celebrities, Swimming with Dr Johnson and
Mrs Thrale gives a fascinating insight into a century where things were
done very differently, often with dangerous consequences. This eccentric
book brings together pieces of eighteenth-century life to create a vivid
picture of the whole, making it essential reading for anybody interested
in history or sport.
