Francis Barber

Francis Barber was born enslaved in Jamaica, became Samuel Johnson's servant and companion for over thirty years, and was left the residue of his estate. He was brought to England as a boy by Colonel Richard Bathurst, whose plantation his mother had worked on, was baptised, and was freed by Bathurst's will in 1754 with a legacy of twelve pounds. He entered Johnson's household in 1752, shortly after the death of Johnson's wife, and stayed with interruptions until Johnson died in 1784. He ran away twice in his youth, once to an apothecary and once to sea; Johnson, who detested the navy and detested slavery more, used the influence of John Wilkes to have him discharged from the fleet in 1760. Johnson then paid to send him to grammar school at Bishop's Stortford in his twenties, an expense he explained to nobody's satisfaction. Barber married an Englishwoman, Elizabeth Ball, and their children lived in Johnson's house. Johnson's will left him an annuity of seventy pounds a year and the residue of the estate, a provision Sir John Hawkins publicly called excessive and which Boswell recorded with some discomfort. Barber moved to Lichfield, kept a school for a time, and sold relics of Johnson as the money ran down; he died poor in a Stafford infirmary in 1801. His descendants still live in the English midlands, and Johnson's toast to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies is usually read against the fact of this household. Johnson called him in a letter his humble friend. Barber sat for at least one portrait, long attributed to Reynolds and now doubted. His story has been the subject of a modern biography and a play, and he is one of the very few Black people of the period whose life is documented in any detail at all.

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