‘I’m coming, my Tetsie’

The first time Tetty Porter met her future husband, Samuel Johnson, she told her daughter, Lucy, that she had never encountered a more ‘sensible’ man. Johnson’s fury on that occasion may help to explain the footnote he appended, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, to a passage in King John about shoes:

‘The authour’ referred to here is as accommodatingly non-specific as the shoes that ‘admit either foot’, but the name which follows hard on the heels of authorial disorder is ‘JOHNSON’, not Shakespeare. The following year, 1737, reduced again to poverty, Johnson left his wife in Lichfield and, accompanied by Garrick, headed to London in the hope of finding employment.

Source: www.lrb.co.uk