Piozzi, Mrs, more famous as MRS THRALE, and by that name to be remembered until Dr Samuel Johnson is forgotten. Her maiden name was Hester Lynch Salusbury, and she was born of a good Welsh family at Bodvel in Carnarvonshire, January 27, 1741. She early gave promise of quick parts and lively disposition, and received an education that extended even to Latin as well as French, Spanish, and Italian. Early introduced into the fashionable world of London, in October 1763 she married Henry Thrale, a prosperous Southwark brewer, thirteen years her senior. He was an honest man, and made an indulgent, if somewhat indifferent, husband; but he was uncommunicative and phlegmatic in temperament. Mrs Thrale made Johnson's acquaintance through the kind offices of Murphy in January 1765, and one of the most interesting friendships in the history of letters at once began. The sage quickly conceived an extraordinary affection for his 'mistress,' was domesticated in her house at Streatham Place for over sixteen years, and for her sake learned to soften many of the eccentricities of his speech, dress, and behaviour. Of all his friendships this was the one most valuable to him, for Mrs Thrale's warm woman's heart and constant cheerfulness henceforward brightened many a gloomy hour in a life that had known but little happiness. Thrale also had a solid esteem for Johnson, carried him with the family to Brighton, to Wales in 1774, and to France in 1775, and left him £200 as one of his four executors. He was returned for Southwark at a by-election in the end of 1765, and sat continuously until the election of 1780. Boswell first visited Streatham in October 1769, Fanny Burney in August 1778. In 1772 Thrale's affairs became embarrassed, but his wife's tact and energy and the timely advances of friends enabled him to tide over the crisis. Thrale died in April 1781, and three years later the brewery was sold for £135,000. Mrs Thrale had borne him twelve children, but her only son died in 1776, and she had but five daughters living at her husband's death. Dr Johnson's health was now declining, and he soon began to feel himself slighted as the widow's affection for the Italian musician Piozzi began to occupy her heart. Their acquaintance had begun only in 1780, though they had met three years before. The proposed match met with the strongest opposition from Mrs Thrale's daughters and from Johnson, whose disapproval, in spite of slandering tongues, was in nowise due to personal disappointment. She left Streatham for Bath in October 1782, and a few letters on the subject of the marriage passed betwixt Johnson and herself in which it must be confessed that the woman shows to more advantage than the sage. But where Johnson loved he loved deeply, and that with a love that could bear no rival near the throne. 'A friendship of twenty years,' he writes, 'is interwoven with the texture of life. A friend may be often found and lost, but an old friend never can be found, and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost.' The marriage, for some time postponed, actually took place at Bath, 25th July 1784, and the pair next travelled through France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium, returning to England early in 1787. Piozzi proved an inoffensive husband, managed their finances with prudence, and her daughters were at length reconciled—the eldest, Dr Johnson's 'Queenie,' married Lord Keith in 1808. Mrs Piozzi returned to Streatham in 1790, but soon after built Brynbella on the banks of the Clwyd. Here Piozzi died in 1809, and here his widow remained till 1814, living thereafter at Bath, Clifton, and Penzance. When past seventy she formed a sentimental attachment for William Augustus Conway, a handsome young actor, who drowned himself crossing the Atlantic in 1828. Fourteen years after his death seven letters from Mrs Piozzi to him were published. Their genuineness is doubtful, but, as Hayward points out, even taken as they stand, they do not amount to very much, while the change of two or three sentences would alter their entire tenor. In May 1821 Mrs Piozzi broke her leg while traveling from Penzance to Clifton, and died after ten days of suffering. She was buried beside Piozzi in the little church of Dymerchion in Flintshire.
Mrs Thrale was vivacious, frank, witty, thoroughly feminine, and charming, if somewhat wanting in refinement. She was pretty, if hardly beautiful—her face gave Hogarth his model in 'The Lady's Last Stake,' but the best portrait is that by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Baretts, Boswell, Peter Pindar, and Horace Walpole all abused her; but she lives secure of immortality in the love of Samuel Johnson, and in the happiness she brought into nearly twenty years of a life 'radically wretched.'
Mrs Piozzi had a fatal facility in composition, but two of her books at least live through their subject, and indeed are only less interesting than Boswell himself: Anecdotes of Dr Samuel Johnson during the last Twenty Years of his Life (1786; reprinted in Mrs Napier's Johnsoniana, 1884), and Letters to and from Dr Samuel Johnson (2 vols. 1788). Her Observations and Reflections made in a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (2 vols. 1789), British Synonymy (2 vols. 1794), and Retrospection, or a Review of the most striking and important Events, &c. (2 vols. 1801) are long forgotten. Of her poems the 'Three Warnings' survives—it was first printed in the Miscellanies of Miss Williams (1766), a volume containing a prose-tale of Johnson's, 'The Fountains,' the heroine of which, Floretta, was a study of Mrs Thrale. Her notes to Wraxall's Historical Memoirs were reprinted in the 1884 edition of that work, as well as in Hayward; her Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains, by Abraham Hayward, in 1861 (2 vols.). See the Rev. Ed. Mangin's Piozziana (1833), Boswell's Life of Johnson, Madame D'Arblay's Diary, Mr Hayward's Introduction, and L. B. Seeley's Mrs Thrale (1891).