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I have been reading Henry Hitchings’ wonderful book on the late great Samuel Johnson and his dictionary, Defining the World. I have found it quite enjoyable. One passage struck me quite hard as I read.
I do not, as a rule, talk about my childhood or my parents. Those closest to me know why. Only the wonderful times with my aunties make it into my biography. Reading last night, I read this:
“Johnson’s childhood was no idyll of scholarly precocity. Reading was, as it is for so many unhappy children, a retreat from the wretchedness of family life. [...] books afforded a vital escape from this curdled domesticity.”
Johnson himself had something to say about his mother. When she once became angry at him and called him a puppy, he asked her if she knew what they called a puppy’s mother.

As Hartley writes in the Go-Between, “the past is a different country.”