Is this piece of furniture really a literary relic, or part of a Victorian money-making hustle?
Museum visitors will be asked whether they believe the piece of furniture really was Dr Johnson's desk
It will be the star attraction of a new museum exhibition, but visitors will be asked whether they now believe it's authentic.Dr Samuel Johnson was an 18th Century literary giant, remembered for compiling in 1755 what was then the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language. But when Lynda Mugglestone, professor of the history of English at the college, began to check out the provenance of the desk, there were some unexpected questions.It had come to the college through a clergyman who had been close to Dr Johnson's god daughter, Elizabeth Ann Lowe, and her sister. A plaque was attached to signify its historic importance.
Writers such as Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, who had just written Hard Times, began to fund raise for the sisters. The case for it being authentic, she says, is that the sisters could have been thinking: "We've sold everything else, but we still have this treasured desk, it's the last thing we have.""They might have seen an opportunity and decided that the knackered old desk in the corner was 'Johnson's desk'," says the museum director Ms McDaid.
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