Barber, Francis, 1742 or 1743-1801

Francis Barber (c. 1742/3 – 13 January 1801), whose original name was Quashey (a common name for men of Coromantee origin), was the Jamaican manservant of lexicographer Samuel Johnson in London from 1752 until Johnson's death in 1784. Barber was born enslaved in Jamaica on a sugarcane plantation belonging to the Bathurst family.

At the age of about 15, he was brought to England by his owner, Colonel Richard Bathhurst, whose son, also called Richard, was a close friend of Samuel Johnson. Barber was sent to school in Yorkshire. Johnson's wife Elizabeth died in 1752, plunging Johnson into a depression that Barber later vividly described to James Boswell. The Bathursts sent Barber to Johnson as a valet, arriving two weeks after her death. Although the legal validity of slavery in England was ambiguous at this time, when the elder Bathurst died two years later he gave Barber his freedom in his will, with a small legacy of £12 (equivalent to £2,000 in 2019).

Barber then went to work for an apothecary in Cheapside but kept in touch with Johnson. He later signed up as a sailor for the Navy. He served as a "landsman" aboard various ships, received regular pay and good reports, saw the coast of Britain from Leith to Torbay, and acquired a taste for tobacco. He was discharged "three days before George II died" (22 October 1760), and returned to London and to Johnson to be his servant. Barber's brief maritime career is known from James Boswell's Life of Johnson.

Later Johnson put Barber, by then in his early thirties, in a school at Bishop Stortford, in Hertfordshire, presumably so that he could act as Johnson's assistant.

Johnson made him his residual heir, with £70 (equivalent to £9,000 in 2019) a year to be given him by Trustees, expressing the wish that he move from London to Lichfield, Staffordshire, Johnson's native city. After Johnson's death, Barber did this, opening a draper's shop and marrying a local woman. Barber was also bequeathed Johnson's books and papers, and a gold watch. In later years he had acted as Johnson's assistant in revising his famous Dictionary of the English Language and other works. Barber was also an important source for James Boswell concerning Johnson's life in the years before Boswell himself knew Johnson.

The money from his inheritance did not last and Barber sold off his store of Johnson memorabilia to defray his debts. Johnson's biographers, Hawkins and Hester Piozzi, were critical of Barber's marriage to a white woman.

Barber died in Stafford on 13 January 1801 due to an unsuccessful operation at Staffordshire Royal Infirmary.

Barber is mentioned frequently in James Boswell's Life of Johnson and other contemporary sources, and there are at least two versions of a portrait, one now in Dr Johnson's House, which may be of him.