Master plaster caster and renowned collector, Mr. Peter Hone, told the much younger SalvoNEWS reporter, "We had a burst tyre on the way to Lichfield. I was livid, then downhearted, because the reinstatement ceremony of Samuel Johnson's bust was due to start at 12, and I was supposed to give a short speech. When we finally arrived at half past one, everyone had left. But my whole spirit rose on seeing Johnson's freshly lime-washed head peering down, and I blossomed into a thrilled heap. History has been made - it looked marvellous."

Hone had generously donated the bust to the great city of Lichfield on condition that it was re-installed in its original place, above what is now the vape shop, at 10 Bird Street. "Now," he said, "the city folk can, as the did in olden days, say I'll meet you at 'The Johnson's Head'." 

The original bust was a local sandstone copy of the life-size clay model made by Nollekens, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1777, of Doctor Samuel Johnson, the famed lexicographer who was born in Lichfield. It was the only sculpture for which Johnson sat.

J.T. Smith, Joseph Nollekens biographer, wrote of Nollekens' impatience with Johnson. Nollekens said to him, "Now, Doctor, you did say you would give my bust half-an-hour before dinner, and the dinner has been waiting this long time," to which Johnson replied, "Bow-wow-wow". Nollekens made the bust as a clay model and saw it as an ancient poet with flowing hair. Between sittings, an Irishman and model, George White, was the inspiration for Johnson's hair. 

Nollekens, a known miser, offered White a shilling, and is said to have refused it telling him that he would have earned more from begging. The clay sculpture was cast in plaster and lead, now in the V&A. Nollekens did not carve a marble version. Johnson said he had heard different opinions of the bust, and that, "it was condemned by Mrs Thrale, Mrs Reynolds and Mrs Garrick". He did not like it much himself, but had a great respect for his friend 'Nolly', calling him: a man of reputation above any of the other sculptors. Johnson said that the value of statuary was in the difficulty of cutting into marble, and so "you would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot".

The sandstone copy of the Nollekens bust was subsequently commissioned by Thomas Lomax, mayor of Lichfield, printer and bookseller, who in 1821 placed the disconsolate looking chap on the stone bracket (also bought in the auction by Hone) cantilevered out of the local brick wall above his shop at 10 Bird Street in Lichfield where it was colloquially known as 'The Johnson's Head'. That sandstone copy was replaced in December 1884 with a new one to commemorate the centenary of Johnson's death. According to most sources, the bust was removed in 1969 and eventually sold at an auction in 2017 to Peter Hone.

In 2024, a project to repair, restore, and reinstate the 1884 bust was successfully completed. The bust was unveiled by the mayor of Lichfield, Sam Schafer, on Wednesday, September 18, 2024, the 315th anniversary of Johnson's birth, in a ceremony organised by the Lichfield City Council.

The project was supported by local businesses, The Johnson Society, and a crowdfunding campaign that raised over £3,000. The bust has now been returned to its original location above the door of 10 Bird Street, which is currently a vape shop.

Samuel Johnson was an abolitionist who left his estate to his lifelong friend, Francis Barber, the first black English schoolteacher. An article in the New Yorker, about a new book, mentions both of them:

'Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies," Samuel Johnson once toasted at an Oxford dinner party, or so James Boswell claims. The veracity of Boswell's biography—including its representation of Johnson's position on slavery—has long been contested. In the course of more than a thousand pages, little mention is made of Johnson's long-term servant, Francis Barber, who came into the writer's house as a child after being taken to London from the Jamaican sugar plantation where he was born into slavery. Some of the surviving pages of Johnson's notes for his famous dictionary have Barber's handwriting on the back; there are scraps on which a twelve-year-old Barber practised his own name while learning to write. Thirty years later, Johnson died and left Barber a sizeable inheritance. But Boswell repeatedly minimises Johnson's abiding opposition to slavery—even that startling toast is characterised as an attempt to offend Johnson's "grave" dinner companions rather than as genuine support for the enslaved. Boswell was in favour of slavery, and James Basker, a literary historian at Barnard College, has suggested that this stance tainted his depiction of Johnson's abolitionism, especially since Boswell's book appeared around the time that the British Parliament was voting on whether to end England's participation in the international slave trade. Johnson's abolitionist views were likely influenced by Barber's experience of enslavement. For much of the eighteenth century, Jamaica was the most profitable British colony and the largest importer of enslaved Africans, and Johnson once described it as "a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness, a den of tyrants, and a dungeon of slaves." He wasn't the only Englishman paying close attention to rebellion in the Caribbean: abolitionists and slavers alike read the papers anxiously for news of slave revolts, taking stock of where the rebels came from, how adroitly they planned their attacks, how quickly revolts were suppressed, and how soon they broke out again. In a new book, the historian Vincent Brown argues that these rebellions did more to end the slave trade than any actions taken by white abolitionists like Johnson.'