Lichfield on the main routes from London to the north-west and Birmingham to the north-east. It also became a centre of great intellectual activity, being the home of many famous people including Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward; this prompted Johnson's remark that Lichfield was "a city of philosophers". In the 1720s Daniel Defoe described Lichfield as 'a fine, neat, well-built, and indifferent large city', the principal town in the region after Chester. During the late 18th and early 19th century much of the medieval city was rebuilt with the red-brick Georgian style buildings still to be seen
Theophilus Levett History of Staffordshire. The Levett home was demolished in 1925. Theophilus Levett's daughter Anne was, according to Anna Seward, the early paramour of actor David Garrick. Garrick, wrote Seward, "was the lover of her early youth. When he quitted Lichfield to become a theatrical adventurer, he had her promise to be his the instant his situation became profitable." The romance was not to be: Anna Levett ultimately married her cousin Rev. Richard Levett of West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The episode prompted Seward to pen her poem "Portrait of Miss Levett" about the fickle Lichfield beauty. The descendants of Theophilus Levett and