Such was the beginning of the life of Richard Savage. Born with a legal claim to honour and to affluence, he was, in two months, illegitimated by the Parliament, and disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life, only that he might be swallowed by its quicksands, or dashed upon its rocks, (p.6)
Johnson was not the only one to be so moved. Savage was also known as one of the most shameless and successful financial spongers in London. With his poignant story of the ‘cruel Mother’ he had at various times succeeded in obtaining money from the essayist Sir Richard Steele, the actress Anne Oldfield, the editor Aaron Hill, the Irish peer and literary patron Lord Tyrconnel (Lady Macclesfield’s nephew), and none other than the great poet Alexander Pope, who eventually organized a charitable subscription for Savage’s benefit in 1739.
All these episodes are recounted with shrewd insight by Johnson in the Life, including the ‘mournful’ fact that they nearly all ended in furious quarrels. ‘It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added that he had not often a friend long, without obliging him to become a stranger, (p. 41)
Possibly his most astonishing financial coup was the grant of a royal pension by the Queen. Savage had unsuccessfully applied for the post of Poet Laureate to the new King George II in 1731 (just 4 years after his trial for murder). Having been rejected in favour of Colley Cibber, he had unblushingly appointed himself ‘Volunteer Laureate to Queen Caroline’, and begun publishing an annual Birthday Ode in her honour, for which he was paid a pension of £50 a year, until the Queen’s death in 1737. Johnson records this ‘odd’ triumph, together with Cibber’s acid observation that Savage might with ‘equal propriety style himself a Volunteer Lord or Volunteer Baronet’. (p.56)
This did not prevent Savage from eventually descending into absolute poverty in London. Significantly perhaps, this was at the very time he first met Johnson, so that the shared nightmare experience of indigence in Grub Street, without proper food or lodgings, became another powerful bond between the two men. It is an experience that also shapes the second half of the biography, and its most dramatic passages of appeal to the reader’s sympathy.
This was also the first time that young Johnson was temporarily separated from his wife Tetty (who remained back in Lichfield), and was exposed to all the temptations and seductions of the capital city. Boswell recalls that at the very end of his life, Johnson looked back at it with uneasiness and perhaps, also, some secret nostalgia. ‘His conduct, after he came to London, and had associated with Savage and others, was not so strictly virtuous, in one respect, as when he was a younger man [at Lichfield]. It was well known that his amorous inclinations were uncommonly strong and impetuous…in his combats with them, he was sometimes overcome.’
2
Johnson heard of Savage’s death in Bristol in August 1743, through their mutual friend Edward Cave, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. It was evidently a great personal blow to him, as he immediately determined to write Savage’s Life. Johnson had in fact already published several short biographical essays with Cave, notably on the piratical sailor Sir Francis Drake (1740), and the Dutch scientist Herman Boerhaave (1739). But this was to be his first attempt at a full length biography on a contemporary subject from original materials. It was also the first to be written con amore. It would eventually run to a book of 180 pages (45,000 words), much longer than any of his subsequent Lives of the Poets.
Within three weeks he announced his intention to defend ‘the unfortunate and ingenious Mr Savage’, in a long letter to the magazine that Cave published in September. The Life would ‘speedily be published by a person who was favoured with his Confidences, and received from himself an Account of most of his Transactions’. This Life would be authentic, and would preserve Savage’s memory from ‘insults and calumnies’. Johnson then made an historic and combative claim about the nature of biography, distinguishing it from romance or fiction.
It may be reasonably imagined that others may have the same Design, but as it is not credible that they can obtain the same Materials, it must be expected they will supply from Invention the want of Intelligence, and that under the Tide of the Life of Savage they will publish only a Novel filled with romantick Adventures, and imaginary Amours. You may therefore perhaps gratify the Lovers of Truth and Wit by giving me leave to inform them in your Magazine, that my Account will be published in 8vo by Mr Roberts of Warwick-Lane.
Johnson had several different kinds of material to draw on. For a start, he had talked a great deal with Savage, and heard his story at length from his own mouth. The accounts of Johnson and Savage walking and talking together all night through the London streets in 1737–8, especially around Westminster and St James’s Square, were eventually to became legendary. This is how Sir John Hawkins remembered them:
Johnson has told me, that whole nights have been spent by him and Savage in conversation of this kind, not under the hospitable roof of a tavern, where warmth might have invigorated their spirits, and wine dispelled their care; but in a perambulation round the squares of Westminster, St James’s in particular, when all the money the could raise was less than sufficient to purchase them the shelter and sordid comforts of a night cellar…
A later friend and biographer, the Irish poet Arthur Murphy, gently embroidered on Johnson’s memories, and moving their location slightly westwards into fashionable Mayfair, gave them an exquisite touch of Dublin absurdity. ‘Johnson has been often heard to relate, that he and Savage walked round Grosvenor Square till four in the morning; in the course of their conversation reforming the world, dethroning princes, establishing new forms of government, and giving laws to the several states of Europe, till fatigued at length with their legislative office, they began to feel the want of refreshment; but could not muster up more than fourpence halfpenny.’
It is therefore particularly interesting that Johnson chooses never to introduce himself explicitly into the Life of Savage. This reticence is unlike, for example, Boswell who appears in propria persona throughout his Life of Johnson (1791); or William Godwin who plays a decisive role in the second half of his Memoirs (1798) of Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson makes only one passing reference to himself in the third person, at the fateful moment in 1739, when Savage finally leaves London for Wales, never to return. Yet this moment is intensely emotional.
‘Full of these salutary resolutions, [Savage] left London in July 1739, having taken leave, with great tenderness, of his friends, and parted with the author of this narrative with tears in his eyes’, (p.85). Johnson’s sentence seems to leave deliberately ambiguous whether the tears belonged to himself or Savage. Perhaps this was deliberate. But in a marginal note later added to a copy he was correcting in 1748, Johnson wrote: ‘I had then a slight fever’. This surely claims the tears - and the intense emotion - as his own.
Johnson’s personal identification with Savage’s fate is one of the most subtle issues underlying the entire biography. It deeply affects his partial handling of evidence, and wonderfully colours the continuous, shifting ambiguity of its narrative tone. Young Johnson makes common cause with Savage, in his bohemian style of life, his love of late-night talk, his proud sense of being a social outcast, and in his intense political anger at oppression by the rich and powerful. Yet this same self-identification produces strange biographical distortions. How deeply Johnson’s feelings were engaged, and how far objective biography becomes distilled into subjective autobiography, is one of the enduring mysteries of its power, and raises larger questions about the whole genre.
3
Johnson took about 3 months compiling and expanding the biography, between mid-September and 14 December 1743, when he signed a receipt for 15 guineas on delivery of the manuscript to Cave. In January 1744, in a deadline crisis familiar to many biographers, he ‘sat up all night’ correcting and revising the