During this time he sent several notes to his editor, many of them giving painful glimpses of the Grub Street writer’s life which he had shared with Savage. Once, the printer’s boy finds Johnson ‘writing this, almost in the dark’ because he lacks candles. Later he is writing hard but lacks ‘good Pens’. Then he has been ill, the writing has been interrupted, but he is ‘almost well again’ and so humbly begs ‘another Guinea’ in advance. Finally, most bleakly of all, he is ‘impransus’- supperless. Meanwhile he bombards Cave with requests for further information. ‘Towards Mr Savage’s Life what more have you got?’ He asks for a transcript of Savage’s trial for murder; for a copy of his Defence speech at the Old Bailey, and a copy of his 1726 Miscellaneous Poems, ‘on account of the Preface’ which attacks Lady Macclesfield. He also wants some articles in the Plain Dealer describing Savage’s case, and ‘all the Magazines that have anything of his or relating to him’.
Johnson had all Savage’s major publications to draw on, and several of his rare letters (less than 30 are known) preserved by Cave at the Gentleman’s Magazine, especially those Savage had written from Newgate Gaol in Bristol in 1743. Johnson would use extracts from these to powerful effect in the final section of the Life, showing the extraordinary shifts in pose and self-presentation which Savage was capable of adopting. Even when cornered and reduced to the most desperate circumstances, Savage was incorrigeable and changeling-like.
He also had copies of the poems and essays that Aaron Hill had published during the Plain Dealer’s campaign of 1724 to establish Savage’s claim against Lady Macclesfield. Most remarkable among these was Savage’s ‘Lament’, published in June 1724. In it Savage transforms his ‘cruel Mother’ into a cruel Lover.
Hopeless, abandoned, aimless, and oppress’d,
Lost to Delight, and every Way distress’d;
Cross his cold Bed, in wild Disorder thrown,
Thus sigh’d Alexis, friendless and alone –
’Why do I breathe? - What joy can Being give?
When she, who gave me Life, forgets I live!
Feels not these wintry blasts; - nor heeds my Smart;
But shuts me from the Shelter of her Heart!…
In the first edition of the Life, Johnson printed extensive extracts from these works in a score of footnotes, many of them several pages long, which almost amounted to a separate anthology. Besides the ‘Lament’, he drew notably on the libelous (and hastily suppressed) ‘Preface to the Miscellaneous Poems’ of 1726, ‘The Bastard’, The Wanderer, The Volunteer Laureates’, and ‘London and Bristol Delineated’. Though fascinating, they obstruct the natural flow of the biographical narrative, and he eventually omitted them in definitive edition incorporated into the Lives of the Eminent English Poets in 1781.
4
Johnson had one other major biographical source of information. He obtained from Cave a 29 page pamphlet written anonymously at the time of Savage’s conviction for murder in 1727. It was entitled The Life of Mr Richard Savage…Who was Condemned at the last Sessions of the Old Bailey, for Murder…With some very remarkable Circumstances relating to the Birth and Education of that Gentleman, which were Never before made Publick. This was the pamphlet, hurriedly organized by Aaron Hill, intended to save Savage from the hangman’s noose. It was dashed off in 2 days by a fellow Grub Street journalist, one Thomas Cooke, who worked in the upstairs room of a Fleet Street tavern, hoping to save ‘a brother poet - how unworthy soever of the appellation’ from the gallows. It was from this work that Johnson drew his extraordinary portrait of Lady Macclesfield, which dramatically sets the combative tone of the opening.
Johnson’s righteous anger is felt throughout this early section, with an unrelenting series of attacks on Lady Macclesfield’s ‘barbarous’, ‘cruel’ and ‘unnatural’ behaviour. He recounts a breathless (and gripping) series of incidents in which she denies Savage’s birthright, suppresses his name, farms him out to a nurse, frustrates a £300 inheritance, attempts to apprentice him to a shoemaker, and dispatch him to the American colonies. Finally she promotes his execution by seeking to prevent the royal pardon, (p.26–7)
The mounting bitterness of these accusations, their rhetorical force, and their melodramatic repetitions, cannot quite hide from an alert reader their curious and unsubstantiated nature. Most problematic of all, Johnson can find no real motive - moral, prudential or pecuniary - for these maternal crimes, (p.5). Yet it is difficult to doubt Johnson’s good faith, and since Lady Macclesfield was still alive (a point he reiterates), one assumes he had documentary evidence that would have protected him and his publisher against libel.
But he did not. All these stories were simply taken from the Old Bailey pamphlet of 1727. No doubt they were confirmed by Savage in his long conversations with Johnson, yet the fact is that they have no other independent documentary source. Even the ‘convincing Original Letters’ which Savage claimed he had discovered and proved his birth, were never actually produced. They are mentioned in the Old Bailey pamphlet, and the editor Aaron Hill claimed he once saw them in 1724, but they were never printed and have long since disappeared. One concludes that Johnson simply wanted - or needed - to believe Savage’s version of events. And to defend Savage, he must also make his reader believe.
Johnson’s defence of Savage’s whole disastrous life - the sponging, the blackmail, the murder charge, the ingratitude to his patron Tyrconnel; and later the obscene poetry, the reckless improvidence, the moral blindness, and the self-destructive behaviour in London and Bristol - depends upon his convincing the reader that Savage was a lifelong victim of Lady Macclesfield’s persecutions. So she is consistently presented as Savage’s evil star, his nemesis, his avenging angel.
This mother is still alive, and may, perhaps, even yet, though her malice was so often defeated, enjoy the pleasure of reflecting that the life which she often endeavored to destroy, was at least shortened by her maternal offices; that, though she could not transport her son to the plantations, bury him in the shop of a mechanick, or hasten the hand of the public executioner, she has yet had the satisfaction of embittering all his hours, and forcing him into exigencies that hurried his death, (p.28)
Over forty years later, Boswell the professional biographer and trained lawyer (he had a brilliant success in defending a sheep-stealer at the Scottish Bar) was also strangely puzzled by what he saw as Johnson’s credulousness over Savage’s claims. ‘Johnson’s partiality for Savage made him entertain no doubt of his story, however extraordinary and improbable. It never occurred to him to question his being the son of the Countess of Macclesfield, of whose unrelenting barbarity he so loudly complained, and the particulars of which are related in so strong and affecting a manner in Johnson’s Life of him.’
His own subsequent researches cast much doubt over the entire story and left him, in a memorable phrase, ‘vibrating in uncertainty’. Modern scholars, like Clarence Tracy and James L. Clifford, have felt the same perplexity. (See Further Reading)
It is interesting that the great French Enlightenment critic and novelist Denis Diderot, in a review of a French translation of the Life which appeared in Paris in 1771, also singled out the peculiar nature of Johnson’s handling of Lady Macclesfield. He wondered, with a wry smile, if a fiction-writer would have got away with it. This Countess of Macclesfield is a strange woman, persecuting a love-child with a rage sustained for many years, never extinguished and founded on nothing. If a writer decided to introduce, in a play or a novel, a character of this kind, it would be booed.’ The implication is that Johnson has broken the Aristotelian rule of ‘probability’.
Yet Diderot finally gives Johnson (not after all a French classicist) the benefit of the doubt. ‘Nevertheless it is compatible with reality. And is reality then sometimes to be booed? Why not! Does it never deserve it?’ It has been suggested that the chameleon anti-hero of Diderot’s own subsequent novel, Le Neveu de Rameau, may partly have been inspired by Savage’s machinations.
It