[Johnson] told Sir Joshua Reynolds, that one night in particular, when Savage and he walked round St James’s Square for want of a lodging, they were not at all depressed by their situation; but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours, inveighed against the minister, and ‘resolved they would stand by their country.’7
The touch of heroic absurdity – two down-and-outs resolving to save the nation – is designed for indulgent laughter. But Reynolds, if he reports Johnson accurately, tells us two surprising things. The first is that the night-walks did not take place in the fabled zone of Grub Street but in the new, fashionable squares of the West End. The second is that their talk was not literary but political. They talked daring opposition politics against the corruption of the Whigs and the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole; and they praised ‘patriotism’, a specifically eighteenth-century usage, implying a radical politics which reviled the ‘German’ monarchy of the Hanoverians. Both this geography and this ideology throw a significant light on the young Johnson and his friend.
The compact geography of eighteenth-century London meant that the city could be crossed on foot in two hours, from the Tower in the south-east to Tyburn in the north-west. It represented a well-defined grid-map of power, professions and social classes. The central axis, running east-west parallel to the River Thames, was the broad boulevard of the Strand. Originally, as the name implies, the Strand was a riverside thoroughfare open to the water, with warehouses, shops, town houses, quaysides, and open unwalled shingle along its length. There was no regular Embankment, and no bridge across the river at this point. A painting by Canaletto, made from the terrace of Somerset House looking east in the 1740s, shows a broken vista of houses, balustrades and riverside steps going beyond St Paul’s to the single London Bridge at Southwark in the East End.
The river was itself a thoroughfare as busy as the Strand, packed with skiffs, wherries, sailing barges and every conceivable kind and size of water-taxi, which passengers hailed at scores of stairs, landing-stages and pontoons. This constant flow of human traffic, east-west along the Strand and the Thames, by day and night, represented the shuttle of power and business activity within the capital.
So, to the east of the Strand, from Ludgate to the Tower and Spitalfields, lay commercial London: banking, broking, shipping, publishing, manufacturing, and the slums. This was the original, historical sire of Grub Street, a narrow road of printers, taverns and lodging-houses roughly where the Barbican and the Museum of the City of London now stands.8 It was where Edward Cave had established his Gentleman’s Magazine, in rooms actually above the old medieval arch of St John’s Gate, in Clerkenwell, which young Johnson ‘beheld with reverence’ when he first arrived in London. It was where a young writer began when he came to seek his fortune, and where an old one ended if he had failed to find it. It was the kingdom of Alexander Pope’s Dunces. It was the East End of hope, and of despair.
But this is not where Johnson and Savage walked all night: they had gone ‘up West’ to the London of political power, wealth and social privilege. They were walking in enemy territory, the land to be conquered, and they came like spies in the night, their very presence a provocation.
To the west of the Strand, then, lay the smart coffee-houses of Charing Cross, the ministries of Westminster and Whitehall, Parliament and the Court, the royal parks and the elegant new squares of what became Mayfair. St James’s Square, only laid out in the 1720s, was the home of dukes and dandies, next to the clubs of St James’s and the royal palace itself. To talk of ministerial corruption and ‘patriotism’ here was like blowing a trumpet under the walls of Jericho. It was an heroic gesture, a defiant pose, which a painter like Reynolds would not forget.
Moreover, such a night-incursion into the domain of wealth and privilege was not a casual expedition. Reynolds may not have known this, but for Savage it was almost a ritual, repeated many times previously and solemnly enshrined in his own writings. In taking his young protégé Johnson into these familiar haunts, he was guiding him ceremonially, as Virgil guides Dante, through a purgatorial topography where much is to be learned by the angry young provincial, familiar only with book-learning:
The Moon, descending, saw us now pursue
The various Talk: – the City near in view!
Here from still Life (he cries) avert thy Sight,
And mark what Deeds adorn, or shame the Night!9
This is from the key poetic document of Savage’s career, the long visionary poem The Wanderer (1729), part meditation and part confession. Here, in its third canto, Savage describes such a night-pilgrimage through London. The young poet is guided by the Virgilian figure of ‘the Hermit’, a sage who has retired from the fret and folly of city life, to read poetry and philosophy in a cave and contemplate the wild beauty of Nature. This is one of Savage’s recurring fantasies of himself, as Johnson eventually came to understand.
The Hermit points out the glittering, delusive dissipations of the West End, as Savage must have instructed Johnson during their own nocturnal pacings round the squares of Mayfair:
Yon Mansion, made by beaming Tapers gay,
Drowns the dim Night, and counterfeits the Day.
From lumin’d windows glancing on the Eye,
Around, athwart, the frisking Shadows fly.
There Midnight Riot spreads illusive Joys,
And Fortune, Health, and dearer Time destroys.10
Against this glimpse of shadow play of aristocratic revelry the Hermit points out the solitary light from a garret window, which signals the ‘patriot’ poet hard at work, perhaps at the other end of the Strand, somewhere near Grub Street. For him, true wealth is not a handsome building, a property speculation, but an intellectual construction, a mental tower of learning and independent intelligence:
A feeble Taper, from yon lonesome Room,
Scatt’ring thin rays, just glimmers through the Gloom.
There sits the sapient BARD in museful Mood,
And glows impassion’d for his Country’s Good!
All the bright Spirits of the Just, combin’d,
Inform, refine, and prompt his tow’ring Mind!11
One may suspect, like Boswell, that Savage’s poetry was more improving than his conduct on such occasions. His Hermit, to say the least, is an idealisation. For it was on just such a night-walk, ten years before, that Savage had been involved in a brawl in a whorehouse, and killed a man and injured a woman, five minutes from St James’s Square in Charing Cross. As Johnson later observed, ‘The reigning Error of his Life was, that he mistook the Love for the Practice of Virtue’.12
When Johnson himself came to describe such night-walks in his own poem London (May 1738), he was much less dreamy and elevated. Indeed he was bitingly realistic, and we see again the big man with the cudgel. He seems to make some unmistakable reference to Savage’s less poetical exploits:
Prepare for Death, if here at Night you roam,
And sign your Will before you sup from Home.
Some fiery Fop, with new Commission vain,
Who sleeps on Brambles till he kills his Man;
Some frolick Drunkard, reeling from a Feast,
Provokes a Broil, and stabs you for a Jest.13
The irony here may be deeper than it first appears. Because this