Dr Johnson and Mr Savage
A classic reissue of Richard Holmes’s brilliant book on Samuel Johnson’s friendship with the poet Richard Savage, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.Dr Johnson & Mr Savage is the story of a mysterious eighteenth-century friendship. Richard Savage was a poet, playwright and convicted murderer who roamed through the brothels and society salons of Augustan England creating a legend of poetic injustice. Strangest of all his achievements was the friendship he inspired in Samuel Johnson, then a young, unknown schoolmaster just arrived in London to seek his literary fortune. This puzzling intimacy helped to form Johnson’s experience of the world and human passions, and led to his masterpiece The Life of Richard Savage, which revolutionized the art of biography and virtually invented the idea of the poet as a romantic, outcast figure.Richard Holmes gradually reconstructs this alliance, throwing suprising new light on the character of Dr Johnson. This extraordinary book also questions the very nature of life-writing and exposes the conflicts between friendship, truth and advocacy which the modern form has inherited.
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Dr Johnson and Mr Savage
Richard Holmes
To the Rose in the Grove
… For as Johnson is reported to have once said, that ‘he could write the Life of a Broomstick’.
Boswell
Table of Contents
When Samuel Johnson was compiling his great Dictionary of the English Language, which defines more than forty thousand words, he decided to illustrate his definitions with suitable literary quotations. ‘I therefore extracted,’ he explained in his Preface, ‘from Philosophers principles of science, from Historians remarkable facts, from Chymists complete processes, from Divines striking exhortations, and from Poets beautiful descriptions.’
To do this, he read and annotated over two hundred thousand passages from innumerable English authors across four centuries. He marked up these passages, and handed them to his clerks in his attic at Gough Square to be entered into eighty large vellum notebooks.
He was working at great speed, and he chose his illustrations entirely at random. Most of them are from the great classics of English literature, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Pope. But of the 116,000 quotations eventually included, he chose seven from the works of his strange friend Richard Savage. These quotations, and the seven words they illustrate, may have a curious significance. Since they were chosen rapidly and at random, from such a vast source, they could be thought to reveal unconscious links and symbolic meanings. If considered as a form of ‘association-test’, these seven words must instinctively have brought Richard Savage to Johnson’s mind. Thus, to an analyst they might suggest something about the nature of that most puzzling relationship. Here are the seven words, and their illustrations, in alphabetical order.
| 1. ‘Elevate’ | to raise with great conceptions. |
| Savage: ‘Now rising fortune elevates his mind, He shines unclouded, and adorns mankind.’ | |
| 2. ‘Expanse’ | a body widely extended without inequalities. |
| Savage: ‘Bright as the Etherial, glows the green expanse.’ | |
| 3. ‘Fondly’ | with great or extreme tenderness. |
| Savage: ‘To be fondly or serenely kind.’ | |
| 4. ‘Lone’ | solitary, unfrequented, having no company. |
| Savage: ‘Here the lone hour a blank of life displays.’ | |
| 5. ‘Squander’ | to scatter lavishly, to spend profusely, to throw away in idle prodigality. |
| Savage: They often squandered, but they never gave.’ | |
| 6. ‘Sterilise’ | to make barren, to deprive of fecundity or the power of production. |
| Savage: ‘Go! sterilize the fertile with thy rage.’ | |
| 7. ‘Suicide’ | self-murder, the horrid crime of destroying one’s self. |
| Savage: ‘Child of despair, and Suicide my name.’ |
Everyone knows the great Dr Johnson, and the scholars seem to know him in minutest detail; almost no one knows anything definite now about the obscure, minor poet Richard Savage.>1 But Johnson and Savage were friends – intimate friends – in London for about two years in the 1730s. In those dark days in the city, dark for them both in many senses, the position was almost exactly reversed. Johnson was then unknown, and Savage was notorious. Thereby hangs a small, but haunting mystery of biography.
Sir John Hawkins, Johnson’s earliest official biographer, thought the friendship was the single most inexplicable fact about Johnson’s entire career. ‘With one person, however, he commenced an intimacy, the motives to which, at first view, may probably seem harder to be accounted for, than any one particular in his life. This person was Mr Richard Savage …’>2
James Boswell, in a moment of rare agreement with Hawkins, thought much the same: ‘Richard Savage: a man, of whom it is difficult to speak impartially, without wondering that he was for some time the intimate companion of Johnson; for his character was marked by profligacy, insolence, and ingratitude …’>3
One of the few facts that can be stated without contradiction about Richard Savage was that he died in 1743. So one might begin with his obituary.
Mr Richard Savage, Gent. Report has just reached us in the Bristol mails, of the Demise of Mr Richard Savage, son of the late Earl Rivers, in the debtor’s Confinements of Bristol Newgate gaol. Mr Savage will be recalled as the unhappy Poet and author of ‘The Wanderer’, convicted at the Old Bailey on a capital charge of Murder, and sometimes Volunteer Laureate to her Gracious Majesty Queen Caroline.
