Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

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The clue to this identification may lie in the word ‘cruel’, which Johnson discovered had an almost talismanic significance for Savage’s personal mythology. But the political implications for Savage of such colonial and imperial attitudes were frankly apocalyptic. The imperial London through which they walked, like Cassandras in the night, might be destroyed by its own unjustly subject peoples. The wheel of fortune and of power would turn round; the outcasts would occupy the inner seats of power:

Revolving Empire you and yours may doom;

Rome all subdued, yet Vandals vanquish’d Rome:

Yes, Empire may revolve, give them the Day,

And Yoke may Yoke, and Blood may Blood repay.

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These parallels with the decline and fall of Rome were particularly significant to Johnson, because they were to lead him to the satires of the second-century Roman poet Juvenal, as a new model for his own poetic persona in London.

Savage and Juvenal were always closely connected in Johnson’s mind as critics of a corrupt, materialist, urban society. Savage roamed through London as Juvenal once roamed through Rome; and Johnson followed both.

With the publication of his poem ‘Of Public Spirit’ in June 1737, Johnson is able to present Savage as he first perceived him. He is the spokesman for the outcast, the oppressed, the ‘sons of Misery’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He is even the spokesman for the daughters of misery, the prostitutes of the city, the ‘beauteous Wretches’ who the ‘nightly Streets annoy, / Live but themselves and others to destroy’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Savage stands out against social injustice. ‘He has asserted the natural Equality of Mankind, and endeavoured to suppress that Pride which inclines Men to imagine that Right is the Consequence of Power.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He writes with ‘Tenderness’.

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It is against this heroic moral background that Johnson carefully places his portrait of the Outcast Poet. In biographical terms it is a close-up, or a montage of street scenes, animated and visualised. It is written with great force and anger, with almost poetic power.

The first paragraph enacts Savage’s progress through the dark labyrinth of streets in a single, unwinding sentence. Its keynote is one of pathos:

He lodged as much by Accident as he dined and passed the Night, sometimes in mean Houses, which are set open at Night to any casual Wanderers, sometimes in Cellars among the Riot and Filth of the meanest and most profligate of the Rabble; and sometimes, when he had no Money to support even the Expences of these Receptacles, walked about the Streets till he was weary, and lay down in the Summer upon a Bulk, or in the Winter with his Associates in Poverty, among the Ashes of a Glass-house.

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Clearly this is not the experience of one bohemian summer night out in the West End. This is a dreadful, Dantesque repetition, at all seasons, and at many locations over London: alleys behind the Strand, off Covent Garden, beyond the Fleet Ditch, behind St Paul’s, in Clerkenwell, off Smithfield, out in Spitalfields.

The alternative forms of lodging open to Savage mark the stages of a humiliating decline from poverty to absolute indigence. The ‘mean House’ would be a penny-a-night public lodging or spike, with stinking dormitories of wooden beds. The ‘Cellar’ would be a single, dark, basement dossing-room of sacks and straw heaps, fouled with urine and vomit, populated by drunks, diseased and ageing prostitutes, lunatics, tramps and psychopaths (the very same in which Johnson finds ‘Misella’).

The ‘Bulk’ was a low, wooden stall attached to a shop-front on which fresh market produce was displayed by day and left to rot at night: old vegetables at Covent Garden, old fish at Billingsgate, old meat at Smithfield. The ‘Glass-house’ was a small factory (like a bakery or kiln) where carriage-glass, window-panes, water jugs, wine-glasses, decorative buttons, cane-tops and other fancy ornaments were melted and cast in fast-burning coal-fired ovens, found all over the East End, with their brick chimneys billowing smoke and their backyards full of warm grey ash and clinker.

Here even a complete down-and-out could keep warm (just as the modern tramp sleeps on a ventilation-grille), though rising as ash-grey as a ghost in the morning. Thus Johnson charts Savage’s decline in the infernal city night; falling as low, if not lower, than those whose rights he ‘asserted’ as a poet.

The ashes of the Glass-house (like the ashes of the grave) may have had a particularly emotive overtone for the eighteenth-century reader. Glassware of all kinds, as opposed to metal or wood, was the province of the rich, and the expression of luxury and refinement. Even the clinker, which smelted into fantastic shapes and vivid oxidised colours, might be prized. It is an expressive irony that Savage’s one-time editor and publisher, the wealthy Aaron Hill, once planned to construct a 300-foot-square rockery in his splendid Richmond garden, composed of blue stones, seashells bought from London toyshops and ‘chosen clinkers, from the glass-houses’. The clinkers were to be carefully ‘picked out of the cinder heaps, and brought in boats’ up the Thames from the East End. On the top of this rockery Hill planned to build an elaborate Chinese summerhouse as an allegorical ‘Temple of Happiness’.

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Johnson never identifies himself as an ‘associate in Poverty’ with Savage, among those ashes. Yet he writes with an immediacy that suggests familiarity – if not first-hand knowledge – of such ‘Receptacles’ of the London night. He is rhetorically present, giving plain and moving testimony.

In the second paragraph Johnson stands back. Pathos turns to anger, plain testimony to high irony. This contrapuntal shift of keys or tones becomes one of Johnson’s most subtle methods of interpreting Savage’s life through narrative. He repeats the stations of Savage’s humiliation, word for word, object for object. But now he sets them into literary perspective with a note of bitter elegy. His phrases are shaped, given a rhythm and mounting climax of outrage. The Tramp is revealed as the Poet, and the ‘casual Wanderer’ becomes again the author of his greatest poem. Johnson for the first time reveals how passionately he feels about his friend, and how profoundly he identifies with Savage’s outcast situation.

In this Manner were passed those Days and those Nights, which Nature had enabled him to have employed in elevated Speculations, useful Studies, or pleasing Conversation. On a Bulk, in a Cellar, or in a Glass-house among Thieves and Beggars, was to be found the Author of the Wanderer, the Man of exalted Sentiments, extensive Views and curious Observations, the Man whose Remarks on Life might have assisted the Statesman, whose Ideas of Virtue might have enlightened the Moralist, whose Eloquence might have influenced Senates, and whose Delicacy might have polished Courts.

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The noble cadences into which Johnson finally lifts this passage, suggest that for his young listener Savage’s night-talk in the London streets sometimes approached the condition of poetry. It is a public poetry, which should have concerned the ‘Moralist’, the ‘Statesman’, the men in power at Parliament (‘Senates’) and at Court. In this sense Savage fulfilled the Augustan concept of the poet as potential ‘legislator’, put forward in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and reiterated by Imlac in Rasselas. But because of Savage’s outcast state, his poverty and humiliating sufferings, it is poetry which is not heard, not acknowledged, by those in power ‘Of Public Spirit’ sells exactly seventy-two copies.

(#litres_trial_promo) Savage is, for young Johnson, the poet who has no place, no social position, no influence on affairs, and literally no home.

Johnson is in effect making a Romantic claim for him. Savage is the Poet as Outcast, the poet as ‘unacknowledged legislator’. This was to be exactly the claim that, fifty years later, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin would make for all poets in Political Justice (1792); and his son-in-law Shelley would make with openly revolutionary intent in A Philosophical View of Reform (1820) and A Defence of Poetry (1821). Johnson had identified in Savage a new poetical archetype. He had, astonishingly, glimpsed in the back streets the first stirrings of the new Romantic age.

One further incident becomes part of Johnson’s heroic account of Savage’s night-existence in the great city. Johnson wrote: ‘Savage was … so touched with the Discovery of his real Mother, that it was his frequent Practice to walk in the dark Evenings for several Hours before her Door, in Hopes of seeing her as she might come by Accident to the Window, or cross her Apartment with a Candle in her Hand.’

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This haunting image of the figure shut out from the lit window, of the man in the edge of shadows and the beloved woman with her candle, also becomes an archetype of the Romantic outsider and can be traced down through popular fiction, even to its Victorian apotheosis in the figure of Heathcliff outside Cathy’s window in Wuthering Heights.

However, there may be another interpretation of this incident. Savage may not be a figure of pathos but of terror; not patiently waiting, but violently seeking entry; not a poetic outcast, but a pathological intruder.

Chapter 4 Mother (#ulink_4983f31f-4915-5a84-98ec-cc839498de20)

So much for the influential story of the night-walks, as it has come down to us. But how in practice did Johnson set about the task of transforming his private feelings into a public and commercially acceptable biography? His conversations with Savage had not been interviews. He had made no notes. He knew very little of Savage’s early life or contacts. Savage’s supposed mother, Lady Macclesfield (by now the seventy-year-old widow, Mrs Brett), was unapproachable. His early patrons, Sir Richard Steele, the essayist, and Anne Oldfield, the actress, were dead. Among his few close literary friends, James Thomson had become something of a recluse at Richmond, and Alexander Pope was mortally ill at Twickenham.

Johnson was not interested in what a modern biographer would call ‘research’. He did not even attempt to investigate the circumstances of Savage’s birth, or walk over to St Andrew’s, Holborn, to examine Savage’s baptismal register. (Years later it was Boswell who meticulously did all this.) He relied almost solely on the books, papers and magazine articles which Edward Cave could supply from the Gentleman’s Magazine archives.

In September 1743 Johnson was working in haste, in poverty, and under the very Grub Street conditions that Savage himself had so often experienced. An undated note to Cave, from Johnson’s rooms in Castle Street, gives a vivid glimpse of the harassed young biographer preparing his materials and estimating his rate of production against his financial reserves.

… The Life of Savage I am ready to go upon, and in great Primer and Pica Notes reckon on sending in half an Sheet a day, but the money for that shall likewise lie in your hands till it is done. With the [Parliamentary] Debates shall I not have business enough? – If I had but good Pens. – Towards Mr Savage’s Life what more have you got? I would willingly have [the text of] his Trial etc, and know whether his Defence be at Bristol; and would have his Collection of Poems [1726] on account of the Preface. – The Plain Dealer [articles] – All the Magazines that have anything of his or relating to him.

Johnson’s postscript to this letter is expressive. He has no candles, and Cave’s printer’s boy ‘found me writing this, almost in the dark’. Cave had also asked for a preliminary epitaph on Savage, to be printed in the forthcoming issue. But Johnson has been ill, and is late producing it. ‘I had no notion of having any thing for the [Savage] Inscription, I hope You don’t think I kept it to extort a price. I could think on Nothing till today. If You could spare me another Guinea … I should take it very kindly tonight, but if You do not shall not think it an injury. – I am almost well again.’

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Because of these conditions, it is invariably thought that Johnson wrote the biography very fast, ‘at white heat’, and largely from memory. It is taken as a sort of spontaneous effusion of friendship; and its surprising romanticism, and many errors and omissions, are easily explained away on these grounds. Boswell was partly responsible for this conventional view, for though he greatly admired the ‘strong and affecting’ narrative, he thought its evident ‘partiality’ might reasonably be excused by haste of composition. During their tour of the Hebrides, thirty years later, he reported Johnson as saying that he wrote ‘forty-eight of the printed octavo pages at a sitting, but then I sat up all night’.

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If true, this would have been about a quarter of the book in a twenty-four-hour period, and the whole Life in less than a week. In fact Johnson took about three months compiling and expanding the biography, between mid-September and 14th December 1743, when he signed a receipt for fifteen guineas for passing the completed manuscript to Cave. By Johnson’s standards this was a leisurely and reflective pace of production.

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It is clear from the typographical evidence of the book’s printing that the epic all-night sitting refers to a single period of rewriting, later in January 1744. Working against a printer’s deadline, Johnson recast the final section with new materials about Savage’s death, and the last forty-eight pages were reset.

(#litres_trial_promo) This rewriting session further delayed the book’s publication until February 1744, some five months after he had started. It is characteristic of the unusual care which Johnson lavished on the whole manuscript, and which forced Cave – who was acting as his editor – to delay what had been originally intended as a piece of instant, topical journalism by the publisher Roberts.

Nor did Johnson compose haphazardly, from memory or a loose collection of personal reminiscences. Many things that he said subsequently about biography might suggest this. Johnson had later insisted to Boswell that true biographical knowledge could only grow out of close companionship: ‘nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social inter-course with him.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Reflecting on the biographical process, in The Rambler, no. 60, Johnson also emphasised the need for intimacy, in an aphorism that became famous. ‘… More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.’