Johnson on Savage: The Life of Mr Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson

Johnson on Savage: The Life of Mr Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson

Richard Holmes

Lives that Never Grow OldPart of a radical series –edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Johnson’s book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.When he first came to London, young Samuel Johnson was befriended by the flamboyant poet, playwright and blackmailer, Richard Savage. Walking the backstreets at night, he learned Savage’s extraordinary story – supposedly persecuted by a ‘cruel mother’, sentenced to death for a murder in a brothel, appointed Volunteer Poet Laureate to the Queen, and finally broken and outcast.With this moving and intimate account, Johnson created a brilliant black comedy of 18th-century Grub Street which revolutionised English biography by its psychological realism. Yet Savage’s destructive charm and delusions of grandeur sometimes even threatened to entangle Johnson himself.

CLASSIC BIOGRAPHIES EDITED BY RICHARD HOLMES

Defoe on Sheppard and Wild Johnson on Savage Godwin on Wolhtonecraft Southey on Nelson Gilchrist on Blake Scott on Zelide

JOHNSON ON SAVAGE

An Account of the Life of

Mr. Richard Savage, Son of

the Earl Rivers

by

Samuel Johnson, LL.D

With three essays on Biography

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

RICHARD HOLMES

HARPER PERENNIAL

London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

CONTENTS

Cover (#u25388e02-d108-5a5a-969e-f96f49b60999)

Title Page (#u36d29f40-3047-5fa1-a07e-592a35cd958f)

Introduction by Richard Holmes (#u01f446e9-ea46-58cf-9464-aa6feb94a7e4)

Select Chronology (#uea2d26d6-1552-5b79-92b4-dec07770a91a)

An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (#u470dcf5c-7a15-5cd9-be54-6b380bffa560)

The Rambler, No. 60: Biography (#litres_trial_promo)

The Idler, No. 84: Autobiography (#litres_trial_promo)

The Idler, No. 102: Literary Biography (#litres_trial_promo)

Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION (#ulink_2e46751d-7dce-5bfe-8397-1449b2766e7f)

1

‘A shilling life will give you all the facts,’ wrote W.H. Auden in his wry sonnet about the shortcomings of biography. But very few facts are known with absolute certainty about the flamboyant 18th century poet who called himself Richard Savage (including his real identity). Yet he is the subject of one of the greatest short biographies in the English language.

One fact is that Savage always claimed to be ‘son of the late Earl Rivers’, but could never prove it. Another is that he was convicted of killing a man in a brothel near Charing Cross, London, on 20 November 1727. A third is that he published a bestselling poem called ‘The Bastard’ in 1728, which ran to five editions in five months. A fourth is that he died penniless in a debtors’ prison in Bristol in 1743. To which we can add a fifth, that his Life was written by Samuel Johnson.

In January 1744, the London Evening Post carried the following tantalizing advertisement for this biography.

An account of the life of Mr Richard Savage, son of the late Earl Rivers. Who was, soon after he came into the world, bastardised by an act of Parliament; and deprived of the tide and estate to which he was born; was committed by his mother, the Countess of Macclesfield, to a poor woman, to be bred up as her own son; came to the knowledge of his real mother, now alive, but abandoned by her, persecuted, and condemned for murder, and against all her endeavours, pardoned; made Poet Laureate to Queen Caroline, became very eminent for his writings, of which many are quoted in this Work, particularly ‘The Bastard’ and the Wanderer…went into Wales, to be supported by a subscription, promoted by Mr Pope, but at last died in Prison.

Johnson’s unlikely friendship with Savage, which inspired this extraordinary work, is one of the strangest episodes in Johnson’s whole career. It belongs to his earliest and darkest days in London, long before he had published his great Dictionary (1755), or formed his Club, or met his own biographer James Boswell (1763). Sir John Hawkins, one of the very few people who knew both Johnson and Savage at this obscure time, remarked that it was ‘an intimacy, the motives for which may probably seem harder to account for, than any one particular in his entire life’.

Boswell later agreed with this uneasy verdict: ‘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.’ He added that Savage had a reputation for ‘fire, rudeness, pride, meanness, and ferocity’.

But he may also have appeared a curiously glamorous figure to Johnson. At the time they first met in 1737, ‘Sam’ Johnson was not the great Doctor of later legend. He was 29 years old, an aspiring but virtually unpublished author from the provinces. Large, shambling, grotesquely scarred by childhood scrofula, he was subject to physical convulsions and disabling episodes of mental depression. Abrupt and awkward in company, he was a unsuccessful schoolmaster from Lichfield, who had come up to London (with his last pupil David Garrick) to try his literary fortunes by contributing poems and translations to the Gentleman’s Magazine.

By contrast, Richard Savage, then in his early forties (his exact birthdate is uncertain), was a stylish, celebrated and even notorious personality in literary London. Universally known in the coffee-houses, he cut a dandyish figure as observed by Hawkins. ‘Savage, as to his exterior, was to a remarkable degree, accomplished; he was a handsome, well-made man, and very courteous in the modes of salutation’. Hawkins added dryly: ‘I have been told that in taking off his hat and disposing it under his arm, and in his bow, he displayed as much grace as those actions were capable of.’

For most of his life Savage had claimed to be the illegitimate offspring of a love-affair between the Countess Macclesfield and Richard Savage, the 4th Earl Rivers. This claim had never been recognised, and remains unproven to this day. But Lord Rivers having died in 1712, Savage had begun to style himself ‘natural Son of the Late Earl Rivers’, and for more than twenty years pursued his claims against the wealthy, widowed Lady Macclesfield, with heroic - or relentless - determination. This became the subject of his notorious poem ‘The Bastard’, published in 1728, shortly after he had received the royal pardon for the murder at Charing Cross:

Blest be the Bastard’s birth! Through wond’rous ways He shines eccentric like a Comet’s blaze. No sickly fruit of faint compliance he; He! Stampt in nature’s mint of extasy! He lives to build, not boast, a gen’rous race: No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.

This brisk, ebullient declaration still enshrines Savage in the modern Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Less well-known is the subsequent passage in which he sardonically and publicly thanks Lady Macclesfield for his illegitimacy:

O Mother, yet no Mother – ’tis to you, My thanks for such distinguish’d claims are due. You, unenslav’d to Nature’s narrow laws, Warm championess for Freedom’s sacred cause, From all the dry devoirs of blood and line, From ties maternal, moral and divine, Discharg’d my grasping soul; push’d me from shore, And launch’d me into life without an oar.

Although Savage’s campaigns and publications between 1724 and 1737 sometimes have the appearance of blackmail, young Johnson was profoundly touched by his oft-repeated tale of emotional rejection and maternal persecution. Though since the real Lady Macclesfield was still alive and living in Old Bond Street, London, it is perhaps curious that Johnson neither attempted to interview her nor correspond with her. Nevertheless, the motif of Savage’s ‘cruel Mother’ drives the early part of his biography with vivid conviction, summoning a kind of fairy-tale power and imagery.

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.’