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

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1 Death

Chapter 2 Love

Chapter 3 Night

Chapter 4 Mother

Chapter 5 Bard

Chapter 6 Murder

Chapter 7 Fame

Chapter 8 Friendship

Chapter 9 Arcadia

Chapter 10 Charon

Appendix Note on Savage’s birth and identity

Select Bibliography

References

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also By Richard Holmes

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

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.’

Chapter 1 Death

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.

Much obscurity attends the Passage of his early life. We have it on his own Authority that he was born in the parish of St Andrew’s, Holborn, in 1698, the bastard Son of the present Mrs Anne Brett, then Lady Macclesfield (though she never acknowledged his Claim), and the late 4th Earl Rivers of Rivers House, Great Queen Street, Holborn. These Circumstances are obliquely referred to in his memorable poem ‘The Bastard’ first given to the World shortly after his Trial in 1728.

Mr Savage first came to Notice with two Spanish dramas, and his Tragedy of ‘Sir Thomas Overbury’ produced at Drury Lane by Mr Cibber in 1723. He was befriended by the essayist Sir Richard Steele, and published a number of poetical Works in The Plain Dealer magazine of Mr Aaron Hill, who proclaimed his Merits and drew attention to his Plight. He became associated with Mr Alexander Pope of Twickenham, and is rumoured to have supplied many of the Scurrilities that furnished the latter’s poetical Satire of ‘The Dunciad’.

As a frequenter of the Coffeehouse, the Salon, and the Green Room, Mr Savage found his Name connected with many of the illustrious Ladies of the day, including the actress Mrs Anne Oldfield, the poetess Martha Sansom, and that assiduous writer of Scandalous romances, Mrs Eliza Haywood.

In November 1727, in consequence of an Affray at Robinson’s Coffeehouse, Charing Cross, he was arrested on a capital charge of Wounding and Murder, found guilty by a Grand Jury Court at the Old Bailey under the direction of Judge Page, and condemned to suffer execution at Tyburn. His Case became celebrated among the Literati and Beau Monde of the capital, and in consequence of the Intercession of his kinsman Lord Tyrconnel and the renowned Patroness of poets my Lady Hertford, he received the Royal Pardon in February 1728.

In relating his Misfortunes, it is remarkable that Mr Savage always afterwards stated that his Mother Mrs Anne Brett, the former Lady Macclesfield, had unaccountably urged the Execution of his sentence against all representations of Mercy, and that it was only the gracious Intercession of her Majesty Queen Caroline which saved him from the Hangman’s Noose. Mr Savage immediately thereafter tasted the delights of Celebrity, and applied precipitously for the position of Poet Laureate; which, failing to obtain, he appointed himself ‘Volunteer Laureate’ to the Queen thereby obtaining an Allowance of £50 per annum until her majesty’s death in 1737. These Facts we have on the Authority of Mr Thomas Birch of the Royal Society.

Mr Savage now came under the Patronage of his generous kinsman Lord Tyrconnel, to whom his poem ‘The Wanderer’ is dedicated. But in consequence of some Misunderstanding, he shortly reverted to his previous condition of Poverty, and with the Cessation of the Queen’s allowance, he was thrown once more upon his Wits and his Friends, in the Town. He once again began to publish a number of poetical Works, in the new Gentleman’s Magazine of Mr Edward Cave at St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, among which was his poem ‘Of Public Spirit’ (1737); but was menaced with a charge of Obscene Libel for his poem ‘The Progress of a Divine’.

The condition of his Poverty being unrelieved, he threw himself with increasing confidence on the Generosity of his many friends, among whom Mr Solomon Mendez of Hackney, and Mr James Thomson, the distinguished author of ‘The Seasons’, at Richmond; though it is to be feared that some Nights were passed in the Cellars and on the Bulks of Covent Garden, in the company of Beggars, Thieves, and other Denizens of Grub Street.

Mr Savage had for some time revolved a plan of Retirement to the country, where he hoped to re-write and refurbish his original Tragedy of ‘Sir Thomas Overbury’. Accordingly through the Generosity of Mr Alexander Pope, a Subscription of £50 per annum was organized among his friends, and in the summer of 1739 Mr Savage departed for Wales. Here he settled at Swansea and its Environs, where he is supposed to have met his Friend the poet Mr John Dyer, and paid court to the celebrated Beauty of Llanelli, Mrs Bridget Jones. But his Funds once again running low, Mr Savage returned to Bristol to write his Tragedy and informed his Friends of his imminent Return to the Capital, at which much of his Subscription was unaccountably discontinued.

In January 1743 Mr Savage was precipitately arrested for Debt, and conveyed to the Newgate Prison in Bristol, where he received the personal Attentions of the Gaoler Mr Dagge, and died suddenly in his Room on 1st August 1743, being buried at Mr Dagge’s expense in St Peter’s Churchyard, six feet from the south Door of the church.

Mr Richard Savage never married, and had no known Off-spring, though he is survived by his reputed mother Mrs Anne Brett, the former Lady Macclesfield, of Old Bond Street, London. His personal Papers have been obtained by his editor Mr Edward Cave, of the Gentleman’s Magazine.

The facts, and even the rumours, given here accurately represent the public knowledge of Richard Savage’s career at the time of his death, and are indeed historically correct as far as they go. But the obituary itself is a biographer’s fiction. Nothing like it can be found in the memorial columns of the contemporary journals of 1743. I have simply invented it.

This imaginary obituary suggests some of the mysteries and questions that always surrounded Savage’s life. But it is forced to omit the single most surprising fact, because at that time it had not become true. Among the ‘Denizens of Grub Street’ whom Savage encountered in the late 1730s was an unknown young literary novice called Samuel Johnson, who assured his own fame by writing Savage’s biography a year later in 1744.

A life like Savage’s is mysterious in itself, but also mysterious in the way it came to be told and reinterpreted, one version layered upon another, like a piece of complex geology. Its stratified truth was not ready to emerge immediately on his own death, or even in his own century. It depends on the series of its tellers or excavators, of whom our imaginary obituarist of 1743 is one; Samuel Johnson in 1744 is another; Johnson’s own biographers, Sir John Hawkins (1787) and James Boswell (1791), are a third and fourth; and so on down a line of scholars, Victorian antiquarians and modern academics to our own time. Through these rich and varied workings of research and story-telling the buried figure of Savage slowly rises back to life again.

The subject of this book is one particular version, the ‘original’ version, Johnson’s Savage. But it is also the question of versions itself. It is the biography of a biography. It concerns the kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can obtain as he tells the story of another’s life, and thereby makes it both his own (like a friendship) and the public’s (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally what we can love.

If there was no official obituary of Savage in 1743, it is still possible to discover how his contemporaries felt about him very close to the time of his death, from public knowledge about his scandalous reputation and from popular hearsay. This must be the start, or first layer, of the investigation.

What emerges initially is a tale of controversy, sensationalism, disputed facts, and a good deal of eighteenth-century moralising about social justice and personal cruelty. Three documents vividly substantiate this: a poem, a letter, and an advertiser’s announcement. Each of these is an early example of the memorial process at work, by which a private life begins to take its place in a nation’s history.

Savage’s life was seen from the start as containing the elements of a crime thriller, which would appeal to a popular as much as a literary readership. Savage, as his very name seemed to suggest, was a poet-killer with a peculiar violence in his relationships. His story begins in an aristocratic divorce court, emerges in the world of publicity and the new monthly magazines, continues in a murder trial, touches upon fashion, politics and royalty, and ends suddenly and disgracefully in a debtors’ prison. More than any other English poet since Christopher Marlowe, Savage’s reputation was notorious and his true identity problematic, though for very different reasons to Marlowe’s. His ‘case’ was exemplary to his age, even if no one could quite agree what it exemplified, or who – ultimately – was to blame for its tragedy.

In the month of his death, the Gentleman’s Magazine, which had to some degree sponsored the final stages of his career and had a literary investment in his story, published a verse ‘Epitaph on the late R------d S------e Esq’. This emphasised the tragic aspects of the affair. It referred obliquely to his poetic powers, his wit, his illegitimacy, his trial, his laureateship, and his ‘cruel’ and vengeful mother.

The anonymous Epitaph writer begins by invoking Phoebus, the god of Poetry – which is like placing a classical bust at the entrance of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Savage’s raffish life is grandly presented as a contest between two powerful patrons: unworldly Poetry and Worldly Fortune, who are necessarily hostile to each other.

Whom Phoebus favour’d, on whom Fortune frown’d

Lies deep beneath this consecrated ground.

Savage the name: – he was design’d by Fate,

That err’d at his conception, to be great.

And such he was, in boundless wit and pride;

Tide and heir his Mother’s lust deny’d.

Within the tight, gavotte-like turns of mid-eighteenth-century occasional verse, the Epitaphist plays decorously on the idea of Savage’s ‘greatness’. Here was a great poet perhaps, but not a great social success. He was a man of great wit (in the sense of intelligence, rather than humour); but also great in his pride, arrogance and self-esteem – qualities which can blunt wit or make it blind. Then comes the scandalous, journalistic punch line: he should have been great in family title and financial inheritance too, but this was ‘deny’d’ him by his mother and – more outrageous yet – by his mother’s ‘lust’. This seems to be a libellous attack on the Countess of Macclesfield.

The Epitaphist now moves swiftly on to enlist sympathy for Savage. He suffered from poverty and dangerous misfortunes, yet he continued to write poetry. His mother cruelly withheld her support, but his Queen eventually saved him, and Heaven pitied him and forgave him, so that a greater justice eventually prevailed in his life.

… His life was Want, yet could his duteous Verse

The Cruel’s praise, that help withheld, rehearse.

Danger extreme*, th’unhappy lawless knew,

And woes he felt, as woes were all his due.

Twice sov’reign Mercy found, a Queen* to save,

From pitying Heaven, to end his cares, a grave.⁴

It is remarkable that the Epitaphist assumes that all his readers will be familiar with the circumstances of Savage’s trial, more than fifteen years before, and merely puts asterisks against the references to it, with a knowing footnote. His cause is still alive, even if the ‘unhappy’ poet himself is dead. Injustice, as much as poetry, has already granted him a kind of immortality.

Even though published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, a largely pro-Savage paper, the Epitaph is by no means a panegyric. It accepts that Savage is a controversial figure, that the woes he felt were all his ‘due’, that he brought trouble on himself, that he was ‘lawless’ and that his ‘cares’ drove him to a premature grave. Nevertheless he remains a man of genius, a poet hounded by ‘the Cruel’ woman and suffering some ill-defined persecution and social injustice. Savage is not merely a case; he is already a cause.

The second document is an open letter to Edward Cave, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine under his pseudonym Mr Urban, announcing a forthcoming biography of Savage. It appeared within three weeks of Savage’s death in Bristol, and immediately demonstrates how topical the cause was. As the announcement explains, the anonymous writer will defend Savage’s memory, and use his personal knowledge of the subject to produce an intimate portrait. It will be the work of a friend and confidante.

Mr Urban: As your Collections show how often you have owed the Ornaments of your poetical Pages, to the Correspondence of the unfortunate and ingenious Mr Savage, I doubt not but you have so much regard to his Memory as to encourage any designs that may have a tendency to the Preservation of it from Insults or Calumnies, and therefore with some Degree of Assurance intreat you to inform the Publick, that his Life will speedily be published by a Person who was favoured with his Confidence, and received from himself an Account of most of the Transactions which he proposes to mention to the Time of his Retirement to Swansea in Wales.⁵

The letter adds that the Life will also give details of his imprisonment in Bristol, and use extracts from Savage’s own private letters and those of his friends: ‘materials still less liable to Objection’.

Great emphasis is laid on the speed at which this Life will be produced, and the accuracy of its sources. Other potential biographers are warned off the subject. The readers must also beware of any rival, romanticised versions which rely on speculation or fiction.

It may be reasonably imagined that others may have the same Design, but as it is not credible that they can obtain the same Materials, it must be expected they will supply from Invention the want of Intelligence, and that under the Title of the Life of Savage they will publish only a Novel filled with romantick Adventures, and imaginary Amours. You may therefore perhaps gratify the Lovers of Truth and Wit by giving me leave to inform them in your Magazine, that my Account will be published in 8vo by Mr Roberts in Warwick-Lane.⁶

This book is to be a true biography, quite different from the kind of ‘novelized’ lives which had become popular through the work of Daniel Defoe or Eliza Haywood, with their obsession with scandalous adventures and sexual exploits. The biography will be committed to an ideal of human truth, moral truth. It will be based on a distinction between fact and fiction. In short, the letter makes both a commercial claim to the literary market in Savage, and an aesthetic claim about the form of true biography. It adds, in a forthright manner, where the Life can be bought; though not yet the price.

This letter is written by the young Samuel Johnson, and is of historic importance in the development of English biography. It confidently asserts the value of the biographic form to a general public, the ‘Lovers of Truth and Wit’; and aggressively declares war on the titillating fictional art of the Novel.

Samuel Johnson’s publisher, Mr James Roberts of Warwick Lane off the Strand, saw the Savage story in different terms. As a publisher, Roberts specialised in tales of social scandal, runaway heiresses, adulterous skirmishes among the aristocracy, lost fortunes, orphaned sons, and careers of glittering crime. The Savage saga was easily adapted to this formula, and Roberts accordingly placed a long advertisement in the London Evening Post pointing out that the biography – though literary in appearance – could be safely relied on for its sensational contents. In this third document, Savage’s life is seen as a labyrinth of deceit, injustice, passion and wrongdoing: in short, everything that might be expected of a poet’s unstable existence in a materialistic society, redeemed only by the gracious interventions of royalty.

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 title 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’, the ‘Wanderer’, ‘Volunteer Laureate’, and ‘Author to be Let’; went into Wales, to be supported by a subscription, promoted by Mr Pope, but at last died in Prison.⁷

This racy summary, with its neat and misleading telescoping of facts, conforms to the shape of what we might call an urban fairy tale. Savage is a kind of Frog Prince, placed under a cruel spell by his Wicked Mother, and saved from the jaws of death by the Good Queen, who transforms him back into his true self as an eminent poet. The premature death in prison, somehow under the auspices of Mr Pope (the most financially successful poet of the age), becomes a kind of moral to this tale. The poor Poet, whether saved or not, will always suffer for his Art. This is not so remote from the story actually told by Johnson; but it indicates what the public wanted to hear about Savage. His life will be an awful – and delicious – warning; and incidentally a very good read.

These are the reactions which people had to Richard Savage at the time of his death in 1743. They are already complicated and various. Savage had caught the popular imagination in a remarkable way. But most remarkable was the biographer who immediately entered the lists on his behalf. Who was this man?

Here again we are confronted with something peculiar in the nature of biography, and its layerings through time. If we assume that it was Dr Samuel Johnson (who received his doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1765), the man who subsequently made a household name in English literature through the work of James Boswell, we will understand little of the story that now begins to emerge. We have to deconstruct almost entirely that powerful, domineering, confident, late-eighteenth-century figure whom Boswell created in his own biography. We have to recover a much more shadowy, fraught and uncertain personality: young Sam Johnson, failed schoolmaster, provincial poet, and desperate Grub Street hack, who signed his letters in 1738 ‘impransus’ – supperless.

It is worth considering here another fiction. What might an imaginary obituarist also have made of Johnson at this period? Suppose Samuel Johnson had also died at about forty years old, say in the summer of 1749 when he had been in London for just over ten years? This is Johnson more than a decade before he met Boswell. This is Johnson still virtually unknown, beyond a small circle of Fleet Street booksellers, when he has just published his first signed work, The Vanity of Human Wishes. This is the young Samuel Johnson that Savage would have recognised, but that we, looking backwards through history and Boswell’s biography, might find difficult to imagine at all. This is how Death might have briefly framed his portrait at that date:

Mr Samuel Johnson: poet, playwright and sometime political journalist. News has just reached us in the London mails, of the untimely death of Mr Samuel Johnson, late of the city of Lichfield, at his house at Gough Square, Fleet Street, London, of a sudden Apoplexy.

He was the son of Michael Johnson, bookseller and stationer of Sadler Street and Market Square; and elder brother of Nathanial Johnson, who continued the family business until 1737 in this city. Mr Johnson’s Learning and Eccentricities will be well remembered, which led him to abandon the useful paths of Pedagogy for the ephemeral pursuit of Letters in the capital city, where he found little Success. He was attached in various capacities to the Gentleman’s Magazine of Mr Edward Cave, where he undertook extensive but anonymous Work, most notably the reporting of Parliamentary affairs in the scurrilous rubric of ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ which he continued for three or four years. He is believed to have published several anonymous Poems and political Pamphlets, of a generally Jacobite tenor and in Opposition to the late Ministry of Mr Walpole.

At the time of his Death, perhaps hastened by Poverty and Overwork, he was engaged in a delusory Scheme to compile by his singular efforts a General Dictionary of the English Language, an enterprise more rationally undertaken in France by a Committee of scholars labouring over many years. The tribulations and disappointments of his Life have been summarised in a recent poetical satire, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, which some may take as his own Elegy.

Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield on 18th September 1709, and taken by his Mother to London at the age of three years to be touched by her Gracious Majesty Queen Anne for the Evil, a Scrofula infection that marked him in a sad and monstrous Manner for the rest of his life. He was nearly blind in one Eye, and suffered from an unhappy series of nervous Spasms, which rendered him permanently unsuitable for the gracious departments of Society, and nullified many of his efforts to obtain Advancement. To these physiological Causes may be ascribed a melancholy of Temper, and irritable dogmatism of Address, which rendered him at times restless, willful, and barbarous. A brooding spirit of Opposition marked many of his proceedings; he felt the pain of Existence, and perhaps unduly resented the Comforts of Privilege, Fortune, or Power. Of his Learning, there can however be little Doubt.

He achieved Pre-eminence among his peers at the Lichfield Grammar School with remarkable celerity; and in October 1728 proceeded to Pembroke College, Oxford, with a reputation for Scholarship that was little short of prodigious; but after fourteen months was forced to withdraw owing to the Business-failings of his father, who died in 1731 leaving him no Patrimony. A period of lassitude and solitary Study now ensued, alternating with unsuccessful attempts to establish himself as a Schoolmaster at Market Bosworth and at Birmingham.

At last, in what might appear a strange fit of Optimism or of Despair, he married Mrs Elizabeth Jervis Porter, the widow of a Birmingham woollen-draper, the Mother of three children and a Woman over twenty years his senior, on 9 July 1735 at St Werburgh’s church, Derby. This Union is said to have been the cause of great Solace to Johnson, and of great Merriment to his Friends. He invested his Wife’s dowry of some £600 in the venture of a private School at Edial, Lichfield, which failed within two years, leaving him without Resource. He was therefore obliged to seek some other Means of Support, and having no Profession, became, by Necessity, an Author.

Removing precipitously to London in the spring of 1737, Mr Johnson sought Employment among the denizens of Grub Street, while attempting to finish ‘Irene’, a blank-verse Tragedy of the passions, incommodiously located in Constantinople at the time of the Turkish ascendancy. He is said to have been greatly attached to his heroine, Aspasia, who resists the heathen Blandishments of the Sultan Mahomet, confirming thereby her Virtue, her Religion, and eventually the Dictates of her Heart.

The insolence of Power, and the Temptations of the animal Passions, appear to have been a constant theme of Mr Johnson’s meditations at this period of his Life, and may reflect upon his own unhappy Situation. But finding himself now no more successful as a Tragedian, than formerly as a Schoolmaster, he at length established a connection with the Gentleman’s Magazine where he earned his Bread as a low writer of Translations, Reviews, Catalogues and Commentaries over the ensuing decade. Throughout these years he knew great Poverty, and his Union with Mrs Johnson is rumoured to have been at Times interrupted.

The spirit of Discontent, if not of Subversion, is revealed in his Imitation of Juvenal’s Third Satire on Rome, which he published anonymously as ‘London’ in 1738; and his Pamphlets in prose and verse directed against the Ministry. In 1744 he published through Mr Dodsley a remarkable Apologia for the Life of the notorious Mr Richard Savage, the self-styled Volunteer Laureate and claimant to the Rivers title, a man renowned equally for his Poetry and his Profligacy.

Mr Johnson’s familiarity with this Gentleman and his London haunts, at the very Nadir of his misfortunes, may indicate something of his own Circumstances. The Performance is executed with both Tenderness and Rigour, as if the Author was to some degree at War with his own Nature and Outlook in the judgement of his unhappy Friend. The Work, though cast in the ephemeral genre of commercial Biography, has received Praise in many quarters including the Approbation of Mr Henry Fielding (whose History of Tom Jones: A Foundling now lies before the World); and it may be counted among the most Successful and Diverting that Mr Johnson was destined to produce.

Disappointed in his literary Prospects, disheartened in his political Hopes, and perhaps embittered by his personal Affairs (but we make no Windows into the human Heart), Mr Johnson threw himself at last into the harmless drudgery of his English Dictionary, for which he undertook a contract in 1746, with a Chimerical fervour, and established himself on Credit at Gough Square with Mrs Johnson who steadily sought refuge from the World in Novels and Medicines. Turning once more to his favourite Juvenal, Mr Johnson now imitated the Disillusion of the Tenth Satire, in his poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, which he is believed to have composed while Walking in the country lanes of Hampstead in a delusory Attempt to escape the Toils of the City which had so fatally ensnared him.

The last concussion to his Hopes occurred this spring, when his long meditated Tragedy of Irene was mounted in Drury Lane by his Friend Mr David Garrick (one of the truly distinguished sons of Lichfield), to be received only with a Tepid expression of Politeness by the Town. The fatal Illness that now struck him down, at the age of Forty, may perhaps be assigned as much to Weariness and melancholy of Mind, as to premature Decay of his ungainly and damaged Body.

He remained throughout a devout and convinced Christian, and found that Solace in Heaven which he could not find in the World. Perhaps he composed an Elegy for himself, and for his Grub Street familiars such as Mr Savage, when he wrote in The Vanity of Human Wishes:

Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes,

And pause a while from Letters, to be wise;

There mark what Ills the Scholar’s Life assail,

Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron and the Jail.⁸

Chapter 2 Love

When Johnson first came to London in 1737 he was twenty-seven years old; and Savage (as far as we can tell) was nearly forty. Johnson was young, unknown and untried; Savage was ageing, experienced and disreputable. We have to begin to imagine a relationship of mentor and pupil between the two men that is unlike almost anything in Johnson’s later career, or in that part of it recorded by Boswell. Savage can be seen as a sort of urbane Mephistopheles, Johnson as a youthful Faust.

The friendship lasted at most only two years, but it seems to have been of great emotional intensity. When they eventually parted, in July 1739, Johnson says that he had ‘Tears in his Eyes’. It is invariably said by Johnson’s own biographers that the man who was weeping was Savage, not Johnson; thereby suggesting that Johnson was relatively unmoved. But this may not be the case. Johnson himself draws special attention to the moment of parting by making it one of the few places in his Life of Savage where he deliberately introduces himself as part of Savage’s story. He emphasises the pathos of the moment with unusual explicitness.

Savage had resolved to abandon London for rural Wales to live frugally, and salvage his writing career. ‘Full of these salutary Resolutions, he left London, in July 1739, having taken Leave with great Tenderness of his Friends, and parted from the Author of this Narrative with Tears in his Eyes.’¹

Tears in whose eyes? The sentence is curiously ambiguous, or deliberately so: the punctuation suggests Savage’s eyes, but Johnson’s dramatic introduction of himself in the final clause seems to claim the tears as his own. It is almost as if Johnson was impelled as a friend to bear witness to his own tears; but was embarrassed as a biographer to admit them in public This embarrassment at the strength of his feelings for Savage, when he later looked back at it, provides us with a first clue to the whole story.

When Johnson came to correct the second edition of the Life in 1748, he noted carefully in the margin next to the ‘Tears in his Eyes’ an explanatory phrase: ‘I had then a slight fever.’ This seems to imply that Johnson was indeed recalling his own tears and emotion at losing Savage, but he felt awkward doing so, and subsequently wished to dismiss them as mere physical weakness, as temporary illness. But in this sense his whole intimacy with Savage may have been something of a young man’s fever. It was hectic, intense, continually menaced by Savage’s poverty and instability, and by Johnson’s own struggles to establish himself professionally in London. Johnson seemed to conceive of their time together as something dreamlike, tidal like the River Thames; a friendship of arrivals and departures in the great city.

In his poem London, Johnson invests just such an imagined parting with a strange, solemn ritual of kissing the ground, bathing the whole moment in a bright silvery light, reflected from the shining water, of romantic intensity:

While Thales waits the Wherry that contains

Of dissipated Wealth the small Remains,

On Thames’s banks, in silent Thought we stood,

Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver Flood:

Struck with the Seat that gave Eliza birth,

We kneel, and kiss the consecrated Earth …²

Nothing could be further from the atmosphere of Boswell’s familiar tale of Johnson and young David Garrick riding to London to seek their fortunes in March 1737. Here, by contrast, is the touch of brisk heroic comedy like a picaresque adventure out of a Fielding novel. ‘Both of them’, says Boswell, ‘used to talk pleasantly of it’, and embellished it suitably as the years went by.

They were cheerful, poor, devil-may-care. Garrick would say that they had only one horse between them, and ‘rode and tied’ – that is, each one riding ahead in turn, tying up the horse to a tree or gate, and walking on till the other overtook and performed the next relay, as if they were gypsies. Johnson would add that his total finances were ‘two-pence half-penny’. Garrick once mockingly challenged this in Boswell’s hearing: ‘Eh? what do you say? With two-pence half-penny in your pocket?’ – Johnson: ‘Why yes; when I came with two-pence half-penny in my pocket, and thou, Davy, with three half-pence in thine.’ It became a favourite party piece, and passed into the Boswellian legend.

They took their ‘precepts of economy’ from an Irish painter, dined once a day at the Pine-Apple Coffee-house in New Street off the Strand for eight pence, and paid formal visits on ‘clean-shirt-days’ only. When Johnson first applied for literary work at a bookseller’s in the Strand, the proprietor Mr Wilcox ‘eyed his robust frame attentively’ and then suggested he take a job as a vegetable porter in Covent Garden.³

But these picturesque details, lovingly gathered by Boswell, mask a much bleaker truth. Johnson was a failed schoolmaster, who had spent most of his wife’s inheritance, and gone off to London with a teenage pupil in a desperate last attempt to recoup his fortunes. Garrick had a definite plan: to apply to Lincoln’s Inn, and if that failed to stay with his actor-brother Peter. He was also due to inherit a legacy of a thousand pounds, sufficient to make him independent.

Johnson, by comparison, was adrift in the capital. He had the unfinished manuscript of his tragedy Irene, and an idea of applying to the Gentleman’s Magazine for hack-work (it had been refused previously, in 1734). He also carried a kindly but useless letter of recommendation from his friend Gilbert Walmsley to the headmaster of Colson’s Academy, a fellow native of Lichfield. Omitting Johnson’s personal circumstances, Walmsley wrote: ‘Mr Johnson [is] to try his fate with a Tragedy, and to see to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French. Johnson is a very good scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a fine tragedy-writer. If it should any way lie in your way, doubt not but you would be ready to recommend and assist your countryman.’⁴

This left out a good deal about the difficulties of Johnson’s character and circumstances.

The young Johnson of Lichfield may have been ‘a very good scholar and poet’ potentially, but so far his professional achievements in either field had been minimal. At twenty-seven he had published nothing except some desultory essays in the Birmingham Journal and a pedestrian translation of Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia. The translation had been dictated to his friend Edmund Hector, while Johnson lay in bed too depressed to go to his desk.⁵

His scholastic career was equally undistinguished. His failure to complete a degree at Pembroke College, Oxford, in December 1729 (because of his father’s poverty, which had caused him endless humiliations) virtually destroyed his chances of a good grammarschool post or headmastership. Combined with his physical handicaps, this produced from 1730 onwards long periods of profound, chronic depression, with days of crushing slothful inactivity. At this time he told his school-friend, John Taylor of Ashbourne, that he ‘strongly entertained thoughts of suicide’.⁶

Over the next six years, Johnson failed in half-a-dozen masterships in small schools scattered between Lichfield, Birmingham and Stourbridge; each time fleeing back to the houses of his friends – Walmsley, Hector, or John Taylor – for solace and domestic comforts. A final blow came in 1736, when an attempt to start his own school at Edial, two miles outside Lichfield, failed through lack of pupils renewing their fees. It was closed with the loss of several hundred pounds. This money was not his own, but belonged to his new wife.⁷

Johnson’s difficulties were not merely, or even largely, financial or professional. They were profound problems of temperament and physical disability. These showed in depressive episodes, alternating with bullying aggression. His immediate appearance was out-landish: over six foot tall, looming in doorways, and shambling dangerously down streets (often muttering to himself). Closer up, he was a large, gaunt, bony young man of alarming, restless movement: quite unlike the noble, rolling, monumental, almost Buddhalike figure who emerges from the later descriptions of Boswell and portraits of Reynolds. He was partially blind in one eye, and heavily scarred round the throat with childhood scrofula. He suffered from frightening nervous spasms of the arms and shoulders, and uncontrollable facial twitches.

Boswell recorded these with great accuracy and tenderness in later life, when they had become almost endearing features. Yet even he notes that the painter Hogarth, on first spotting Johnson in Richardson’s drawing-room, assumed he was a congenital idiot taken in for philanthropic reasons.⁸

In his late twenties Johnson was a figure of horrid fascination. Men were intimidated by him, women were both excited and repulsed, children were frightened in his presence and cruelly mocking behind his back. This disturbing, unfamiliar picture emerges from the confidential reports of several of the schools that rejected him.

The governors of Solihull, seven miles outside Birmingham, sent this reply to Gilbert Walmsley’s recommendation of Johnson for the vacant headmastership in 1735: ‘… all agree that he is an excellent scholar, and upon that account deserves much better than to be schoolmaster of Solihull. But then he has the character of being a very haughty, ill-natured gent., and that he has such a way of distorting his face (which though he can’t help) the gent, think it may affect some young lads; for these two reasons he is not approved on …’⁹ Boswell did not know of this report, or at any rate did not quote it.

A similar rejection came from the headmaster of Brewood Grammar School, fifteen miles west of Lichfield, in 1736. Johnson was refused the post of assistant master, ‘from an apprehension that the paralytick affection … might become the object of imitation or of ridicule, among his pupils’.¹⁰ Boswell did have this report in his archives, but omitted it from his account of young Johnson, including it only as a retrospective footnote to his moving description of Johnson’s death in 1784.

Less than a dozen letters have survived from this Lichfield period of Johnson’s life, and so it has always remained obscure. But something of that ‘haughty, ill-natured’ manner appears in his earliest attempt to find a professional opening in London. Writing to Edward Cave of the Gentleman’s Magazine in November 1734, he confidently recommends himself – an unknown, unemployed schoolmaster from Stafford – for the post of literary correspondent: ‘Sir: As You appear no less sensible than Your Readers of the defects of your Poetical Article, You will not be displeased, if, in order to the improvement of it, I communicate to You the sentiments of a person, who will undertake on reasonable terms sometimes to fill a column.’¹¹

We particularly catch young Johnson’s voice in his bullish, and splendidly tactless, summary: ‘By this method your Literary Article, for so it might be called, will, he thinks, be better recommended to the Publick, than by low Jests, awkward Buffoonery, or the dull scurrilities of either Party.’¹² The application met with a polite refusal.

Haughtiness covered not merely provincial gaucherie, but desperate loneliness and uncertainty. Johnson’s frustrated intellectual brilliance hid extraordinary emotional immaturity. This, Boswell never seems to have grasped. For him, Johnson was a sage from boyhood, a wise owl from the egg. Yet the truth seems to be that, barricaded in his large monstrous body, Johnson had the tender, awkward emotions of an overgrown child.

He depended on his friends, and needed almost to be mothered by them. In 1735, he wrote one of his few revealing letters to Richard Congreve, a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate then at Oxford. Congreve had known him briefly at Lichfield and had written a summer letter vaguely suggesting a renewal of their ‘old acquaintance’. Johnson, then twenty-six, replied with an awkward but surprisingly romantic enthusiasm. He imagines their friendship as a kind of Arcadia, from which he can flee from the hostile world.

Our former familiarity which you show in so agreeable a Light was embarrassed with no forms, and we were content to love without complimenting each other. It was such as well became our rural Retreats, shades unpolluted by Flattery and falsehood, thickets where interest and artifice never lay concealed! To such an acquaintance I again invite you …¹³

The way young Johnson already idealises friendship is striking. His instinct is to treat it as poetic and aphoristic ‘He may be justly said to be alone,’ he tells Congreve, ‘who has none to whom he imparts his thoughts.’ Something intensely personal emerges in the description of the true friend: one with whom a man may converse ‘without suspicion of being ridicul’d or betray’d’.¹⁴ This secret longing for companionship prepares us for Savage’s tremendous impact on his life.

The actual news that Johnson conveys to Congreve is oddly muted: ‘little has happened to me recently’, he remarks, and he will not dwell on ‘past disappointments’. The only thing worthy of note is the Edial scheme, ‘a private boarding-school for Young Gentlemen whom I shall endeavour to instruct in a method more rational than those commonly practised’. It is what he fails to tell his Arcadian friend that is most remarkable: that in less than a fortnight he is due to be married. Indeed his future wife, Elizabeth Porter, gets no mention at all. Johnson appears too embarrassed, too uncertain of himself, to mention his strongest feelings.

Yet these strong feelings certainly existed, especially in sexual matters. Johnson’s profound emotional frustration throughout the early part of his life, both in Lichfield and in London, forms a part of his literary personality that has rarely been recognised. Just as it is difficult to imagine Johnson young, so it seems impossible to imagine Johnson in love. Thanks largely to Boswell, the very phrase sounds faintly ludicrous. But Boswell, whose Journals reveal how fascinated, amused and tortured by sex he was all his own life, could never really bear to envisage his sage in equivalent throes of lust or passion. Having first met Johnson at the age of fifty-four (Boswell then being a mere twenty-three), he always projected a venerable father-figure, a moral counsellor, detached from passion. So, perhaps understandably, he could never really accept the vulnerable, tender and romantic side of ‘the Great Cham’, in his far-distant youth. This has subtly affected our view of Johnson’s whole biography ever since.

Boswell always deflects the question of Johnson’s sexual feelings by treating them whimsically, if not farcically. He admits that Johnson was attracted by women: ‘Johnson had, from his early youth, been sensible to the influence of female charms’; but he typically diffuses this by archly remarking on the ‘facility and elegance’ with which Johnson could ‘warble the amorous lay’.¹⁵

This deflating humour is deployed whenever he writes about the women who, throughout Johnson’s life, were the serious objects of his interests, hopes and passions. There were more than is usually thought: apart from his wife Elizabeth Porter, there was the adored Molly Aston; Hill Boothby (intended as Johnson’s second wife); Hester Thrale (the confidante who replaced a second wife); the understanding Elizabeth Desmoulins (the young widowed daughter of his doctor); the admired Elizabeth Carter; and half-a-dozen young women writers and actresses, whom Boswell often simply omits from his account.’¹⁶

His treatment of Johnson’s strange, passionate and deeply unhappy marriage to Elizabeth Porter as a sentimental farce of ‘connubial felicity’ is wholly characteristic.¹⁷ Nowhere does he seriously consider the impact of Johnson’s sexual frustrations on his beginnings as a writer and poet. Modern biographers tend to take the same line. Even James Clifford writes: ‘Johnson could never give himself up wholeheartedly to romance, whether in life or in literature.’¹⁸

Yet the women who knew young Johnson best, either directly or through family gossip and reminiscence, take a very different attitude. Among them are Lucy Porter (Johnson’s stepdaughter), Anna Seward and Hester Thrale: almost invariably cited by Boswell as ‘unreliable’ witnesses.

Anna Seward (1747–1809), who became the poet known as ‘the Swan of Lichfield’, was not born when Johnson left for London. But she became an invaluable source for local memories and hearsay about him, especially through her grandfather (who had taught Johnson), her mother (who knew Elizabeth Porter) and the Walmsley family, about all of whom she wrote extensively. Boswell delights in disproving her stories on innumerable points. Yet Anna frequently throws revealing light on young Johnson’s emotions. One of her most suggestive formulations is this: ‘Johnson was always fancying himself in love with some princess or other.’¹⁹

Johnson first fell in love some time in his middle teens. His princess was Ann Hector, the sister of his school-friend, Edmund Hector, at Stourbridge. It is probably for her that he wrote his first poem: ‘On a Daffodil: The First Flower that the Author had seen that Year’, which refers to a smiling nymph, Cleora. A distinguished modern biographer, Walter Jackson Bate, remarks that ‘when we think of the later Johnson, the very title is hilarious’.²⁰ Yet this seems a curiously revealing admission. For the poem does not appear particularly absurd for a sixteen-year-old:

But while I sing, the nimble moments fly,

See! Sol’s bright chariot seeks the western main,

And ah! behold the shriveling blossoms die,

So late admir’d and prais’d, alas! in vain!

With grief this emblem of mankind I see,

Like one awaken’d from a pleasing dream,

Cleora’s self, fair flower, shall fade like thee,

Alike must fall the Poet and his theme.²¹

When Boswell discovered this romance, he used another characteristic form of deflection: he omitted it from the Lichfield years, and retold it retrospectively as a reminiscence of Johnson’s in his sixty-seventh year. It was displaced, and thus disarmed. Yet what Johnson says is moving and significant. ‘She was the first woman with whom I was in love. It dropt out of my head imperceptibly; but she and I shall always have a kindness for each other.’ When he talked of Ann Hector that night, ‘he seemed to have had his affection revived; for he said, “If I had married her, it might have been as happy for me.”’²²

Later at Stourbridge, just before going up to Oxford, he fell more seriously in love with Olivia Lloyd, the beautiful and well-educated daughter of a rich Quaker family of ironmasters and philanthropists. Olivia was two years older than him, well-read in Greek and Latin classics (which she later taught to her nephews), amusing and quick, and renowned for her looks. She was known locally as ‘the pretty Birmingham Quakeress’.²³ Johnson fantasised about her throughout his university years, and she was one of the dreams he had to abandon bitterly along with his degree.

Olivia was the first in a line of pretty, vivacious bluestockings whom Johnson quietly worshipped (and also helped professionally) in London. Boswell takes a single sentence to describe the affair ‘he was much enamoured of Olivia Lloyd … to whom he wrote a copy of verses, which I have not been able to recover.’²⁴

Edmund Hector recalled acting as a go-between in this situation: ‘some Young Ladies in Lichfield had a mind to act The Distressed Mother, for whom [Johnson] wrote the Epilogue and gave it me to convey privately to them.’ Johnson’s agonies of self-consciousness about his monstrous appearance are glimpsed in that ‘privately’.

Other poems possibly connected with Olivia Lloyd include a series of translations from Horace, normally the most urbane, ironic and detached of poets. But Johnson selects passages that are surprisingly moody, bleak and romantic:

But being counsell’d to go home

And see my mistress face no more

Confus’d about the streets I roam

And stop’d unwilling at her door.

Then to the inclement skies expos’d I sat

And sigh’d and wept at her relentless gate.²⁵

Johnson must have chosen these particular stanzas (from Horace’s Eleventh Epode) because they reflected something in his own situation, his eternal longings for la princesse lointaine. As a picture of the lover unrequited, the man shut out, the roamer through the dark windswept streets, they also prepared him for Savage.

There are several other love-poems and poetical flirtations (mostly collected by Edmund Hector) which date from this sad post-Oxford period: ‘To a Young Lady on her Birthday’, ‘An Ode on a Lady Leaving her Place of Abode’, and a verse to the eighteen-year-old Dorothy Hickman, ‘Playing on the Spinet’. Dorothy was the daughter of another friend at Stourbridge, George Hickman, and she married soon after in 1734.

The pattern of longing, frustration and self-laceration (however formalised in drawing-room ‘impromptus’) is common throughout these poems. As he wrote of Dorothy Hickman, ‘We bless the Tyrant, and we hug the Chain.’²⁶

Young Johnson’s daydreams were not only confined to suitable girls. His princess might also be some tempting, racy actress. At about the time he first met Elizabeth Porter he also ‘was in love with’ a Junoesque young actress who visited Lichfield with a local repertory company, playing Flora, the romantic lead in Colley Cibber’s suggestive farce, Hob: or the Country Wake.²⁷ David Garrick seems to have known something about this infatuation, and remarked that Johnson (possibly because of his eyesight) did not have a delicate (‘elegans’) taste in the female form, and could also appreciate brazen and ‘vulgar’ sexual talents.²⁸ Boswell once again safely confined this episode to Johnson’s reminiscences forty years later.

Anna Seward seems to have been right about Johnson’s ‘princess’ syndrome, and the pattern that emerges is not unlike the classic fairy-tale of Beauty and the Beast. Johnson’s marriage does not really seem to have altered this, and throughout Johnson’s early London years there is evidence that it continues. It made Johnson both peculiarly sympathetic, and perhaps even vulnerable, to Savage’s own much wilder emotional fantasies.

Johnson’s strange romance with Elizabeth Porter began in 1734. His good friend Harry Porter, a mercer at Edgbaston, had been taken ill, and Johnson rode out frequently from Lichfield to attend Harry’s sick-bed. Johnson became a friend of the whole family in their distress: two young sons Jervis and Joseph; an eighteen-year-old daughter, Lucy; and Mrs Elizabeth Porter, then aged forty-five.²⁹

Boswell, and all Johnson’s subsequent biographers except Anna Seward, failed to draw the obvious conclusion. If Johnson had any interest other than pure friendship, it was evidently in the princess, the eighteen-year-old Lucy, to whom he had been attracted since his schooldays.³⁰ Her mother Elizabeth, who was nearly twice his age and devoted to her ailing husband, was not initially the object of his dreams.

A formal introduction to Lucy, as with other girls, had later been made by Edmund Hector, who bought his clothes from Harry Porter.³¹ This was probably in 1732, when Lucy was a blossoming sixteen and Johnson twenty-three. She vividly recalled Johnson from those early visits, with a physical revulsion that is expressive. This is Beauty describing the Beast, as reported years later to Boswell. Both maintain the comfortable fiction that Johnson was only ever interested in Lucy’s mother. But this is not what emerges, and it is not what Anna Seward thought either ‘the rustic prettiness, and artless manners of her daughter, the present Mrs Lucy Porter, had won Johnson’s youthful heart.’³²

In pictorial terms, these early meetings resulted in perhaps the most unforgettable image of Johnson in his twenties that we have. Boswell records:

Miss Porter told me, that when he was first introduced to her mother, [Johnson’s] appearance was very forbidding: he was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hid-eously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrophula were deeply visible. He also wore his hair, which was straight and stiff, and separated behind: and he often had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which tended to excite at once surprize and ridicule.³³

This, with its touch of horrified exaggeration, is almost worthy of Hogarth. The detail of the hair, ‘stiff and straight’, worn without a wig, and yet combed self-consciously behind, is curiously disturbing; and perhaps there is a grotesque hint, through Lucy’s eyes, of the suitor. Lucy recalls her mother’s extraordinary reaction: ‘this is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.’

Anna Seward was quoting a Lichfield tradition that Johnson was first in love with Lucy. She goes on to suggest, by way of proof, that Johnson’s poem ‘On a Sprig of Myrtle’ was written for Lucy, and given to her around 1733. Boswell ridicules this, and is able to show conclusively that the poem was written before they met, in 1731, and at the special request of a quite different friend of Edmund Hector’s – a Mr Morgan – who ‘waited upon a lady’ in the neigh-bourhood. At Boswell’s urgings, Hector even produced an original manuscript dated 1731. There biographers have left the matter.³⁴

No one has considered that Johnson may later have given the same poem, or a version of it, to Lucy Porter as well, exactly as Anna Seward claims. The poem is about the ‘ambiguity’ of love, as summed up in the emblem of the myrtle which can mean many things in lover’s lore:

The Myrtle crowns the happy Lovers heads,

Th’ unhappy Lovers Graves the Myrtle spreads;

Oh! then the Meaning of thy Gift impart,

And cure the throbbings of an anxious Heart …³⁵

Anna Seward’s account of its presentation to Lucy, written privately to Boswell, is particularly insistent:

I know those verses were addressed to Lucy Porter, when he was enamoured of her in his boyish days, two or three years before he had seen her mother, his future wife. He wrote them at my grandfather’s, and gave them to Lucy in the presence of my mother, to whom she showed them on the instant. She used to repeat them to me, when I asked her for the Verses Dr Johnson gave her on a Sprig of Myrtle, which he had stolen or begged from her bosom. We all know honest Lucy Porter to have been incapable of the mean vanity of applying to herself a compliment not intended for her.³⁶

It seems unlikely that Anna Seward was muddled about the particular poem, or that she should be completely wrong about the general direction of Johnson’s feelings.

At all events, when Harry Porter suddenly died and was buried on 5th September 1734, the situation evidently changed. Elizabeth was now a widow, with a small family fortune of £600, a lively interest in books and a desire for solace. Johnson and she clearly enjoyed each other’s company; both were to some degree eccentric Physical passion emerged on both sides, and Johnson would later insist, ‘with much gravity’, that it was ‘a love-marriage’ for both of them.³⁷

Mrs Porter was a vivacious woman with a well-rounded figure, a mass of blonde hair and a large maternal bosom. She dressed well, used make-up, lived quite expensively and liked to talk and tipple in the evenings. Johnson, starved for love and intelligent conversation, childlike and shy in his affection, punished for his physical ugliness, was slowly captivated over the next eighteen months. He must have given up any hope he may have had for children of his own. He abandoned, at least temporarily, his dream of the princess.

Instead, it was agreed as part of the marriage contract that Mrs Porter would invest her money in the school at Edial. When the forthcoming wedding was announced, all the Porter relations were appalled; her older son Jervis (then training for the Navy) refused ever to see his mother again, while the younger, Joseph, was unreconciled for many years.³⁸ Only Lucy stood by her mother and tenderly accepted her outlandish stepfather.

Lucy Porter never married subsequently. Her sweet nature, her shyness and her loyalty to Johnson became proverbial.³⁹ He later told Mrs Thrale how he would always get Lucy on his side when he had an argument with his wife.⁴⁰ She also became the one person who could manage his old mother at Lichfield, and eventually ran the bookshop, the accounts, and the whole household there when Johnson had left for London. Lucy ultimately became like a beloved younger sister to him: a confidante in all matters, financial and emotional, and in some ways closer to him than his wife.

Elizabeth Porter was, after all, much nearer to his mother’s generation; and in the London years one can sometimes glimpse Johnson confiding to Lucy behind the backs of the two elder women simultaneously. With Lucy, he is familiar, teasing, self-revealing in a way that appears nowhere else in his early life; and certainly not in the few known letters to Elizabeth Porter. His manner can be quite startling.

When Lucy’s rich uncle, Joseph Porter, died in 1749, and Lucy wrote to Johnson about family business using a black wax on her letter seal, he replied: ‘You frighted me, you little Gipsy, with your black wafer, for I had forgot you were in mourning and was afraid your letter had brought me ill news of my mother, whose death is one of the few calamities on which I think with horror. I long to know how she does, and how you all do. Your poor Mamma is come home but very weak yet I hope she will grow better, else she shall go into the country. She is now upstairs and knows not of my writing.’⁴¹

It is only a glimpse, but it is expressive of much: the tenderness, the confidentiality, the sense of Johnson and Lucy coping together with two elderly mothers who can cause such anxiety and heartache. Sarah Johnson was then eighty, and Elizabeth Porter sixty. It is an obvious question to ask, from all this, how far Johnson had actually married not a princess, but a mother-figure.

There are many anecdotes of Johnson and Elizabeth together – from Garrick, from John Taylor, from Mrs Desmoulins, from Hawkins – nearly all of them in a vein of high, and sometimes cruel, sexual comedy, which encouraged Boswell to dismiss the whole question of Johnson’s romantic nature.⁴² It comes across as a grotesque liaison – ‘tumultuous and awkward’ – viewed through a biographical keyhole. Taylor put it most bluntly of all: ‘She was the plague of Johnson’s life, was abominably drunken and despicable …’⁴³

In later life, Johnson would endlessly, loyally and guiltily profess his undying affection for his ‘Tetty’. There are huge contradictions in the evidence. But it seems that one of the reasons that Johnson left Lichfield for London in 1737, besides the search for a regular income, was to escape both his wife and his mother. And perhaps to dream, once again, of a princess.

All this begins to suggest a young Johnson quite different from Boswell’s sage, with his dry epigrammatic resignation about marital infelicity – second marriage is ‘the triumph of hope over experience’, and so on. Indeed, the purely external facts of finance and domesticity suggest a clear pattern of romantic disenchantment during the first decade or so of the marriage.

Once Johnson had used up the bulk of Elizabeth’s £600 dowry on the failed school at Edial, he contrived to live apart from her for steadily increasing periods of time. Edial failed in the autumn of 1736, and Johnson left for London the following March, remaining away for six or even eight months, much longer than a professional reconnaissance of the capital could possibly have required.

This was the first significant absence, but others soon followed. Having brought Elizabeth back to London at the end of 1737, he established her in relatively comfortable West End lodgings at Castle Street, off Cavendish Square. But by winter 1738 Johnson was again drifting away, using separate rooms off Fleet Street, or at least spending many nights away. Boswell denies this, but Hawkins seems definite on the point and speaks of a ‘temporary separation’.⁴⁴ Modern biographers concur ‘Everything we can piece together about Johnson’s own way of living, at least by the winter of 1738—39, indicates not merely that he was living elsewhere, probably in or near Fleet Street, but also that he sometimes even roamed the streets without settled lodging.’⁴⁵

This separation coincides with his greatest period of intimacy with Savage. It is also the first time that Johnson began to earn an independent income from his literary work: editorial wages from the Gentleman’s Magazine, ten guineas for the publication of his poem London (May 1738), and £49.7s.0d. for a translation of Sarpi’s Council of Trent, paid in instalments up till April 1739.⁴⁶ Johnson, always the most generous of men, probably used most of this money to support Elizabeth at Castle Street and, if there was spare, to help Savage who was renowned for his relentless borrowing from any friend in sight.

Johnson was now suspended between unhappy, dutiful domesticity and the roving, bohemian poet’s life in the city, allowing him the freedom which he craved. Curious glimpses of this life of garrets, taverns, journalists and prostitutes appeared years later, and only mildly disguised, in his Rambler essays.⁴⁷ Hawkins comments severely on the decline of his ‘domestic virtues’, and on the effect of Savage’s loose morals and his acquaintance with ‘the vices of the town’, during these hectic months. He remarks that Johnson’s reflections on this time later gave him great ‘uneasiness’.⁴⁸

When Savage finally left London, after the tearful parting of July 1739, Johnson almost immediately left the city too. He abandoned Elizabeth in Castle Street. Though his official reason was a possible schoolmaster-ship in Appleby, Leicestershire, this third separation also lasted about six months, until April 1740. ‘Abandon’ does not seem too strong a word. During this time Johnson fell in love with a woman of his own age, the dashing, high-spirited Molly Aston.

Molly was the second daughter of Sir Thomas Aston, and Johnson had admired her from afar at Lichfield ever since his return from Oxford. He called her ‘a beauty and a scholar, a wit and a whig’; she was probably the most entrancing of all his princesses. When Mrs Thrale once asked him what had been the happiest period of his whole life, he replied without hesitation that it had been a single evening spent with Molly. ‘That indeed (said he) was not happiness, it was rapture; but the thoughts of it sweetened the whole year.’⁴⁹

Molly was just three years older than him: tall, elegant, well-read and brilliantly amusing. She was rich, clever and slightly daunting; many men were frightened of her and women tended to be jealous. Anna Seward, who confirms Johnson’s passion for her, called her ‘handsome but haughty’.⁵⁰ She had a high, slighdy beaky profile; an impatient mass of auburn hair that she brushed back hard; and she did not suffer fools gladly.

Johnson loved her for all this, and respected her opinions. Her remarks on Pope and Gray appeared, years later, in his Lives of the Poets, a sort of delayed lover’s tribute from him. He once deferred to her on a question of economics.⁵¹ When he had heard her one evening speaking in a whiggish way about political freedom (an attitude he normally detested), he gallantly deflected his disagreement into a Latin epigram about her beauty, ‘Pulchra Maria’. Her beauty allowed him no freedom, since he was her slave. It was translated, long after, by Mrs Thrale (who had become his confidante in all these matters of the heart):

Persuasions to freedom fall oddly from you,

If freedom we seek, fair Maria, Adieu!⁵²

Another cycle of six poems, ‘To Stella’, which Johnson finally published anonymously (perhaps because of his wife) in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1747, also seems to be associated with Molly Aston. One of Molly’s sisters had married George Walmsley and another sister Johnson’s rumbustious friend Henry Hervey Aston. Johnson visited Molly at both their houses in Lichfield, and perhaps also at Hervey’s town house in London. It was Harry Hervey who transcribed the ‘Stella’ group in their original form, during the period of their greatest intimacy, between 1737 and 1743.⁵³ It has been cautiously suggested that Johnson wrote them for Harry himself to send to some unnamed ‘attractive girl in her teens’; perhaps even the Aston sister whom Harry married. But even if this were so, Johnson’s private inspiration still seems to have been Molly herself.⁵⁴

The titles of the poems trace a delicate, oblique, drawing-room romance: ‘To Miss – On her Playing Upon the Harpsichord’; ‘To Miss – On her Giving the Autho. a Gold and Silk Net-Work Purse’; ‘Stella in Mourning’; ‘An Evening Ode: To Stella’; and, above all, ‘The Winter’s Walk’, winch obviously relates to that difficult winter of 1739-40, when Johnson’s heart was balanced – as he puts it in the poem – between ‘rapture’ and ‘despair’.

If it seems strange to imagine Johnson in such romantic throes, yet the poems have a more than drawing-room passion, and indeed strike a recognisably Johnsonian note of pain and longing. This is especially true of the close of ‘The Winter’s Walk’. Beginning with a bleak, rather Thomson-like description of the chill Staffordshire landscape, ‘the naked hill, the leafless grove’, it moves inwards to the ‘stern winter’ in the poet’s own heart:

Enliv’ning hope, and fond desire,

Resign the heart to spleen and care,

Scarce frighted love maintains his fire,

And rapture saddens to despair.

In groundless hope, and causeless fear,

Unhappy man! behold thy doom,

Still changing with the changeful year,

The slave of sunshine and of gloom.

Tir’d with vain joys, and false alarms,

With mental and corporeal strife,

Snatch me, my Stella, to thy arms,

And screen me from the ills of life.⁵⁵

How far can we really take these verses as an expression of personal emotion? Perhaps the very fact that they exist (and are so rarely quoted) itself suggests something not usually recognised about Johnson’s sensibility: his gloomy longings for physical tenderness in a world of ‘ills’. Hawkins did not believe him ‘susceptible of amorous emotion’, but accepts there was one ‘romantic passion’ in his early youth; and admits that Molly Aston was the one ‘danger’ and that Johnson always spoke of her with ‘rapture’.⁵⁶

Boswell mockingly dismisses the ‘Stella’ poems as a serious expression of Johnson’s feelings.⁵⁷ He argues that since in old age Johnson could ‘condescend to trifle in namby-pamby rhymes, to please Mrs Thrale and her daughter’, so in earlier years he may have jokingly composed such pieces.⁵⁸ But this reveals Boswell’s own limitations of portraiture. It is precisely to Mrs Thrale, and not to Boswell, that Johnson spoke openly about Molly Aston.

Hester Thrale gives us a penetrating female view of Johnson’s psychology. From the time she met him in 1765, she entered more deeply into his confidence than any other woman in his life. Her Anecdotes (1786) provide a continual revelation into the hidden side of his emotional nature: his tears, his guilts, his regrets, and his sudden storms of feeling. Such glimpses appear in numerous tiny incidents, like the time that Johnson came fretfully back from seeing Hester’s son to school, suddenly immersed in memories of his own adolescence. ‘“Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered my heart was communicated in a dream.” “What was it, Sir?” said I. “Do not ask me,” replied he, with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation.’⁵⁹

Mrs Thrale knew about the tensions in Johnson’s marriage, and affirms Elizabeth’s knowledge and jealousy of Molly Aston. Johnson’s own romantic feelings are lightly, but clearly indicated in a story he told Mrs Thrale of meeting a Gypsy fortune-teller while out walking in the country with his wife. The Gypsy read his palm, and in so doing reduced Elizabeth to tears. ‘Your heart is divided, Sir, between a Betty and a Molly: Betty loves you best, but you take most delight in Molly’s company: when I turned about to laugh, I saw my wife was crying.’ Johnson added gallantly, ‘Pretty charmer! she had no reason.’ But the significant thing is that he told such a story to Mrs Thrale at all. He was admitting deep and divided feelings, even long afterwards.⁶⁰

It was only Elizabeth’s sudden injury (a torn tendon), and financial desperation, which finally brought him back to London and his marriage in 1740. There was also a chance to get Irene staged. These considerations shape the rest of the much-tested relationship: Elizabeth confined more and more to bed, drinking, reading and taking opium pain-killers; Johnson working hard, supporting and indulging her like an invalid, but emotionally withdrawn. The bedroom is no longer shared.⁶¹

The tone of the letter written at the end of January 1740, in which Johnson promises to return to Elizabeth, expresses a great deal. He is penitent, affectionate and guilty: ‘You have already suffered more than I can bear to reflect upon, and I hope more than either of us shall suffer again. One part at least I have often flattered myself we shall avoid for the future our troubles will surely never separate us more.’

He continues contritely: ‘I still promise myself many happy years from your tenderness and affection, which I sometimes hope our misfortunes have not yet deprived me of.’

But there is some uncertainty about her resentment: ‘I hope You do not think so unkindly of me as to imagine that I can be at rest while I believe my dear Tetty in pain.’

Moreover there is a defensiveness about his own dalliance with Molly Aston, which surely hides resignation at the fact that his princess had once again eluded him: ‘Be assured, my dear Girl, that I have seen nobody in these rambles upon which I have been forced, that has not contributed to confirm my esteem and affection for thee …’ But he ends with a gallant flourish: ‘I am, my charming Love, Yours, Sam Johnson.’⁶²

It is interesting that Boswell slides over this whole separation, does not quote from the letter, and once again only refers to the friendship with Molly Aston retrospectively, at a much later date, in 1776: ‘the lady of whom Johnson used to speak with the warmest admiration … who was afterwards married to Captain Brodie of the navy.’⁶³

From then on the marriage slowly petrified. Elizabeth was increasingly ill, or drunk. She at first took some part in Johnson’s journalistic work, reading and researching for him, but this soon tailed off. Her dowry was spent, her family relations (except Lucy in Lichfield) alienated from her, her husband sunk in hack-work. Some time in the mid-1740s she began to visit the country village of Hampstead for her health, and by 1748 she had almost permanent lodgings there. Johnson visited her on some evenings and at weekends.

She did not manage to attend the first night of Irene, Johnson’s final bid as a dramatic poet, in February 1749. Perhaps this was a relief to both of them. Garrick’s vicious caricature of her dates from this final stage of the marriage: ‘very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behaviour.’⁶⁴ Yet it is the emotional disappointment of the entire marriage which is partly reflected in this sad parody of Johnson’s longed-for princess.

At Hampstead, Elizabeth was attended on by a young widow, Mrs Desmoulins, an old friend of the Lichfield circle, whom Johnson had brought south to be her companion. In old age she was cross-questioned by Boswell about the relations between husband and wife. What he discovered was omitted from his biography, and filed separately under the Latin heading Tacenda – to be held back in silence.

What Mrs Desmoulins said was this. Elizabeth drank heavily, using the excuse that she was not well; was usually in bed asleep when Johnson appeared; and had refused for years to have sexual relations with him. Johnson would retire to a separate bedroom, and when in bed would call in Mrs Desmoulins to talk with him. Presently she would lie on the bed, on top of the sheets but with her head on the pillow next to his. He would then cuddle and fondle her in an amorous way, before sending her abruptly out of the room.

To Boswell’s further, insistent questions and demands for detail (he was expert in every physical nuance of such encounters), Mrs Desmoulins would only reply that Johnson ‘never did anything that was beyond the limits of decency’.⁶⁵ Boswell never established what young Mrs Desmoulins had thought those limits were; but the picture – tender, tragic, ludicrous – is clear enough.

It was at exactly this period, walking alone in the lanes of Hampstead outside his wife’s lodgings, that Johnson composed his greatest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. And it was now, as I have suggested, that his fictional biography might have ended, at the age of forty, in an apoplexy brought on by hard work, lack of recognition, frustration and misery.

It is against the background of this marriage, this longing for companionship, and this frustrated ‘dream of princesses’, that Johnson’s friendship with Savage has to be reconsidered.

Chapter 3 Night

There has always been one vivid, popular legend of Johnson’s unlikely friendship. It is enshrined in a particular anecdote that was passed lovingly around Johnson’s later circle: each one heard, embroidered and retold a different version of it. The account describes how Johnson and Savage walked round the squares of London all one night, being too poor to afford either food or lodging but sustained by the passionate intimacy of their conversation.

This story, in its various renditions, became symbolic of the Augustan writer’s life in Grub Street, just as the story of Thomas Chatterton’s death in a Holborn garret became symbolic of the romantic poet for the later eighteenth century. It passed quickly into treasured anecdote, and remains to this day the one clear image of young Johnson in London. A recent American scholar summarises it with relish: ‘Those who know nothing else of his early life can envision in Hogarthian detail Johnson in his ill-fitting great-coat and Savage dressed like a decayed dandy, wandering the street for want of a lodging and inveighing against fortune and the Prime Minister.’¹

It is easy to see why the story appealed. It is indeed like a Hogarth illustration to Johnson’s famous line, from his poem London, ‘Slow rises worth, by Poverty depressed’. The link between poverty and genius, between poetry and lack of recognition, is axiomatic for the young writer coming to try his fortune in the great city.

We can instantly imagine the scene: the cobbled streets, the stinking rubbish, the tavern signs, the shuttered house-fronts; the moonlight and the dark alleys; the slumbering beggars, the footpads and the Night Watch; and the two central figures striding along, bent in conversation, convivial and ill-matched. Here is the huge, bony Johnson with his flapping horse-coat and dirty tie-wig, swinging the famous cudgel with which he once kept four muggers at bay until the Night Watch came up to rescue him; and here the small, elegant Savage with his black silk court-dress (remarked on at his trial), his moth-eaten cloak, his tasselled sword and his split shoes, which well-wishers were always trying to replace.

It is a night scene: these friends are outcasts from society, without money and without lodgings, talking of poetry and politics and reforming the world, while the wealthy complacent city slumbers in oblivion. They are in a sense its better conscience, ever wakeful; or its uneasy dream of oppression and injustice. It is a romantic, Quixotic, heroic or mock-heroic picture, depending on one’s point of view. But how true is it?

There are in fact four separate accounts of these night-wanderings. They are given by Sir John Hawkins, Johnson’s early biographer; by his young friend the Irish playwright, Arthur Murphy; by his later companion in the celebrated Club, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds; and by Boswell. All depend on hearsay, for none of them actually knew Johnson at the time, or had ever seen him together with Savage. Indeed an extraordinary fact at once emerges: no one, at any time, or in any place, ever left a first-hand account of seeing Johnson and Savage together. It was, from the start, an invisible friendship.

The episode of their night-walks exists as a kind of composite memory rather than as a specific event which anyone witnessed. All the accounts must have had Johnson as their ultimate source, but the circumstances are never quite the same. To show how the story developed, it is interesting to unwrap each version and examine its layered contents. We begin with Boswell, and work backwards until we finally reach Johnson’s original account, dating from 1743.

Boswell was writing forty years later, and paints a general picture without describing a specific time or location in London. He emphasises the stoicism of the two friends whose imaginations could rise above the grim material facts of their poverty. ‘It is melancholy to reflect, that Johnson and Savage were sometimes in such extreme indigence, that they could not pay for a lodging; so that they have wandered together whole nights in the streets. Yet in these almost incredible scenes of distress, we may suppose that Savage mentioned many of the anecdotes with which Johnson afterwards enriched the Life of his unhappy companion, and those of other Poets.’²

Boswell seems to admit tacitly that there may be some picturesque exaggeration in Johnson’s fond recollections of these ‘almost incredible scenes of distress’. (Indeed the degree of Johnson’s poverty will bear further examination.) He likes to suppose that their talk was literary and anecdotal. He shrewdly imagines Johnson as collecting biographical ‘anecdotes’ from Savage, for the later Lives of the Poets; much as he in turn, many years later, would quiz Johnson for his own Life. His version of the night-walk is poetic: a handing-on of tales and traditions.

Uncharacteristically Boswell adds no visual details: nothing of dress, weather or season – a summer amble under the stars would presumably be very different from a winter tramp in rain or frost. But he does suggest, rather uneasily, that the two friends might sometimes have had enough money for other pursuits of the night, specifically drinking and whoring. ‘I am afraid, however, that by associating with Savage, who was habituated to the dissipation and licentiousness of the town, Johnson, though his good principles remained steady, did not entirely preserve [his] conduct … but was imperceptibly led into some indulgencies which occasioned much distress to his virtuous mind.’³

This is merely a hint, but a hint from Boswell on such a subject—experto crede—is much; and deserves to be borne in mind. So too does the rich London low-life material which Johnson subsequently incorporated into his Rambler essays, including a two-part biography of a country girl who becomes a prostitute, ‘The Story of Misella’. She ends her life in an appalling series of late-night taverns and infested night-cellars, which Johnson describes with bitter conviction:

Thus driven again into the Streets, I lived upon the least that could support me, and at Night accommodated myself under Penthouses as well as I could … In this abject state I have now passed four Years, the drudge of Extortion and the sport of Drunkenness; sometimes the Property of one man, and sometimes the common Prey of accidental Lewdness; at one time tricked up for sale by the Mistress of a Brothel, at another begging in the Streets to be relieved of Hunger by wickedness; without any hope in the Day but of finding some whom Folly or Excess may expose to my Allurements, and without any reflections at Night but such as Guilt and Terror impress upon me.

If those who pass their days in Plenty and Security could visit for an Hour the dismal Receptacles to which the Prostitute retires from her nocturnal Excursions, and see the Wretches that lie crowded together, mad with Intemperance, ghastly with Famine, nauseous with Filth, and noisome with Disease; it would not be easy for any degree of Abhorrence to harden them against Compassion, or to repress the Desire which they must immediately feel to rescue such numbers of Human Beings from a state so dreadful.⁴

Sir Joshua Reynolds’s account has a very different atmosphere. President of the Royal Academy, an elegant, easygoing man of the world, Reynolds had been fascinated with Savage’s story ever since he had first read Johnson’s Life in the 1750s. He had then shared with Johnson an acute dislike of aristocratic pretensions, and at a supper party in the presence of the Duchess of Argyll, the two pretended to be manual labourers, and loudly discussed the hourly wage-rate: ‘How much do you think you and I could get in a week, if we were to work as hard as we could?’⁵

Reynolds had first read of Savage on returning from his painter’s apprenticeship in Rome, casually picking up the book in a drawing-room in Devonshire. He began to read it ‘while he was standing with his arm leaning against a chimney-piece. It seized his attention so strongly, that, not being able to lay down the book till he had finished it, when he attempted to move, he found his arm totally benumbed.’⁶

This is a painter’s anecdote, mental attention represented by physical posture, with a certain flattering exaggeration of pose. Reynolds evidently questioned Johnson subsequently about his night-walks with Savage, and produced a witty bravura version, which would have told well in the Club. He supplies an exact location, a brisk amusing style, a conversational theme and a dramatic flourish at the end. All is high style and insouciance, a brilliant Society sketch:

[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 may be Savage himself speaking. There is considerable evidence that this passage, and indeed much of the poem, is a dramatic monologue written partly in Savage’s own voice. The whole of London may be partly Johnson’s attempt to render, in verse, the impact of Savage’s long conversations through the night. In this sense the poem could be considered as Johnson’s first version of Savage’s biography.

Certainly it seems true that Johnson first discovered in their night-walks the new form of intimate life-writing. It was to be like an extended conversation in the dark, taking ordinary facts and anecdotes, and pursuing them towards the shadowy and mysterious regions of a life, at the edge of the unknown or unknowable.

Johnson’s early impressions of these night-walks continue to be modified, in a complex way, by the other friends who recollected them. Arthur Murphy, a genial Irish playwright nearly twenty years Johnson’s junior, turned them into a piece of delightful comedy. Moving them even deeper into the West End, to the edge of Hyde Park, he added picturesque details of time and money, and with his playful turns of phrase seems to conjure up the witty outlines of a sketch that might have been written long after by Peacock or G. B. Shaw. (It should be read, perhaps, in a light Dublin brogue.)

Johnson has been often heard to relate, that he and Savage walked round Grosvenor Square till four in the morning; in the course of their conversation reforming the world, dethroning princes, establishing new forms of government, and giving laws to the several states of Europe, till, fatigued at length with their legislative office, they began to feel the want of refreshment; but could not muster up more than fourpence halfpenny.¹⁴

The ‘fourpence halfpenny’ is, of course, a spurious comic exactitude. Yet there is something about Murphy’s whole scenario, with its gracious absurdities, that carries a curious literary conviction. Why is this?

It is, surely, that Murphy has captured or suggested a premonition of the high, elegant, philosophic comedy of Johnson’s Rasselas (1759). The destitute Savage talking to Johnson about giving laws to Europe is not unlike the deluded Astronomer telling Prince Imlac that he has been secretly assigned the universal regulation of the weather. ‘… The sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the Dog Star, and mitigated the fervours of the Crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto refused my authority …’¹⁵

These confidences, too, are delivered in the dark, in the Astronomer’s turret, during a midnight storm. It was perhaps Savage who first gave Johnson the theme for Rasselas: that ‘dangerous prevalence of the imagination’ which Imlac discovers in the most interesting of human minds. Among those is the Poet himself, who must be acquainted with ‘all the modes of life’, who must commit his claims ‘to the justice of posterity’ and who must write ‘as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind’.¹⁶

Of all the versions of the night-walks which we have, it is that by Sir John Hawkins, with his direct knowledge of young Johnson from the mid-1740s, which most sharply emphasises the subversive political nature of their talks. Boswell consistently derides Hawkins’s accounts, not merely because he is the chief rival biographer, an amateur and musicologist, and so gratifyingly full of factual errors and ‘solemn inexactitudes’. For Hawkins, himself a lonely and awkward personality, gives an altogether rougher, darker, more emotionally unstable picture of the young writer finding his path than Boswell’s hero-worship will allow.

Hawkins’s youthful Johnson is never a comfortable figure, never a natural Tory clubman. He is anxious, self-doubting and obsessive. His politics, like his whole personality, are fierce and to some degree disruptive. Boswell could never be easy with this. Hawkins sees immediate common political ground between the two outcasts. ‘They had both felt the pangs of poverty, and the want of patronage: Savage had let loose his resentment against the possessors of wealth, in a collection of poems printed about the year 1727, and Johnson was ripe for an avowal of the same sentiments.’¹⁷

They both shared, according to Hawkins, ‘the vulgar opinion, that the world is divided into two classes, of men of merit without riches, and men of wealth without merit’. Hawkins also says that Savage’s ‘principles of patriotism’ – the semi-subversive Opposition to the Whig Government and the Hanoverian Crown – shaped Johnson’s political outlook during their talks, and may even have made him run the risk of Jacobite treason. ‘They both saw with the same eye, or believed they saw, that the then Minister meditated the ruin of this country; that Excise Laws, standing Armies, and penal Statutes, were the mean by which he [Walpole] meant to effect it; and, at the risk of their liberty, they were bent to oppose his measures …’¹⁸

Hawkins’s evident disapproval of this youthful radicalism makes it all the more convincing as evidence. It is exactly these political themes that Johnson does go on to address in his earliest, anonymous poetry and prose, up to the age of thirty-five. In the satire London, it takes the form of a general charge of political corruption against those in power:

Here let those reign, whom Pensions can incite

To vote a Patriot black, a Courtier white;

Explain their Country’s dear-bought Rights away,

And plead for Pirates in the Face of Day …¹⁹

In the pamphlet Marmor Norfolciense (1739) – viz. ‘The Stone of Norfolk’ – it becomes a specific attack on the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (whose estates lay in that county), and Hanoverian rule. As a recent critic, Thomas Kaminski, has observed, here ‘we find a Johnson unknown to the readers of Boswell – a rabid, harsh opponent of the ruling government, a critic not only of a party but of the King’.²⁰ And in the Latin pastiche ‘prophesy’, attached to the pamphlet, which Johnson translated as the poem ‘To Posterity’, we meet a baleful vision of complete national subversion, the land overrun by alien redcoat soldiers, and the entire British population ready for rebellion:

Whene’er this Stone, now hid beneath the Lake,

The Horse shall trample, or the Plough shall break,

Then, O my Country! shalt thou groan distrest,

Grief swell thine Eyes, and Terror chill thy Breast.

Thy Streets with Violence of Woe shall sound,

Loud as the Billows bursting on the Ground.

Then thro’ thy Fields shall scarlet Reptiles stray,

And Rapine and Pollution mark their Way …

Then o’er the World shall Discord stretch her Wings,

Kings change their Laws, and Kingdoms change their Kings.²¹

So Hawkins’s night-walk is that of romantic, political malcontents. The two men are penurious, angry, to some degree sinister. The walk has a wintry atmosphere, chill and discomforting, with even a hint of cloak and dagger. Like Boswell, like Reynolds, like Murphy, Hawkins also says he is telling the story directly as Johnson described it; only as something that happened frequently, perhaps over many months.

Johnson has told me, that whole nights have been spent by him and Savage in conversations of this kind, not under the hospitable roof of a tavern, where warmth might have invigorated their spirits, and wine dispelled their care; but in a perambulation round the squares of Westminster, St James’s in particular, when all the money they could both raise was less than sufficient to purchase for them the shelter and sordid comforts of a night cellar. Of the result of their conversations little can now be known, save, that they gave rise to those principles of patriotism, that both, for some years after, avowed.²²

Hawkins’s suspicions would have been further darkened had he known – or had he suspected that Johnson knew – that Savage, many years previously, had actually been arrested and questioned on a charge of treasonable, Jacobite publication; and that for some months he was the subject of Secret Service reports.²³ Whether young Johnson knew this then, or later, will soon become a leading question about their friendship.

For Johnson himself these night-conversations in London with Savage were a transforming experience. They shaped his idea of the city itself, his politics, and his whole notion of the writer’s task and situation. That Savage appeared both poor and outcast must have struck him as bitterly ironic and yet curiously glamorous. Here was a brilliant, strange and enchanting man, who had known all the leading writers of the day – Sir Richard Steele, Colley Cibber, Alexander Pope, James Thomson – and moved in circles close to Parliament and the Court. Yet he was reduced to the back streets, he voiced subversive politics, and he befriended someone as obscure and socially inept (not to say monstrous) as Johnson himself.

Savage needed company and talk, needed them with something approaching desperation, to act out his own life and his extensive fantasies. This soon became clear to Johnson. In this too there was at once a common bond. Both men dreaded solitude, and Savage had found a remedy with which Johnson instantly identified. Talk held off the terrors and depressions of loneliness.

‘His Method of Life particularly qualified him for Conversation, of which he knew how to practise all the Graces,’ wrote Johnson appreciatively. ‘His Language was vivacious and elegant, and equally happy upon grave or humorous Subjects. He was generally censured for not knowing when to retire, but that was not the Defect of his Judgment, but of his Fortune; when he left his Company he was frequently to spend the remaining Part of the Night in the Street, or at least was abandoned to gloomy Reflections, which it is not strange that he delayed as long as he could …’²⁴ This could be Johnson writing of himself. One can begin to see how sympathetically two such men might meet, as Cave’s offices emptied at Clerkenwell, or the taverns closed along the Strand.

So when Johnson came to write Savage’s Life in 1743, he put Savage’s night-walking at the heart of the story of his literary career. He did it so powerfully that he created a legend, almost an eighteenth-century archetype, of the Outcast Poet moving through an infernal cityscape, the ‘City of Dreadful Night’, in which his eye alone witnesses the horror, filth and misery that the rich and powerful have created as they slumber, uncaring.

To achieve this, Johnson does something extraordinary. He completely withdraws himself from the story. He never makes a single mention of himself as Savage’s night-time companion. The two Hogarthian figures, joined in their companionable talk, who appear again and again in the memoirs, never once appear in Johnson’s original account. Savage is essentially, and one might say symbolically, alone.

Johnson places this description or evocation of the Outcast Poet at a pivotal moment in his own narrative. It is set in 1737, immediately after the publication of Savage’s poem ‘Of Public Spirit’ (including an extract in the Gentleman’s Magazine), and at the time that Johnson himself first arrived in the city and became aware of Savage’s work (though this fact is studiously omitted).²⁵

The theme of Savage’s poem is also dramatically relevant. It considers how far the State is responsible for the poor, incapacitated or underprivileged in society; and in particular whether the Whig policy of expatriation – forcible emigration to the new colonies in North America and Africa – can be morally justified. Is this ‘out-casting’ of men from their native homes and families, a true expression of ‘Public Spirit’?

Rising above his own situation, like the true poet, Savage touches on this general issue of social justice, which Johnson summarises with angry force:

The Politician, when he considers Men driven into other Countries for Shelter, and obliged to retire to Forests and Deserts, and pass their Lives and fix their Posterity in the remotest Corners of the World, to avoid those Hardships which they suffer or fear in their native Place, may very properly enquire why the Legislature does not provide a Remedy for these Miseries, rather than encourage an Escape from them. He may conclude, that the Flight of every honest Man is a Loss to the Community …²⁶

But Savage, here presented by Johnson as the spokesman for the oppressed, goes much further than this. He attacks the whole notion of colonisation itself.

In historical terms of the early eighteenth century this is a truly radical position. Savage runs directly counter to the prevailing maritime, trading and enterprise culture of commercial exploitation, which Walpole’s administration notoriously represented, with support for such institutions as the South Sea Company and the East India Company. Again, Johnson’s summary is forceful and angry: ‘Savage has not forgotten … to censure those Crimes which have been generally committed by the Discoverers of new Regions, and to expose the enormous Wickedness of making War upon barbarous Nations because they cannot resist, and of invading Countries because they are fruitful; of extending Navigation only to propagate Vice, and of visiting distant Lands only to lay them waste.’²⁷ Ever afterwards, this anti-Imperialist stance became Johnson’s own.

In his poem Savage is specific about colonial exploitation. To illustrate this, Johnson does something new in literary biography. He quotes extensively from the poetry and begins to integrate these quotations into the texture of his prose narrative by placing them in careful footnotes. These quotations are, technically, a new biographical device, because they bring us an impression of Savage’s own voice, of Savage actually talking to the reader (and of how he talked to Johnson). It is the biographer’s answer to the novelist’s most powerful mode of verisimilitude: direct speech.

The quotations perform the role of ‘authentic’ monologue, a mode which would normally imply that very fictionalisation which Johnson had dismissed as a legitimate means of historical truth. By taking them from Savage’s own poetry, Johnson gives them textual authenticity: these are his own words, they are not invented, but they strike us in his own voice, they are what he actually said. Moreover, by using extracts, Johnson effectively reanimates Savage’s work.

Savage’s lines paradoxically work much better as fragments of contemporary reported speech than as more formal and extended passages of mid-eighteenth-century poetry. That is, compared to the best of Pope or Thomson they are weak; but compared to some of the diffuse, first-person narratives of Defoe or Eliza Haywood they are vividly alive. As a critic, Johnson knew that ‘Of Public Spirit’ was a slapdash performance – ‘not sufficiently polished in the Language, or enlivened in the Imagery, or digested in the Plan’.²⁸ But as a biographer he knew it was deeply expressive, and conveyed one aspect of Savage’s fantastic idealising power with great intensity.

Savage’s two main targets are the East India trade in silks, spices, hardwoods and other luxury goods; and the West African trade in black slaves. Both produce their own kinds of oppression, and make outcasts of men powerless within their system. In India he sees this primarily as a cultural oppression, in which the indigenous populations are simply subdued by the Western traders, who care nothing about native laws, customs or religions. He calls on the colonisers to be more respectful, more just, more generous:

Do you the neighb’ring, blameless Indian aid,

Culture what he neglects, not his invade;

Dare not, oh! dare not, with ambitious View,

Force or demand Subjection, never due.²⁹

In Africa, he recognises with horror a trade in human bodies that is both indefensible in itself and cruel and hypocritical in its operation. The great Whig merchants, so much of whose personal wealth, houses, estates and even servants are drawn directly or indirectly from this trade, defend themselves with the cry that ‘while they enslave, they civilize’.³⁰

The black servant – especially as coach-driver, table-waiter or personal valet – was a familiar feature of eighteenth-century London smart society. Johnson himself later took on a black manservant, Frank Barber, originally as a wild and illiterate teenager, who promptly ran away to sea. But this was one of Johnson’s spiritual reparations: he took infinite trouble to trace him, buy him out of the service, educate him, provide for him and his family, and eventually made him an inheritor in his will, so he became virtually an adopted son, ending his days in ease in Hampshire, corresponding genially with Boswell. Savage saw this enslavement with acute revulsion, which suggests at some level a personal identification:

Why must I Afric’s sable Children see

Vended for Slaves, though form’d by Nature free,

The nameless Tortures cruel Minds invent,

Those to subject, whom Nature equal meant?³¹

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.³²

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’.³³ 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’.³⁴ 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.’³⁵ He writes with ‘Tenderness’.³⁶

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.³⁷

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’.³⁸

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.³⁹

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.⁴⁰ 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.’⁴¹

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

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.’¹

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’.²

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.³

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.⁴ 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.’⁵ 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.’⁶

Savage of course had never had a servant, and the absence of a domestic menage of any kind, except for those temporarily borrowed (and quickly alienated) from other households such as Lord Tyrconnel’s, posed its own peculiar mystery round his unusual solitude, which Johnson had to penetrate.

The value of personal witness, of small impressions and trivial incidents, of recent memories and vivid anecdotes, however fleeting and partial they might be, was defended by Johnson as essential to biography. ‘… Most accounts of particular persons are barren and useless. If a Life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but we must expect little intelligence; for the incidents that give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.’⁷

This might have been written with his Life of Savage specifically in mind; and such ‘volatile’ impressions, recalling their friendship with rueful tenderness, streamed easily from Johnson’s pen once he began to write. Savage’s innocent, almost childlike vanity as an author produces one such typical incident. ‘He could not easily leave off when he had once begun to mention himself or his Works, nor ever read his Verses without stealing his Eyes from the Page, to discover in the Faces of his Audience, how they were affected with any favourite Passage.’⁸

Yet Johnson has removed himself from this moment, just as he did in the great description of the night-walking. His personal presence, as Savage’s friend, is absorbed in the anonymity of ‘the Faces of his Audience’. The witness, the friend, is absent. This remains true almost throughout the Life: though intensely personal and partial, its narrative voice appears distanced and carefully withdrawn. This makes Johnson’s attitude, and the level of his irony, peculiarly difficult to judge.

Indeed Johnson based the opening section of his story on something quite different from the personal impressions and interviews with friends that a modern biographer might expect. In fact what he did was so unexpected that it was overlooked by many commentators (though not by Boswell). For the first half of Savage’s life, up to the trial for murder of 1727 at least, Johnson simply used a previous biography.

This was a twenty-nine-page booklet, issued anonymously by the ‘bookseller J. Roberts’ in December 1727, entitled The Life of Mr Richard Savage…Who was Condemned … the last Sessions at 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. Johnson followed its storyline paragraph by paragraph, adding his own commentary and occasional new facts or corrections.

The booklet is a defence of Savage, intended to save him from the gallows. It was published, significantly, by the same James Roberts who commissioned Johnson’s work. Johnson assumed its information was taken direct from Savage, during a series of interviews in the condemned cells at Newgate Prison. But a contemporary letter from Savage in Newgate suggests this was not strictly so, and he certainly contradicted some of the booklet’s facts later.

So Johnson, far from using original sources or research, was basing the first section of his biography on a partial and secondary source, the ‘Newgate’ booklet, whose proclaimed aim was to exculpate Richard Savage from his crimes.

For the second part of Savage’s Life, from 1728 onwards, Johnson would work in another way. Not only would he use his own impressions, often brilliantly perceptive and blackly humorous. He would incorporate no less than forty pages of quotations from Savage’s poetry and letters (some twenty per cent of the entire text).⁹ But for the crucial beginning of the biography, dealing with Savage’s mysterious childhood and shadowy early career to the age of thirty, Johnson very largely accepted the ‘Newgate’ version of 1727. He postponed any serious attempt at psychological enquiry or historical research until later. He opened for the defence, with the materials on hand.

Why did Johnson do this? Laziness, or deadline pressure, are hardly sufficient explanations. Johnson took his time and he wrote con amore of a friend who had meant something vital in his own escape to London and launching of a literary career. He was well aware, too, of the perils of biographical bias. He recalled in The Rambler his own situation in 1743: ‘If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness, overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if not to invent.’¹⁰ Perhaps he believed in retrospect that he had been, to some degree, overpowered by the Savage legend as set forth in the ‘Newgate’ booklet.

What I think happened was this. Johnson was caught up in its romantic drama. He responded overwhelmingly to the picture it presented of Savage as a man on trial for his life, a victim of society, and particularly as a victim of one woman’s cruelty. For this is the central argument of the ‘Newgate’ version, and one that Johnson amplifies with passion, and even something close to fury, in his own Life.

While relying on the bare outlines of the ‘Newgate’ version, Johnson transforms the first thirty years of Savage’s life into an extraordinary and emotional piece of story-telling. It is highly compressed, occupying only a quarter of the overall biography, and astonishingly sketchy with facts and dates. Yet it grips the reader from the first moment with its drama and pathetic images of rejection and persecution.

Richard Savage is introduced as a tragic outcast from eighteenth-century society, not merely disowned by his supposed mother, Lady Macclesfield, but ‘with an implacable and restless Cruelty’ pursued and persecuted by her ‘from the first Hour of his Life to the last’.¹¹

Johnson never seriously questioned ‘Newgate’s’ assertion that Savage was the illegitimate child of Lady Macclesfield. He did not even bother to examine the documentary evidence, or question those who might have seen it, like Aaron Hill or Lady Macclesfield’s nephew, Lord Tyrconnel. His view of Savage’s wayward character and misfortunes is grounded on the supposed injustice he suffered throughout his life when that claim was consistently denied, for whatever motives, by Lady Macclesfield.

He accepted Savage as a rejected child, flung out from his rightful place in society, and presented this with all the pathos at his command. ‘Born with a legal Claim to Honour and to Riches, 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.’¹²

The image of the child launched helplessly upon the waters, like young Moses in his basket of reeds, is powerfully emotive. It indicts not merely the mother but society as a whole (represented by Parliament). Johnson was later to develop this social indictment with great effect.

He pursues this interpretation to far greater lengths, and with even greater biographic daring, or recklessness, in his portrait of Lady Macclesfield herself. Here again he accepts the ‘Newgate’ version of the facts without question, and without investigation, and he intensifies it to an extraordinary degree. No attempt is made to give the objective details of her life, her family circumstances, her social connections or even her age. She is presented simply as a type of the worthless aristocratic woman: capricious, voluptuous, vindictive and relentlessly cruel. Johnson is so roused by this image that he openly courts a charge of libel.

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 endeavoured 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 publick Executioner, she has yet had the Satisfaction of imbittering all his Hours, and forcing him into Exigencies, that hurried on his Death.’¹³

It can be suggested that this figure is a fictional rather than a biographic creation. Johnson seems to have built on Savage’s fantasies in The Bastard and The Wanderer and unconsciously added something of his own. Throughout the Life he identifies strongly with Savage’s obsessive anger and feelings of rejection by a powerful woman. There is an undercurrent of vengefulness, if not of misogyny, in his portrait of Lady Macclesfield which seems uncharacteristic of the later Johnson and which we can only explain by his own romantic disappointments, surely aggravated by his physical grotesqueness and sexual awkwardness as a young man. At no moment is he prepared to consider events from Lady Macclesfield’s point of view: she is always Savage’s persecutor, a figure of ‘motiveless malignity’, torturing him for her sport. Again and again he calls her ‘unnatural’, like Lady Macbeth; and describes her as ‘outragious and implacable’, as if she was the force of destiny itself.¹⁴

At the time Johnson wrote, in 1743, the real Lady Macclesfield was a rich, sad and reclusive widow in her late seventies, living alone in a small house in Old Bond Street. She had lost her title through divorce, and was known by the name of her second husband (by then deceased) as Mrs Anne Brett. Her whole life had been shaken by domestic unhappiness and public scandals.

Born in Shropshire in 1668, the daughter of Sir Richard Mason, a Clerk Comptroller in the royal household, with a house in Whitehall, she had made an early and disastrous marriage to a young Whig firebrand, Viscount Brandon, when she was only fifteen. Brandon was a violent and dangerous character who had killed a boy in the London streets when drunk, and was later twice imprisoned in the Tower for treason.

The marriage broke down in the first few weeks, and by the age of seventeen she was separated and living with her sister Lady Brownlow at Beaufort House, where she remained for the next twelve years, fearful of her husband’s rages. She none the less pleaded on her knees before the King, in order to obtain Brandon’s pardon after the Rye House plot, when he had been implicated in an assassination attempt on James II.

In 1694 her husband inherited the title of Lord Macclesfield, though no reconciliation and no children were forthcoming. Two years later Lady Macclesfield, now approaching her thirtieth birthday and desperate for affection, fell in love with Richard Savage, the Fourth Earl Rivers. It was another disastrous choice. Rivers was well known as a gambler, rake and political intriguer, and was renowned for his amours. He kept a large establishment, with gardens, at Rivers House, Great Queen Street, in the parish of Holborn. Lady Macclesfield bore him two illegitimate children, a girl and a boy, in rapid succession and great secrecy. Lord Macclesfield, hearing rumours of this but unable to establish proof, began divorce proceedings in the House of Lords on 15th January 1698.

Throughout, Lady Macclesfield protested her innocence, concealed the affair with Rivers and took immense precautions to cover up the illegitimate births. Later evidence shows that the boy was born in private rooms at Fox Court, Holborn, with both parents using pseudonyms, and Lady Macclesfield even wearing a mask throughout her labour in order to disguise her identity from the midwife.’¹⁵

The birth of the son was registered at St Andrew’s, Holborn, on 16th January 1697, with Earl Rivers signing himself as godfather, under the name of Captain John Smith. The child was christened Richard Smith. Lord Macclesfield was never able to establish these facts, and the name of Earl Rivers was never mentioned in the House of Lords. None the less a divorce was granted in March 1698, and Lady Macclesfield’s personal fortune was returned to her as part of the settlement. She subsequently married Colonel Henry Brett, in 1700, and bore him a legitimate daughter to whom she was greatly attached. Through Brett’s contacts in Drury Lane (he was a director of the Theatre Committee), she moved for a time in literary circles, and made a friend of the dramatist Colley Cibber. But on the Colonel’s sudden death in 1724, she largely retired from social life, devoted herself to her daughter, and died a recluse at the age of eighty.¹⁶

She always insisted to Brett (who of course knew all the details of the divorce) that both her illegitimate children had died as babies and there is considerable documentary evidence for this claim (see Appendix). She had a reputation as an attractive, kind, and perhaps foolish woman; and as a notably loving mother (as even Savage was forced to admit on occasions). Nothing we know of her from external evidence supports the picture drawn by Johnson.

The one real mystery about her behaviour (as Boswell pointed out after extensive investigation) is why she never sued for libel, either on the publication of the ‘Newgate’ booklet in 1727 or of Johnson’s own Life in 1744. But one can imagine that after the scandalous House of Lords divorce case in 1698, she had had enough of litigation. It even seems possible that she may have felt sorry for Savage, at least in the early years, regarding him as a talented but deluded young man rather than a criminal impostor. But again, by identifying so completely with Savage’s claims, Johnson excludes this interpretation.

Whatever the truth of the affair, the salient feature of this part of the biography is that Johnson did not attempt to unearth it through research. Boswell, although he thought that ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’ as to the final facts, saw this very clearly.¹⁷ It is one of the reasons he so distrusted Savage’s influence over Johnson’s mind and heart, and regarded the whole friendship as an aberration. For him, Johnson’s powers of judgement were temporarily seduced by Savage. Yet one may feel, equally, that for the first time Johnson had found a story that enabled him to give full literary expression to his passionate nature, his intense human sympathies, and his rage against social injustice.

Limiting himself to the ‘Newgate’ materials, and committed to his romantic, and indeed melodramatic version of Savage’s early life, Johnson narrates it as a fable of the Outcast Poet, persecuted and spurned by a malign mother, brought up in poverty and obscurity, and finding temporary succour from a series of generous but frequently disreputable benefactors. Whatever picturesque details he can add, he takes on trust from Savage’s personal reminiscences (though the versions frequently changed).

This is the account that Johnson gives. Born in January 1698 (not 1697 as the registration shows), inexplicably rejected by his mother, Savage was brought up somewhere in London by an anonymous nurse and a godmother called Mrs Lloyd who died when he was aged ten. (Savage later said, ‘As for … the mean nurse, she is quite a fictitious character’.¹⁸

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