Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
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