Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
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.
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