strains of the Lark.’ (p.95)
The end, when it comes, is swift but enigmatic. The dying Savage has one more secret to impart, but moving his hand ‘in a melancholy manner’, fails to tell it to his kindly gaoler - or to his attentive biographer. Johnson’s elegant summary of Savage’s extraordinary mixture of vices and virtues maintains its tender, ironic balance to the last. Although, not quite to the last. The final appeal is made directly to the reader’s sympathy, to his heart, in what became Johnson’s most celebrated biographical peroration. ‘For his life, or for his writings, none who candidly consider his fortune, will think an apology either necessary or difficult…Those are no proper judges of his conduct, who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty; nor will any wise man presume to say, “Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.”’ (p.105)
There is in fact one more paragraph, which concludes with a more severe and conventional verdict, bringing the two words ‘genius’ and ‘contemptible’ into irreconcilable contact. But against this, Savage’s friend and advocate later wrote dismissively in the margin of his own 1748 copy: ‘Added’.
8
The biography was an immediate and dazzling success. It became the book of the season, the talk of the London coffee-houses, and the subject of ecstatic reviews. The monthly Champion was representative: This pamphlet is, without flattery to its [anonymous] author, as just and well written a piece of its kind I ever saw…It is not only the story of Mr Savage, but innumerable incidents relating to other persons and other affairs, which renders this a very amusing and withal a very instructive and valuable performance…The author’s observations are short, significant and just…His reflections open to all the recesses of the human heart.’ Johnson would particularly have liked that last phrase.
The reaction of the fashionable painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, was typical of contemporary readers. He was delighted by the picturesque elements of Savage’s story, and even more by Johnson’s wonderfully shrewd comments and reflections. He did not question the historical truth of Savage’s claims, but was simply gripped and mesmerized by its human drama. Reynolds told Boswell that ‘upon his return from Italy he met with it in Devonshire, knowing nothing of its author, and 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.’
Although anonymous, it would be true to say that the publication of the Life of Richard Savage in 1744 made Johnson’s name, and determined him to continue as a professional author in London. He was 35, and from henceforth he began to sign his own books and poems. Within three years he was able to agree the contract for the Dictionary, with a substantial advance payment of £1,575 from a syndicate of London publishers, and take the famous house in Gough Square. A second edition of the Life of Savage was also published by Cave in 1748, and his greatest poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ followed in 1749. No doubt Savage would have been pleased by all this, and made one of his famous, hat-doffing bows to his young protegee.
Johnson’s further reflections on Biography and Autobiography appear in three short essays, which are appended to this edition. In Rambler No. 60, ‘On the Dignity and Usefulness of Biography’ he made the first great modern defence of the form (1750). He argued both for its intimate nature, and its universal appeal, and enshrined these in some notable aphorisms. ‘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’, (p.114). He also raised the question of how far we can believe in autobiography; and suggested the particular value of literary biography, with its emphasis on inner imaginative drama. ‘The gradations of a hero’s life are from battle to battle; and an author’s from book to book.’ (p.126)
In after years Johnson often talked to Boswell about the nature and appeal of biography. In 1763, the year they met, he boasted that ‘the biographical part of literature is what I love most.’ Later in 1772, clearly thinking back to his time with Savage, he gave it as his opinion that ‘nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.’ But later still, in 1776, talking with Thomas Warton at Trinity College Cambridge, he added that even biography based on personal intimacy was ‘rarely well executed…Few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him’. However, he never revived the question of the historical truth of Savage’s claims in Boswell’s hearing.
Yet, right or wrong, Johnson had done something normally associated with much later 20th century biography. He had made Savage’s childhood and adolescence a determining factor in his adult struggles. Whether genuinely a rejected child, or a brilliant obsessive fraud, a tragic self-deluded impostor, Savage was defined by a ‘lost’ childhood identity. It would of course be anachronistic to talk of Freudian insights in an early 18th century text. But Johnson’s treatment of Savage’s obsession with his ‘Cruel Mother’ always repays further reading.
Beyond the historical controversy, it can be seen to yield remarkable psychological insights. Johnson noted, for example, that when the actress Anne Oldfield (with whom Savage may have had an affair) died in 1730, ‘he endeavored to show his gratitude in the most decent manner, by wearing mourning as for a Mother.’ (p.15). He also observed that throughout his adult life Savage should be ‘considered as a child exposed to all the temptations of indigence’, (p.53). His final appeal is not for formal justice, but for the warmth of human understanding.
In a longer perspective, one can see that Johnson had championed English biography as a virtually new genre. He had saved it from the medieval tradition of solemnly extended hagiography, or the lifeless accumulations of 17th century biographical Dictionaries. He had shown that it was not ‘compiled’, but narrated, argued and brought dramatically alive. He had also raised it above those commercial compilations of scandalous anecdote, that were still so much in vogue, like Theophilus Cibber’s Lives of the Poets (1753, 200 poets packed like sardines into 5 volumes).
He had separated it from gossip and cheap romance, and redirected it towards ‘the Lovers of Truth and Wit’. By introducing the subject’s own writings - poetry, essays, letters - into the narrative, he had made it more scholarly and authentic. Nor was it any longer dependent on classical models and the lives of the great and eminent - as those by Plutarch, Tacitus, or Suetonius. Instead it had absorbed several popular and indigenous English forms - the Newgate confession, the sentimental ballad, the courtroom drama, even the Restoration comedy of manners.
Moreover English biography was no longer necessarily about fame and success. It could take obscure, failed and damaged lives, and make them intensely moving and revealing. Biography was an act of imaginative friendship, and depended on moral intelligence and human sympathy. Biography had become a new kind of narrative about the mysteries of the human heart.
Many years later Johnson is reported to have told Boswell, ‘that he could write the Life of a Broomstick’.
Johnson made minor corrections to The Life of Richard Savage in the second edition of 1748, and reduced the footnotes in the subsequent editions of 1775 and the definitive edition incorporated into The Lives of the Eminent English Poets of 1781. (See Select Chronology) The text used here is based on the 1781 edition, with some modernizing of capital letters and punctuation.
| 1697/8 | (16 January?) Richard Savage born in Holborn, LondonBrought up by a nurse as Richard Smith |
| 1709 | Samuel Johnson born in Lichfield, Staffordshire |
| 1712 | Death of the 4th Earl Rivers |
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