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