Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes

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.