Macclesfield, of whose unrelenting barbarity he so loudly complained, and the particulars of which are related in so strong and affecting a manner in Johnson’s Life of him.’
His own subsequent researches cast much doubt over the entire story and left him, in a memorable phrase, ‘vibrating in uncertainty’. Modern scholars, like Clarence Tracy and James L. Clifford, have felt the same perplexity. (See Further Reading)
It is interesting that the great French Enlightenment critic and novelist Denis Diderot, in a review of a French translation of the Life which appeared in Paris in 1771, also singled out the peculiar nature of Johnson’s handling of Lady Macclesfield. He wondered, with a wry smile, if a fiction-writer would have got away with it. This Countess of Macclesfield is a strange woman, persecuting a love-child with a rage sustained for many years, never extinguished and founded on nothing. If a writer decided to introduce, in a play or a novel, a character of this kind, it would be booed.’ The implication is that Johnson has broken the Aristotelian rule of ‘probability’.
Yet Diderot finally gives Johnson (not after all a French classicist) the benefit of the doubt. ‘Nevertheless it is compatible with reality. And is reality then sometimes to be booed? Why not! Does it never deserve it?’ It has been suggested that the chameleon anti-hero of Diderot’s own subsequent novel, Le Neveu de Rameau, may partly have been inspired by Savage’s machinations.
It is certainly possible that Savage may have been what he constantly, obsessively, unfailingly (even under sentence of death) claimed to be: Lady Macclesfield rejected son. Johnson may have been right: his honesty and intellectual judgement were always formidable After all, he later saw through the claims of the epic poet ‘Ossian’, and the Rowley ‘forgeries’ of Thomas Chatterton. On the other hand, his profound sympathy for Savage may simply have misled him. His later confidante, Hester Thrale remarked tenderly: ‘Dear Dr Johnson was not difficult to be imposed on where the Heart came into question.’
Yet there is a strange fury in these biting, unsubstantiated denunciations of Lady Macclesfield which suggest other, obscurer forces at work. They might perhaps be connected with young Johnson’s own darker feelings towards women: his repulsive appearance, his difficulties with his wife Tetty (20 years his senior and increasingly reliant on ‘cordials’); and his own unloving mother Sarah Johnson.
A modern poet and biographer, John Wain, has speculated in this direction rather further than Boswell. There were also deeper emotional reasons. Savage had, by his own account, been cruelly rejected by an unnatural mother. Now Johnson, as we have seen, had strong and ambivalent feelings towards his own mother…This resentment of Sarah for her failure to give him love and emotional security was buttoned down tightly out of sight and watched over by an unsleeping censor. All the more eagerly did he listen to Savage’s tirades against the mother who had similarly, and far more spectacularly, failed him. Chords which his own fingers were forbidden to touch became vibrant at the eloquent recital of Savage’s wrongs. How deep did Savage’s influence go? Very deep, I think. His presence touched the hidden springs of Johnson’s deep feelings, and may, here and there, have caused some strange streams to gush from the rock. He was, for some crucial months, closer to Johnson than anyone else. Certainly, closer than Tetty.’ (Wain, 1974)
5
Yet there is a further layer to the enigma. An attentive reading of the Old Bailey pamphlet, which was after all written specifically to exculpate Savage, also suggests that Johnson - out of loyalty—may have been avoiding a much harsher possible interpretation of Savage’s character in the early years. Leaving aside the historical truth of Savage’s claims, one begins to ask just who was persecuting whom?
Savage’s emotional appeals to Lady Macclesfield as the hopeless, abandoned, sighing ‘Alexis’ in 1724, have within three years later taken on a far more aggressive and imperious tone. With the publication of his Miscellaneous Poems of 1726, shortly before the unfortunate murder, he seems to be conducting something indistinguishable from a successful blackmail campaign. How else should one interpret the following passage from Old Bailey?
He had also wrote a long Preface to [the Poems], giving some Account of his Mother’s unparalleled ill Treatment of him; but was prevail’d on through the imposition of some very considerable Persons to cancel it; and about that time he had a Pension of 50 pounds a year settled upon him. It will not venture to say whether this Allowance came from her, or, if so, upon what Motives she was induced to grant it; but choose to leave the Reader to guess at it.
Johnson also avoids the notion of blackmail in his account of the subsequent publication of Savage’s most famous poem, ‘The Bastard’.
It was the most severe and successful attack Savage had ever mounted against Lady Macclesfield, and her public humiliation at Bath is fully, and indeed appreciatively described by Johnson, as an act of necessary justice for a lifetime’s persecution. He accordingly assigns its publication to 1735, after Lord Tyrconnel had withdrawn his splendid £200 annual pension, and Savage was once again reduced to poverty. (See Select Chronology.) The poem is presented as Savage’s final, bitter and fully justified riposte. ‘Thus Savage had the satisfaction of finding that, though he could not reform his mother, he could punish her, and that he did not always suffer alone.’ (p.50)
But either deliberately, or unconsciously, Johnson has crucially altered the publication date to suit his defence of Savage. The fact - one of those few, definite ‘shilling’ facts - is that ‘The Bastard’, in all 5 of its editions, appeared seven years earlier in the spring and summer of 1728. It appeared, therefore, shortly before Lady Macclesfield’s nephew Lord Tyrconnel made Savage the £200 pension, and therefore seems to have had an entirely different motivation. It may certainly be seen as a successful demand for money, with menaces. £200 per annum was the cost of silence, and it is true that Savage published nothing again against Lady Macclesfield until the pension was abruptly terminated (after a quarrel) in 1735.
The Old Bailey pamphlet also first mentions the romantic ‘candle’ incident, which so moved Johnson and seems to summon up a whole world of tragic outcasts, rejected children, and homeless wanderers. This is the emotive picture his source draws.
While Nature acted so weakly on the Humanity of the Parent, she seems on the Son’s side to have doubled her usual Influence. Even the most shocking personal Repulses, and a severity of Contempt and Injuries received at her Hands, through the whole Course of his Life, were not able to erase from his Heart the impressions of his filial Duty, nor, which is more strange, of his Affection. I have known him walk three or four Times in a dark Evening, through the Street this Mother lives in, only for the melancholy Pleasure of looking up at her Windows, in hopes to catch a Moment’s Sight of her as she might cross the Room by Candlelight.
Johnson brilliantly deploys and develops this memorable image of the outcast in the dark streets, adding layers of pathos and irony. ‘But all his assiduity and tenderness were without effect, for he could neither soften her heart nor open her hand, and was reduced to the utmost miseries of want, while he was endeavoring to awaken the affection of a mother. He was therefore, obliged to seek some other means of support, and having no profession, became by necessity an author.’ (p.9–10)
But in order to sustain the pathetic, benighted picture of young Savage, Johnson is compelled to hold over in the chronology of his narrative the alarming ‘stalking’ incident in which these evening vigils culminated. This incident is Omitted in the order of time’ (as he cautiously explains) until it can be more safely placed in the account of Savage’s trial. So only when Savage is himself in danger of death, does Johnson reveal the supremely damaging story of Savage actually slipping into Lady Macclesfield’s Old Bond Street house at night, silently entering her bedroom, and only thinking it ‘prudent to retire’ when the terrified woman, fearful of
