and an aesthetic claim about the form of true biography. It adds, in a forthright manner, where the Life can be bought; though not yet the price.
This letter is written by the young Samuel Johnson, and is of historic importance in the development of English biography. It confidently asserts the value of the biographic form to a general public, the ‘Lovers of Truth and Wit’; and aggressively declares war on the titillating fictional art of the Novel.
Samuel Johnson’s publisher, Mr James Roberts of Warwick Lane off the Strand, saw the Savage story in different terms. As a publisher, Roberts specialised in tales of social scandal, runaway heiresses, adulterous skirmishes among the aristocracy, lost fortunes, orphaned sons, and careers of glittering crime. The Savage saga was easily adapted to this formula, and Roberts accordingly placed a long advertisement in the London Evening Post pointing out that the biography – though literary in appearance – could be safely relied on for its sensational contents. In this third document, Savage’s life is seen as a labyrinth of deceit, injustice, passion and wrongdoing: in short, everything that might be expected of a poet’s unstable existence in a materialistic society, redeemed only by the gracious interventions of royalty.
An account of the life of Mr Richard Savage, son of the late Earl Rivers. Who was, soon after he came into the world, bastardised by an act of Parliament, and deprived of the title and estate to which he was born; was committed by his mother, the Countess of Macclesfield, to a poor woman, to be bred up as her own son; came to the knowledge of his real mother, now alive, but abandoned by her, persecuted, and condemned for murder, and against all her endeavours, pardoned; made poet laureate to Queen Caroline, became very eminent for his writings, of which many are quoted in this Work, particularly the ‘Bastard’, the ‘Wanderer’, ‘Volunteer Laureate’, and ‘Author to be Let’; went into Wales, to be supported by a subscription, promoted by Mr Pope, but at last died in Prison.7
This racy summary, with its neat and misleading telescoping of facts, conforms to the shape of what we might call an urban fairy tale. Savage is a kind of Frog Prince, placed under a cruel spell by his Wicked Mother, and saved from the jaws of death by the Good Queen, who transforms him back into his true self as an eminent poet. The premature death in prison, somehow under the auspices of Mr Pope (the most financially successful poet of the age), becomes a kind of moral to this tale. The poor Poet, whether saved or not, will always suffer for his Art. This is not so remote from the story actually told by Johnson; but it indicates what the public wanted to hear about Savage. His life will be an awful – and delicious – warning; and incidentally a very good read.
These are the reactions which people had to Richard Savage at the time of his death in 1743. They are already complicated and various. Savage had caught the popular imagination in a remarkable way. But most remarkable was the biographer who immediately entered the lists on his behalf. Who was this man?
Here again we are confronted with something peculiar in the nature of biography, and its layerings through time. If we assume that it was Dr Samuel Johnson (who received his doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1765), the man who subsequently made a household name in English literature through the work of James Boswell, we will understand little of the story that now begins to emerge. We have to deconstruct almost entirely that powerful, domineering, confident, late-eighteenth-century figure whom Boswell created in his own biography. We have to recover a much more shadowy, fraught and uncertain personality: young Sam Johnson, failed schoolmaster, provincial poet, and desperate Grub Street hack, who signed his letters in 1738 ‘impransus’ – supperless.
It is worth considering here another fiction. What might an imaginary obituarist also have made of Johnson at this period? Suppose Samuel Johnson had also died at about forty years old, say in the summer of 1749 when he had been in London for just over ten years? This is Johnson more than a decade before he met Boswell. This is Johnson still virtually unknown, beyond a small circle of Fleet Street booksellers, when he has just published his first signed work, The Vanity of Human Wishes. This is the young Samuel Johnson that Savage would have recognised, but that we, looking backwards through history and Boswell’s biography, might find difficult to imagine at all. This is how Death might have briefly framed his portrait at that date:
Mr Samuel Johnson: poet, playwright and sometime political journalist. News has just reached us in the London mails, of the untimely death of Mr Samuel Johnson, late of the city of Lichfield, at his house at Gough Square, Fleet Street, London, of a sudden Apoplexy.
He was the son of Michael Johnson, bookseller and stationer of Sadler Street and Market Square; and elder brother of Nathanial Johnson, who continued the family business until 1737 in this city. Mr Johnson’s Learning and Eccentricities will be well remembered, which led him to abandon the useful paths of Pedagogy for the ephemeral pursuit of Letters in the capital city, where he found little Success. He was attached in various capacities to the Gentleman’s Magazine of Mr Edward Cave, where he undertook extensive but anonymous Work, most notably the reporting of Parliamentary affairs in the scurrilous rubric of ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ which he continued for three or four years. He is believed to have published several anonymous Poems and political Pamphlets, of a generally Jacobite tenor and in Opposition to the late Ministry of Mr Walpole.
At the time of his Death, perhaps hastened by Poverty and Overwork, he was engaged in a delusory Scheme to compile by his singular efforts a General Dictionary of the English Language, an enterprise more rationally undertaken in France by a Committee of scholars labouring over many years. The tribulations and disappointments of his Life have been summarised in a recent poetical satire, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, which some may take as his own Elegy.
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield on 18th September 1709, and taken by his Mother to London at the age of three years to be touched by her Gracious Majesty Queen Anne for the Evil, a Scrofula infection that marked him in a sad and monstrous Manner for the rest of his life. He was nearly blind in one Eye, and suffered from an unhappy series of nervous Spasms, which rendered him permanently unsuitable for the gracious departments of Society, and nullified many of his efforts to obtain Advancement. To these physiological Causes may be ascribed a melancholy of Temper, and irritable dogmatism of Address, which rendered him at times restless, willful, and barbarous. A brooding spirit of Opposition marked many of his proceedings; he felt the pain of Existence, and perhaps unduly resented the Comforts of Privilege, Fortune, or Power. Of his Learning, there can however be little Doubt.
He achieved Pre-eminence among his peers at the Lichfield Grammar School with remarkable celerity; and in October 1728 proceeded to Pembroke College, Oxford, with a reputation for Scholarship that was little short of prodigious; but after fourteen months was forced to withdraw owing to the Business-failings of his father, who died in 1731 leaving him no Patrimony. A period of lassitude and solitary Study now ensued, alternating with unsuccessful attempts to establish himself as a Schoolmaster at Market Bosworth and at Birmingham.
At last, in what might appear a strange fit of Optimism or of Despair, he married Mrs Elizabeth Jervis Porter, the widow of a Birmingham woollen-draper, the Mother of three children and a Woman over twenty years his senior, on 9 July 1735 at St Werburgh’s church, Derby. This Union is said to have been the cause of great Solace to Johnson, and of great Merriment to his Friends. He invested his Wife’s dowry of some £600 in the venture of a private School at Edial, Lichfield, which failed within two years, leaving him without Resource. He was therefore obliged to seek some other Means of Support, and having no Profession, became, by Necessity, an Author.
Removing precipitously to London in the spring of 1737, Mr Johnson sought Employment among the denizens of Grub Street, while attempting to finish ‘Irene’, a blank-verse Tragedy of the passions, incommodiously located in Constantinople at the time of the Turkish ascendancy. He is said to have been greatly attached to his heroine, Aspasia, who resists the heathen Blandishments of the Sultan Mahomet, confirming thereby her Virtue, her
