It is interesting that Boswell slides over this whole separation, does not quote from the letter, and once again only refers to the friendship with Molly Aston retrospectively, at a much later date, in 1776: ‘the lady of whom Johnson used to speak with the warmest admiration … who was afterwards married to Captain Brodie of the navy.’63
From then on the marriage slowly petrified. Elizabeth was increasingly ill, or drunk. She at first took some part in Johnson’s journalistic work, reading and researching for him, but this soon tailed off. Her dowry was spent, her family relations (except Lucy in Lichfield) alienated from her, her husband sunk in hack-work. Some time in the mid-1740s she began to visit the country village of Hampstead for her health, and by 1748 she had almost permanent lodgings there. Johnson visited her on some evenings and at weekends.
She did not manage to attend the first night of Irene, Johnson’s final bid as a dramatic poet, in February 1749. Perhaps this was a relief to both of them. Garrick’s vicious caricature of her dates from this final stage of the marriage: ‘very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behaviour.’64 Yet it is the emotional disappointment of the entire marriage which is partly reflected in this sad parody of Johnson’s longed-for princess.
At Hampstead, Elizabeth was attended on by a young widow, Mrs Desmoulins, an old friend of the Lichfield circle, whom Johnson had brought south to be her companion. In old age she was cross-questioned by Boswell about the relations between husband and wife. What he discovered was omitted from his biography, and filed separately under the Latin heading Tacenda – to be held back in silence.
What Mrs Desmoulins said was this. Elizabeth drank heavily, using the excuse that she was not well; was usually in bed asleep when Johnson appeared; and had refused for years to have sexual relations with him. Johnson would retire to a separate bedroom, and when in bed would call in Mrs Desmoulins to talk with him. Presently she would lie on the bed, on top of the sheets but with her head on the pillow next to his. He would then cuddle and fondle her in an amorous way, before sending her abruptly out of the room.
To Boswell’s further, insistent questions and demands for detail (he was expert in every physical nuance of such encounters), Mrs Desmoulins would only reply that Johnson ‘never did anything that was beyond the limits of decency’.65 Boswell never established what young Mrs Desmoulins had thought those limits were; but the picture – tender, tragic, ludicrous – is clear enough.
It was at exactly this period, walking alone in the lanes of Hampstead outside his wife’s lodgings, that Johnson composed his greatest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. And it was now, as I have suggested, that his fictional biography might have ended, at the age of forty, in an apoplexy brought on by hard work, lack of recognition, frustration and misery.
It is against the background of this marriage, this longing for companionship, and this frustrated ‘dream of princesses’, that Johnson’s friendship with Savage has to be reconsidered.
There has always been one vivid, popular legend of Johnson’s unlikely friendship. It is enshrined in a particular anecdote that was passed lovingly around Johnson’s later circle: each one heard, embroidered and retold a different version of it. The account describes how Johnson and Savage walked round the squares of London all one night, being too poor to afford either food or lodging but sustained by the passionate intimacy of their conversation.
This story, in its various renditions, became symbolic of the Augustan writer’s life in Grub Street, just as the story of Thomas Chatterton’s death in a Holborn garret became symbolic of the romantic poet for the later eighteenth century. It passed quickly into treasured anecdote, and remains to this day the one clear image of young Johnson in London. A recent American scholar summarises it with relish: ‘Those who know nothing else of his early life can envision in Hogarthian detail Johnson in his ill-fitting great-coat and Savage dressed like a decayed dandy, wandering the street for want of a lodging and inveighing against fortune and the Prime Minister.’1
It is easy to see why the story appealed. It is indeed like a Hogarth illustration to Johnson’s famous line, from his poem London, ‘Slow rises worth, by Poverty depressed’. The link between poverty and genius, between poetry and lack of recognition, is axiomatic for the young writer coming to try his fortune in the great city.
We can instantly imagine the scene: the cobbled 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
