Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

In September 1743 Johnson was working in haste, in poverty, and under the very Grub Street conditions that Savage himself had so often experienced. An undated note to Cave, from Johnson’s rooms in Castle Street, gives a vivid glimpse of the harassed young biographer preparing his materials and estimating his rate of production against his financial reserves.

… The Life of Savage I am ready to go upon, and in great Primer and Pica Notes reckon on sending in half an Sheet a day, but the money for that shall likewise lie in your hands till it is done. With the [Parliamentary] Debates shall I not have business enough? – If I had but good Pens. – Towards Mr Savage’s Life what more have you got? I would willingly have [the text of] his Trial etc, and know whether his Defence be at Bristol; and would have his Collection of Poems [1726] on account of the Preface. – The Plain Dealer [articles] – All the Magazines that have anything of his or relating to him.

Johnson’s postscript to this letter is expressive. He has no candles, and Cave’s printer’s boy ‘found me writing this, almost in the dark’. Cave had also asked for a preliminary epitaph on Savage, to be printed in the forthcoming issue. But Johnson has been ill, and is late producing it. ‘I had no notion of having any thing for the [Savage] Inscription, I hope You don’t think I kept it to extort a price. I could think on Nothing till today. If You could spare me another Guinea … I should take it very kindly tonight, but if You do not shall not think it an injury. – I am almost well again.’1

Because of these conditions, it is invariably thought that Johnson wrote the biography very fast, ‘at white heat’, and largely from memory. It is taken as a sort of spontaneous effusion of friendship; and its surprising romanticism, and many errors and omissions, are easily explained away on these grounds. Boswell was partly responsible for this conventional view, for though he greatly admired the ‘strong and affecting’ narrative, he thought its evident ‘partiality’ might reasonably be excused by haste of composition. During their tour of the Hebrides, thirty years later, he reported Johnson as saying that he wrote ‘forty-eight of the printed octavo pages at a sitting, but then I sat up all night’.2

If true, this would have been about a quarter of the book in a twenty-four-hour period, and the whole Life in less than a week. In fact Johnson took about three months compiling and expanding the biography, between mid-September and 14th December 1743, when he signed a receipt for fifteen guineas for passing the completed manuscript to Cave. By Johnson’s standards this was a leisurely and reflective pace of production.3

It is clear from the typographical evidence of the book’s printing that the epic all-night sitting refers to a single period of rewriting, later in January 1744. Working against a printer’s deadline, Johnson recast the final section with new materials about Savage’s death, and the last forty-eight pages were reset.4 This rewriting session further delayed the book’s publication until February 1744, some five months after he had started. It is characteristic of the unusual care which Johnson lavished on the whole manuscript, and which forced Cave – who was acting as his editor – to delay what had been originally intended as a piece of instant, topical journalism by the publisher Roberts.

Nor did Johnson compose haphazardly, from memory or a loose collection of personal reminiscences. Many things that he said subsequently about biography might suggest this. Johnson had later insisted to Boswell that true biographical knowledge could only grow out of close companionship: ‘nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social inter-course with him.’5 Reflecting on the biographical process, in The Rambler, no. 60, Johnson also emphasised the need for intimacy, in an aphorism that became famous. ‘… More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.’6

Savage of course had never had a servant, and the absence of a domestic menage of any kind, except for those temporarily borrowed (and quickly alienated) from other households such as Lord Tyrconnel’s, posed its own peculiar mystery round his unusual solitude, which Johnson had to penetrate.

The value of personal witness, of small impressions and trivial incidents, of recent memories and vivid anecdotes, however fleeting and partial they might be, was defended by Johnson as essential to biography. ‘… Most accounts of particular persons are barren and useless. If a Life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but we must expect little intelligence; for the incidents that give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.’7

This might have been written with his Life of Savage specifically in mind; and such ‘volatile’ impressions, recalling their friendship with rueful tenderness, streamed easily from Johnson’s pen once he began to write. Savage’s innocent, almost childlike vanity as an author produces one such typical incident. ‘He could not easily leave off when he had once begun to mention himself or his Works, nor ever read his Verses without stealing his Eyes from the Page, to discover in the Faces of his Audience, how they were affected with any favourite Passage.’8

Yet Johnson has removed himself from this moment, just as he did in the great description of the night-walking. His personal presence, as Savage’s friend, is absorbed in the anonymity of ‘the Faces of his Audience’. The witness, the friend, is absent. This remains true almost throughout the Life: though intensely personal and partial, its narrative voice appears distanced and carefully withdrawn. This makes Johnson’s attitude, and the level of his irony, peculiarly difficult to judge.

Indeed Johnson based the opening section of his story on something quite different from the personal impressions and interviews with friends that a modern biographer might expect. In fact what he did was so unexpected that it was overlooked by many commentators (though not by Boswell). For the first half of Savage’s life, up to the trial for murder of 1727 at least, Johnson simply used a previous biography.

This was a twenty-nine-page booklet, issued anonymously by the ‘bookseller J. Roberts’ in December 1727, entitled The Life of Mr Richard Savage…Who was Condemned … the last Sessions at the Old Bailey, For Murder…With some very remarkable Circumstances relating to the Birth and Education, of that Gentleman, which were never before made publick. Johnson followed its storyline paragraph by paragraph, adding his own commentary and occasional new facts or corrections.

The booklet is a defence of Savage, intended to save him from the gallows. It was published, significantly, by the same James Roberts who commissioned Johnson’s work. Johnson assumed its information was taken direct from Savage, during a series of interviews in the condemned cells at Newgate Prison. But a contemporary letter from Savage in Newgate suggests this was not strictly so, and he certainly contradicted some of the booklet’s facts later.

So Johnson, far from using original sources or research, was basing the first section of his biography on a partial and secondary source, the ‘Newgate’ booklet, whose proclaimed aim was to exculpate Richard Savage from his crimes.

For the second part of Savage’s Life, from 1728 onwards, Johnson would work in another way. Not only would he use his own impressions, often brilliantly perceptive and blackly humorous. He would incorporate no less than forty pages of quotations from Savage’s poetry and letters (some twenty per cent of the entire text).9 But for the crucial beginning of the biography, dealing with Savage’s mysterious childhood and shadowy early career to the age of thirty, Johnson very largely accepted the ‘Newgate’ version of 1727. He postponed any serious attempt at psychological enquiry or historical research until later. He opened for the defence, with the materials on hand.

Why did Johnson do this? Laziness, or deadline pressure, are hardly sufficient explanations. Johnson took his time and he wrote con amore of a friend who had meant something vital in his own escape to London and launching of a literary career. He was well aware, too, of the perils of biographical bias. He recalled in The Rambler his own situation in 1743: ‘If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness, overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if not to invent.’10 Perhaps he believed in retrospect that he had been, to some degree, overpowered by the Savage legend as set forth in the ‘Newgate’ booklet.

What I think happened was this. Johnson was caught up in its romantic drama. He responded overwhelmingly to the picture it presented of Savage as a man on trial for his life, a victim of society, and particularly as a victim of one woman’s cruelty. For this is the central argument of the ‘Newgate’ version, and one that Johnson amplifies with passion, and even something close to fury, in his own Life.

While relying on the bare outlines of the ‘Newgate’ version, Johnson transforms the first thirty years of Savage’s life into an extraordinary and emotional piece of story-telling. It is highly compressed, occupying only a quarter of the overall biography, and astonishingly sketchy with facts and dates. Yet it grips the reader from the first moment with its drama and pathetic images of rejection and persecution.

Richard Savage is introduced as a tragic outcast from eighteenth-century society, not merely disowned by his supposed mother, Lady Macclesfield, but ‘with an implacable and restless Cruelty’ pursued and persecuted by her ‘from the first Hour of his Life to the last’.11

Johnson never seriously questioned ‘Newgate’s’ assertion that Savage was the illegitimate child of Lady Macclesfield. He did not even bother to examine the documentary evidence, or question those who might have seen it, like Aaron Hill or Lady Macclesfield’s nephew, Lord Tyrconnel. His view of Savage’s wayward character and misfortunes is grounded on the supposed injustice he suffered throughout his life when that claim was consistently denied, for whatever motives, by Lady Macclesfield.

He accepted Savage as a rejected child, flung out from his rightful place in society, and presented this with all the pathos at his command. ‘Born with a legal Claim to Honour and to Riches, he was in two Months illegitimated by the Parliament, and disowned by his Mother, doomed to Poverty and Obscurity, and launched upon the Ocean of Life, only that he might be swallowed by its Quicksands, or dashed upon its Rocks.’12

The image of the child launched helplessly upon the waters, like young Moses in his basket of reeds, is powerfully emotive. It indicts not merely the mother but society as a whole (represented by Parliament). Johnson was later to develop this social indictment with great effect.

He pursues this interpretation to far greater lengths, and with even greater biographic daring, or recklessness, in his portrait of Lady Macclesfield herself. Here again he accepts the ‘Newgate’ version of the facts without question, and without investigation, and he intensifies it to an extraordinary degree. No attempt is made to give the objective details of her life, her family circumstances, her social connections or even her age. She is presented simply as a type of the worthless aristocratic woman: capricious, voluptuous, vindictive and relentlessly cruel. Johnson is so roused by this image that he openly courts a charge of libel.

This Mother is still alive, and may perhaps even yet, though her Malice was so often defeated, enjoy the Pleasure of reflecting, that the Life which she often endeavoured to destroy, was at least shortened by her maternal Offices; that though she could not transport her Son to the Plantations, bury him in the Shop of a Mechanick, or hasten the Hand of the publick Executioner, she has yet had the Satisfaction of imbittering all his Hours, and forcing him into Exigencies, that hurried on his Death.’13

It can be suggested that this figure is a fictional rather than a biographic creation. Johnson seems to have built on Savage’s fantasies in The Bastard and The Wanderer and unconsciously added something of his own. Throughout the Life he identifies strongly with Savage’s obsessive anger and feelings of rejection by a powerful woman. There is an undercurrent of vengefulness, if not of misogyny, in his portrait of Lady Macclesfield which seems uncharacteristic of the later Johnson and which we can only explain by his own romantic disappointments, surely aggravated by his physical grotesqueness and sexual awkwardness as a young man. At no moment is he prepared to consider events from Lady Macclesfield’s point of view: she is always Savage’s persecutor, a figure of ‘motiveless malignity’, torturing him for her sport. Again and again he calls her ‘unnatural’, like Lady Macbeth; and describes her as ‘outragious and implacable’, as if she was the force of destiny itself.14

At the time Johnson wrote, in 1743, the real Lady Macclesfield was a rich, sad and reclusive widow in her late seventies, living alone in a small house in Old Bond Street. She had lost her title through divorce, and was known by the name of her second husband (by then deceased) as Mrs Anne Brett. Her whole life had been shaken by domestic unhappiness and public scandals.

Born in Shropshire in 1668, the daughter of Sir Richard Mason, a Clerk Comptroller in the royal household, with a house in Whitehall, she had made an early and disastrous marriage to a young Whig firebrand, Viscount Brandon, when she was only fifteen. Brandon was a violent and dangerous character who had killed a boy in the London streets when drunk, and was later twice imprisoned in the Tower for treason.

The marriage broke down in the first few weeks, and by the age of seventeen she was separated and living with her sister Lady Brownlow at Beaufort House, where she remained for the next twelve years, fearful of her husband’s rages. She none the less pleaded on her knees before the King, in order to obtain Brandon’s pardon after the Rye House plot, when he had been implicated in an assassination attempt on James II.

In 1694 her husband inherited the title of Lord Macclesfield, though no reconciliation and no children were forthcoming. Two years later Lady Macclesfield, now approaching her thirtieth birthday and desperate for affection, fell in love with Richard Savage, the Fourth Earl Rivers. It was another disastrous choice. Rivers was well known as a gambler, rake and political intriguer, and was renowned for his amours. He kept a large establishment, with gardens, at Rivers House, Great Queen Street, in the parish of Holborn. Lady Macclesfield bore him two illegitimate children, a girl and a boy, in rapid succession and great secrecy. Lord Macclesfield, hearing rumours of this but unable to establish proof, began divorce proceedings in the House of Lords on 15th January 1698.

Throughout, Lady Macclesfield protested her innocence, concealed the affair with Rivers and took immense precautions to cover up the illegitimate births. Later evidence shows that the boy was born in private rooms at Fox Court, Holborn, with both parents using pseudonyms, and Lady Macclesfield even wearing a mask throughout her labour in order to disguise her identity from the midwife.’15

The birth of the son was registered at St Andrew’s, Holborn, on 16th January 1697, with Earl Rivers signing himself as godfather, under the name of Captain John Smith. The child was christened Richard Smith. Lord Macclesfield was never able to establish these facts, and the name of Earl Rivers was never mentioned in the House of Lords. None the less a divorce was granted in March 1698, and Lady Macclesfield’s personal fortune was returned to her as part of the settlement. She subsequently married Colonel Henry Brett, in 1700, and bore him a legitimate daughter to whom she was greatly attached. Through Brett’s contacts in Drury Lane (he was a director of the Theatre Committee), she moved for a time in literary circles, and made a friend of the dramatist Colley Cibber. But on the Colonel’s sudden death in 1724, she largely retired from social life, devoted herself to her daughter, and died a recluse at the age of eighty.16

She always insisted to Brett (who of course knew all the details of the divorce) that both her illegitimate children had died as babies and there is considerable documentary evidence for this claim (see Appendix). She had a reputation as an attractive, kind, and perhaps foolish woman; and as a notably loving mother (as even Savage was forced to admit on occasions). Nothing we know of her from external evidence supports the picture drawn by Johnson.

The one real mystery about her behaviour (as Boswell pointed out after extensive investigation) is why she never sued for libel, either on the publication of the ‘Newgate’ booklet in 1727 or of Johnson’s own Life in 1744. But one can imagine that after the scandalous House of Lords divorce case in 1698, she had had enough of litigation. It even seems possible that she may have felt sorry for Savage, at least in the early years, regarding him as a talented but deluded young man rather than a criminal impostor. But again, by identifying so completely with Savage’s claims, Johnson excludes this interpretation.

Whatever the truth of the affair, the salient feature of this part of the biography is that Johnson did not attempt to unearth it through research. Boswell, although he thought that ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’ as to the final facts, saw this very clearly.17 It is one of the reasons he so distrusted Savage’s influence over Johnson’s mind and heart, and regarded the whole friendship as an aberration. For him, Johnson’s powers of judgement were temporarily seduced by Savage. Yet one may feel, equally, that for the first time Johnson had found a story that enabled him to give full literary expression to his passionate nature, his intense human sympathies, and his rage against social injustice.

Limiting himself to the ‘Newgate’ materials, and committed to his romantic, and indeed melodramatic version of Savage’s early life, Johnson narrates it as a fable of the Outcast Poet, persecuted and spurned by a malign mother, brought up in poverty and obscurity, and finding temporary succour from a series of generous but frequently disreputable benefactors. Whatever picturesque details he can add, he takes on trust from Savage’s personal reminiscences (though the versions frequently changed).

This is the account that Johnson gives. Born in January 1698 (not 1697 as the registration shows), inexplicably rejected by his mother, Savage was brought up somewhere in London by an anonymous nurse and a godmother called Mrs Lloyd who died when he was aged ten. (Savage later said, ‘As for … the mean nurse, she is quite a fictitious character’.18

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