Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
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3 Night
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 Boswell adds no visual details: nothing of dress, weather or season – a summer amble under the stars would presumably be very different from a winter tramp in rain or frost. But he does suggest, rather uneasily, that the two friends might sometimes have had enough money for other pursuits of the night, specifically drinking and whoring. ‘I am afraid, however, that by associating with Savage, who was habituated to the dissipation and licentiousness of the town, Johnson, though his good principles remained steady, did not entirely preserve [his] conduct … but was imperceptibly led into some indulgencies which occasioned much distress to his virtuous mind.’3
This is merely a hint, but a hint from Boswell on such a subject—experto crede—is much; and deserves to be borne in mind. So too does the rich London low-life material which Johnson subsequently incorporated into his Rambler essays, including a two-part biography of a country girl who becomes a prostitute, ‘The Story of Misella’. She ends her life in an appalling series of late-night taverns and infested night-cellars, which Johnson describes with bitter conviction:
Thus driven again into the Streets, I lived upon the least that could support me, and at Night accommodated myself under Penthouses as well as I could … In this abject state I have now passed four Years, the drudge of Extortion and the sport of Drunkenness; sometimes the Property of one man, and sometimes the common Prey of accidental Lewdness; at one time tricked up for sale by the Mistress of a Brothel, at another begging in the Streets to be relieved of Hunger by wickedness; without any hope in the Day but of finding some whom Folly or Excess may expose to my Allurements, and without any reflections at Night but such as Guilt and Terror impress upon me.
If those who pass their days in Plenty and Security could visit for an Hour the dismal Receptacles to which the Prostitute retires from her nocturnal Excursions, and see the Wretches that lie crowded together, mad with Intemperance, ghastly with Famine, nauseous with Filth, and noisome with Disease; it would not be easy for any degree of Abhorrence to harden them against Compassion, or to repress the Desire which they must immediately feel to rescue such numbers of Human Beings from a state so dreadful.4
Sir Joshua Reynolds’s account has a very different atmosphere. President of the Royal Academy, an elegant, easygoing man of the world, Reynolds had been fascinated with Savage’s story ever since he had first read Johnson’s Life in the 1750s. He had then shared with Johnson an acute dislike of aristocratic pretensions, and at a supper party in the presence of the Duchess of Argyll, the two pretended to be manual labourers, and loudly discussed the hourly wage-rate: ‘How much do you think you and I could get in a week, if we were to work as hard as we could?’5
Reynolds had first read of Savage on returning from his painter’s apprenticeship in Rome, casually picking up the book in a drawing-room in Devonshire. He began to read it ‘while he was standing with his arm leaning against a chimney-piece. It seized his attention so strongly, that, not being able to lay down the book till he had finished it, when he attempted to move, he found his arm totally benumbed.’6
This is a painter’s anecdote, mental attention represented by physical posture, with a certain flattering exaggeration of pose. Reynolds evidently questioned Johnson subsequently about his night-walks with Savage, and produced a witty bravura version, which would have told well in the Club. He supplies an exact location, a brisk