Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
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invented it.
This imaginary obituary suggests some of the mysteries and questions that always surrounded Savage’s life. But it is forced to omit the single most surprising fact, because at that time it had not become true. Among the ‘Denizens of Grub Street’ whom Savage encountered in the late 1730s was an unknown young literary novice called Samuel Johnson, who assured his own fame by writing Savage’s biography a year later in 1744.
A life like Savage’s is mysterious in itself, but also mysterious in the way it came to be told and reinterpreted, one version layered upon another, like a piece of complex geology. Its stratified truth was not ready to emerge immediately on his own death, or even in his own century. It depends on the series of its tellers or excavators, of whom our imaginary obituarist of 1743 is one; Samuel Johnson in 1744 is another; Johnson’s own biographers, Sir John Hawkins (1787) and James Boswell (1791), are a third and fourth; and so on down a line of scholars, Victorian antiquarians and modern academics to our own time. Through these rich and varied workings of research and story-telling the buried figure of Savage slowly rises back to life again.
The subject of this book is one particular version, the ‘original’ version, Johnson’s Savage. But it is also the question of versions itself. It is the biography of a biography. It concerns the kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can obtain as he tells the story of another’s life, and thereby makes it both his own (like a friendship) and the public’s (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally what we can love.
If there was no official obituary of Savage in 1743, it is still possible to discover how his contemporaries felt about him very close to the time of his death, from public knowledge about his scandalous reputation and from popular hearsay. This must be the start, or first layer, of the investigation.
What emerges initially is a tale of controversy, sensationalism, disputed facts, and a good deal of eighteenth-century moralising about social justice and personal cruelty. Three documents vividly substantiate this: a poem, a letter, and an advertiser’s announcement. Each of these is an early example of the memorial process at work, by which a private life begins to take its place in a nation’s history.
Savage’s life was seen from the start as containing the elements of a crime thriller, which would appeal to a popular as much as a literary readership. Savage, as his very name seemed to suggest, was a poet-killer with a peculiar violence in his relationships. His story begins in an aristocratic divorce court, emerges in the world of publicity and the new monthly magazines, continues in a murder trial, touches upon fashion, politics and royalty, and ends suddenly and disgracefully in a debtors’ prison. More than any other English poet since Christopher Marlowe, Savage’s reputation was notorious and his true identity problematic, though for very different reasons to Marlowe’s. His ‘case’ was exemplary to his age, even if no one could quite agree what it exemplified, or who – ultimately – was to blame for its tragedy.
In the month of his death, the Gentleman’s Magazine, which had to some degree sponsored the final stages of his career and had a literary investment in his story, published a verse ‘Epitaph on the late R------d S------e Esq’. This emphasised the tragic aspects of the affair. It referred obliquely to his poetic powers, his wit, his illegitimacy, his trial, his laureateship, and his ‘cruel’ and vengeful mother.
The anonymous Epitaph writer begins by invoking Phoebus, the god of Poetry – which is like placing a classical bust at the entrance of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Savage’s raffish life is grandly presented as a contest between two powerful patrons: unworldly Poetry and Worldly Fortune, who are necessarily hostile to each other.
Whom Phoebus favour’d, on whom Fortune frown’d
Lies deep beneath this consecrated ground.
Savage the name: – he was design’d by Fate,
That err’d at his conception, to be great.
And such he was, in boundless wit and pride;
Tide and heir his Mother’s lust deny’d.
Within the tight, gavotte-like turns of mid-eighteenth-century occasional verse, the Epitaphist plays decorously on the idea of Savage’s ‘greatness’. Here was a great poet perhaps, but not a great social success. He was a man of great wit (in the sense of intelligence, rather than humour); but also great in his pride, arrogance and self-esteem – qualities which can blunt wit or make it blind. Then comes the scandalous, journalistic punch line: he should have been great in family title and financial inheritance too, but this was ‘deny’d’ him by his mother and – more outrageous yet – by his mother’s ‘lust’. This seems to be a libellous attack on the Countess of Macclesfield.
The Epitaphist now moves swiftly on to enlist sympathy for Savage. He suffered from poverty and dangerous misfortunes, yet he continued to write poetry. His mother cruelly withheld her support, but his Queen eventually saved him, and Heaven pitied him and forgave him, so that a greater justice eventually prevailed in his life.
… His life was Want, yet could his duteous Verse
The Cruel’s praise, that help withheld, rehearse.
Danger extreme*, th’unhappy lawless knew,
And woes he felt, as woes were all his due.
Twice sov’reign Mercy found, a Queen* to save,
From pitying Heaven, to end his cares, a grave.4
It is remarkable that the Epitaphist assumes that all his readers will be familiar with the circumstances of Savage’s trial, more than fifteen years before, and merely puts asterisks against the references to it, with a knowing footnote. His cause is still alive, even if the ‘unhappy’ poet himself is dead. Injustice, as much as poetry, has already granted him a kind of immortality.
Even though published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, a largely pro-Savage paper, the Epitaph is by no means a panegyric. It accepts that Savage is a controversial figure, that the woes he felt were all his ‘due’, that he brought trouble on himself, that he was ‘lawless’ and that his ‘cares’ drove him to a premature grave. Nevertheless he remains a man of genius, a poet hounded by ‘the Cruel’ woman and suffering some ill-defined persecution and social injustice. Savage is not merely a case; he is already a cause.
The second document is an open letter to Edward Cave, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine under his pseudonym Mr Urban, announcing a forthcoming biography of Savage. It appeared within three weeks of Savage’s death in Bristol, and immediately demonstrates how topical the cause was. As the announcement explains, the anonymous writer will defend Savage’s memory, and use his personal knowledge of the subject to produce an intimate portrait. It will be the work of a friend and confidante.
Mr Urban: As your Collections show how often you have owed the Ornaments of your poetical Pages, to the Correspondence of the unfortunate and ingenious Mr Savage, I doubt not but you have so much regard to his Memory as to encourage any designs that may have a tendency to the Preservation of it from Insults or Calumnies, and therefore with some Degree of Assurance intreat you to inform the Publick, that his Life will speedily be published by a Person who was favoured with his Confidence, and received from himself an Account of most of the Transactions which he proposes to mention to the Time of his Retirement to Swansea in Wales.5
The letter adds that the Life will also give details of his imprisonment in Bristol, and use extracts from Savage’s own private letters and those of his friends: ‘materials still less liable to Objection’.
Great emphasis is laid on the speed at which this Life will be produced, and the accuracy of its sources. Other potential biographers are warned off the subject. The readers must also beware of any rival, romanticised versions which rely on speculation or fiction.
It may be reasonably imagined that others may have the same Design, but as it is not credible that they can obtain the same Materials, it must be expected they will supply from Invention the want of Intelligence, and that under the Title of the Life