Among the many biographies written by Samuel Johnson the most readable one, the one of greatest intrinsic interest, must surely be his early, anonymously published Life of Richard Savage (1744). It has usually been regarded as a fine illustration of Johnson's theory, announced much later,¹ that a biographer should have eaten and drunk and lived familiarly with his subject. That view of the Savage is proper. But it may also prove illuminating to consider it in connection with Johnson's practice, well established in the eight biographies he had already published, of compiling his work from previous printed accounts, with some effort to reconcile, interpret, and moralize the material. The superiority of the Life of Savage is of course due most of all to its containing Johnson's affectionate recollections of his frail and talented friend. But its literary quality also derives from its printed sources, and these are not uninteresting.

The biography of the man who called himself Richard Savage has recently been rewritten with as much fullness as now seems possible.² The bizarre story he told about himself Samuel Johnson and many other of his contemporaries believed to be true. But other people, including James Boswell, who had done some investigating, and the author of the latest full-length scholarly biography of Johnson,³ have regarded Savage as either a brilliant liar or a self-deluded man. Boswell's dictum that the world must “vibrate in a state of uncertainty as to what was the truth” stands up so well that I do not wish to challenge it. My purpose is, rather, to examine the story of Richard Savage as it was offered to the world in a series of printed versions, to notice how the biographical details accumulate and how the characterizations of the two main figures change. By this procedure we shall perhaps see Johnson's narrative in a new light, if not Savage as well. I shall consider only what appeared in print, ignoring all the substantiating and enriching material that Savage may have passed out in his reportedly fascinating and interminable conversations. It is the printed, the “literary,” history that I shall survey, the growth on paper of the legend from 1715, when the Weekly Packet of November 5-12 reported the arrest of “Mr. Savage, natural Son to the late Earl Rivers,”⁴ on the charge of having a treasonous pamphlet in his possession, to 1744, when the name Richard Savage had a one-hundred-eighty page biography attached to it.

The first time Savage announced, as author, that he was a “Son of the late Earl of Rivers” was in 1718. This was at the head of a feeble poem by him printed in Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Theophilus Keene. In 1719 the dedication of his play Love in a Veil, issued with the same honorific identification, added two crumbs of biographical information: his mother, he asserted, was “the Countess of—” and his father left him not a penny. Obviously the reader must pity this new young author and condemn the heartless (and notorious) Earl Rivers.

But in 1719 also appeared an abbreviated yet specific account of the main “facts” that Savage was henceforth to insist upon. This was in one of Edmund Curll's biographical publications, The Poetical Register, edited by Giles Jacob. The lives of living poets printed in it, Jacob asserted, were supplied by the poets themselves. The account of Savage runs as follows:

This Gentleman is a Natural Son of the late Earl Rivers, by the Countess of Macclesfield (now Widow of the late Colonel Bret) she being divorc'd by the House of Lords from the Earl of Macclesfield on Account of His Birth. Earl Rivers himself stood Godfather, gave him his own Name, and saw it enter'd accordingly in the Register-Book of St. Andrew's Holborn; and for whom, no doubt, he would have liberally provided, had not some unfair Methods been put in practice to deceive him, by a false Report of his Son's Death.

To his own Mother he has not been the least oblig'd for his Education, but to her Mother the Lady Mason; she committed him to the Care of Mrs. Lloyd his Godmother, who, dying before he was Ten Years old, out of her tender Regard, left him a Legacy of 300 1. which was embezzled by her Executors.⁵

Two plays are mentioned as by Savage; the earlier one, Woman's a Riddle, having been slightly altered by “Mr. C. Bullock,” was published, we are told, without any credit to the real author. It happens that the prompter at Drury Lane published in 1750⁶ a quite different account of the origin of this play and said it was not Savage's at all but Bullock's and Lucy Price's.⁷ But aside from that disputable matter, Savage's story was now presented in a way to win favor for Rivers, who was then dead, to arouse the most hostile suspicions of Mrs. Brett, who was alive and known to possess a fortune, and of course to elicit once more our compassion for the poor author. Hereafter Savage's supposed father, Rivers, fares well in the histories though he is not given much prominence.

There seem to have been no printed additions to Savage's biography during the next five years unless we include some verses of ecstatic admiration contributed by him to the second volume of Mrs. Eliza Haywood's unimpressive novel Love in Excess (1720) which suggest that he had lost his heart or his mind or, at the least, his capacity to feel embarrassment.

But 1724 was a crucial year for the history of the histories of Richard Savage. In March appeared anonymously a long book, of fiction presumably but declared in the preface to have a foundation “in truth of fact; and so the work is not a story, but a history.” Written as autobiography, the book, called The Fortunate Mistress, tells the secret history of the beautiful Roxana, deserted by her fool of a husband and left penniless with five children to feed. By a trick she manages to deposit the children with unwilling relatives, and she elopes to France with her landlord; there after his death she becomes the mistress of a French (or German) prince. Eventually he leaves her—in great wealth. After an absence of fifteen years she returns to England and for the first time grows curious about her children. She sets up a grand establishment in London and eventually becomes mistress to a royal person. Keeping her identity unknown, she sends her devoted maid Amy to find and aid her children. Two are dead, and the rest suppose she is dead. Roxana means to keep them thinking so, lest she be exposed, shamed, and her fortune taken from her. One son, she learns, is apprenticed to a “mean trade.” She rescues him from that disgrace and with the expenditure of a large amount of money enables him to become a prosperous merchant in Sicily. She regrets that she cannot make herself known to him. But there is a frightful discovery: Roxana's daughter Susan has by chance been a kitchen maid in her grand house and once had a chance to see her face during her days of greatest luxury as a courtesan. Amy has to handle Susan carefully as she gives her money. (“I was too tender a mother,” says Roxana, who had forgotten five children for fifteen years, “to let this poor girl go about the world drudging, as it were, for bread.”)⁸ But Amy's care is insufficient, especially as she once goes to see the children in Roxana's coach, and Susan grows curious; she gradually evolves the theory that Roxana is her mother.

Roxana now retires from fast life and lodges with a kind Quaker lady. One of her former lovers, a Dutch merchant, turns up, and she is painfully conscious of the discrepancy between his love for their illegitimate son, whom he would like to acknowledge, and her own total neglect of him. Meanwhile, Susan pursues Roxana, trying in every way to discover her identity and then, when she thinks she knows it, to get Roxana to acknowledge her. She forces herself into Roxana's company, and once Roxana almost yields to a natural motherly impulse (quite unexpected in this mother) to embrace her. She tries to silence the girl, who is very persistent, by cutting off the funds she has been sending her through Amy. Roxana refuses to see the girl again under any circumstances. The girl watches her house “night and day” hoping to get a chance to speak to her; she grows maudlin, and though she knows of her mother's adultery, she promises that she will be silent about it, for all she wants is to be owned by her dear mother. Susan is sure, Roxana learns, that “I was so tender and compassionate, I would not let her perish after I was convinced that she was my own flesh and blood.”⁹ Because of much more of this insistence Amy decides that the girl must be murdered, and in spite of Roxana's objections she brings it about that we hear no more of the girl. Then Roxana discharges Amy. Soon Roxana, thinking the worst and “with a heavy, bleeding heart for my poor girl,”¹⁰ departs for Holland with her (illegal) husband, and the book suddenly ends. As Charles Lamb said, it is these latter adventures that constitute the most absorbing part of Defoe's novel.¹¹

The reader may notice a faint resemblance between one or two circumstances in Jacob's account of Savage and in Defoe's account of Roxana. But they are not striking. The case is different when one looks at the version of Savage's story that Aaron Hill offered in his Plain Dealer, when Defoe's story was in print. Two months after the appearance of The Fortunate Mistress, Hill, an amiable and generous man into whose circle of associates and beneficiaries Savage had now entered, printed in Plain Dealer number 15 (May 11, 1724) an essay on the topic of the contrast of indulgent fathers and cruel mothers. First the reader is asked to compare, more or less abstractly, a loving father and “a Mother who can look with Indifference (not to say with Aversion) upon the Child of her Body.” How could one explain such an unnatural woman? What “Monstrous Turn in the whole Course of the Blood, what Prodigies over-ruling the whole Rational and Animal System, can Eraze from a Mother's Heart all those fond Records of Tenderness which the Hand of Nature must have engraven there, in behalf of the Being which received its first Principle of Vitality so near it, and its immediate Preservation from it.”¹² The discussion turns to a particular young gentleman whose rich parents have abandoned him and who possesses literary talents. Next Hill prints a queer poem “By Mr. Savage” which vaguely and sadly presents the author as “Depress'd, Obscur'd, Unpitied, and Unprais'd” and goes on to sketch the outline of a fine man who is—or could be—patron to a poor poet or painter. Hill's scheme obviously was to get someone to step forward with a donation and claim the portrait for himself. Apparently no one did.

During the next six weeks the Plain Dealer regaled readers with coquettes and dreamers and parlor philosophers and bereaved fathers but nothing more about Mr. Savage. Yet that depressed gentleman had seemingly expected something else from his friend Hill, and in the kind of arrogant letter that he was in the habit of addressing to his benefactor from time to time¹³ he accused Hill of forgetting him. Hill wrote back to Savage on June 26: “The effects of my affection for you are, yet, to be experienced: for I have, hitherto, but loved you.”¹⁴Plain Dealer number 28, published on the same day, reveals “the effects” of Hill's affection.

The paper begins, as number 15 did, with generalities, this time about the beauty of the grief of bereaved mothers. Then follows a long epistle from “Amintas,” who must be Hill, intended again to provoke someone to become patron to Savage. A touching sketch, without names, of his whole history is given—how his mother robbed him not only of his two noble fathers but also, “in direct Opposition to the Impulse of her Natural Compassion, upon mistaken Motives of a false Delicacy, shut her Memory against his Wants, and cast him out to the severest Miseries; without allowing herself to contribute even such small Aid, as might at least, have preserv'd him from Anguish; and pointed out some Path to his future Industry.” But the most shocking repulses and injuries from her throughout his life

have not been able to eraze, from his Heart, the Impressions of his filial Duty: Nor, which is much more strange! of his Affection. I have known him walk, three or four times, in a dark Evening, through the Street this Mother lives in, only for the Melancholy Pleasure of looking up, at her Windows, in Hopes to catch a Moment's Sight of her, as she might cross the Room by Candle Light.¹⁵

Amintas is sure that if the lady only knew of the pleasure her son takes in describing her humanity as the rest of the world knows it she would give him some token of kindness. Then Amintas copies out some overpowering verses: “Hopeless, abandon'd, aimless, and oppress'd,” Alexis casts himself across his bed in grief over his mother's cruelty in abandoning her loving son.

Yet has this sweet Neglecter of my Woes
The softest, tend'rest, Breast, that Pity knows!
Her Eyes shed Mercy, wheresoe'er they shine;
And her Soul melts, at every Woe,—but mine.

The verses, here attributed to Savage (that is “Alexis”) and claimed by him in the signed letter from him printed in Plain Dealer number 73, he afterwards told Johnson were really by Hill.¹⁶ The author ends this part of the paper with remarking that Alexis is miserable while the lady his mother is “gay, and fortunate.”

That Amintas-Hill had read The Fortunate Mistress cannot safely be asserted. But the two “true” histories are interestingly similar at certain points even though Defoe tells his story from the angle of the hunted, haunted mother and Hill from that of the pursuing child. What is most remarkable about Hill's narrative is what The Fortunate Mistress exploits, a peculiar psychological relationship of mother and repudiated child. Like Roxana, Mrs. Brett is portrayed as both tender-hearted and, in her treatment of the child, coldly cruel. In both stories the child is emotional to the point of being maudlin. Both children watch the house of the kind-cruel mother for a chance to see her. Both think the mother would act differently if she only realized what the feelings and the forgiving attitude of the child were. (And though I use the word “child,” Susan is about twenty and Savage about twenty-six at the time we are to contemplate their tearful pleas.) Susan's very much upset mother and Savage's “sweet Neglecter” of his woes both strike one as oddities, though Defoe has more space than Amintas and makes both parent and child more plausible.

Touching as the story was intended to be, Plain Dealer number 28 presumably failed to capture Mrs. Brett or any other important benefactor.¹⁷ So Savage and Hill projected another scheme for raising money for Alexis, a volume of Miscellaneous Poems to which John Dyer and others might contribute. This item in Savage's biography was announced in Plain Dealer number 73 (November 30, 1724), which printed a signed letter from him identifying him with the Alexis of number 28 and explaining that he is submitting to the editor of the Plain Dealer some “convincing Original letters” that will reveal him as an even more pitiable figure than was portrayed in paper number 28. But what the letters tell of his life is not revealed; nor was this most important material for Savage's “true” history ever printed or even specifically summarized. The allusion to it was of course intended to frighten Mrs. Brett or her relatives into a cash payment.

The next person to print a history of Savage was his sometime-friend, Eliza Haywood. In 1725 she issued Memoirs Of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia in which was inserted a thirty-page “History of Masonia, Count Marville, and Count Riverius” that tells the Countess of Macclesfield's and Savage's stories in the lively and lustful manner for which Mrs. Manley's and Mrs. Haywood's “secret histories” were famous. In this version the Countess is a lovely, virtuous deserted wife who sinks into adultery partly because of the plotting of her maid. At first a passionate adulteress, after being divorced from her unkind husband she grows self-conscious, thoughtful, regretful. After loving comes loathing, which extends even to her children. The illegitimate son is passed on to a gentlewoman and after her death to a gentleman. Other new details are that his mother tried to have the master of a ship decoy him aboard and carry him to some remote country; that after forcing his mother into a gift of money he let her off from the rest of the promised payment when he heard she was in financial straits; that he is good-natured fellow; and that he has served as pimp to an evil matron whose lover he has been. “Memoir,” said Mr. Bickerstaff,¹⁸ “is French for a novel,” and Savage's story in this version with its somewhat lurid additions must at least be called interesting. Only certain of the details flattering to Savage were retained by his later biographers.

The next account of his life is his own, and a strange affair it is! It appeared the following year as a kind of preface to Miscellaneous Poems and Translations. By Several Hands. Publish'd by Richard Savage, Son of the late Earl Rivers.¹⁹ The first six pages, witty and unabashed, give Savage's report on the Macclesfield scandal, the principals being mentioned by name, with biting scorn poured over his “Mamma.” The only new biographical detail is that after Mrs. Brett failed in her effort to have Savage shipped off “to one of the Plantations” and when he was “about Fifteen,” her “Affection began to awake,” and she tried then to apprentice him to a shoemaker, whose “very honest and reputable Occupation” he refused to accept. Savage next prints fifteen pages of quotation from The Plain Dealer numbers 28 and 73 with their lacrimose picture of his unfailing love for his sweet mother. The effect upon the reader of this preface, in which Savage's brutal wit totally defeats the purpose of Hill's tearful sentiment, is to make one despise both Savage and his alleged mother. As for the single new detail, the effort to degrade a nobleman's son by apprenticing him to a shoemaker, the tone of voice in which Savage relates this crime leaves one not quite sure that it isn't chiefly a piece of scornful wit. Incidentally, the historian may recall that that other fortunate mistress, Roxana, after a fifteen-year absence found her son apprenticed to a “mean trade” but rescued him from that ignominy. He may also recall that Hill in Plain Dealer number 28 had lamented that Mrs. Brett had not even troubled to point out “some Path to his future Industry.”

Biographies of Savage continued to appear annually. The reason for the twenty-seven-page Life of 1727 was that, late on a night in November, a visit of Savage and two friends to Robinson's coffee-house led to a brawl in the course of which Savage killed a Mr. Sinclair. Convicted of murder and condemned to death, Savage was of course an appropriate subject for the sort of journalistic biography that certain publishers, especially John Applebee, were in the habit of providing for the “heroes” of Newgate. Criminal biographies of the early eighteenth century, whether of Jack Sheppard or Jonathan Wild or some less famous figure, varied in tone from the pert and jocular to the sober and penitential. The Ordinary of Newgate had the license to sell for his own profit the last words and dying confessions of condemned malefactors;²⁰ his compositions might be expected to extract the moral of the story. Some of the pamphlets were written “straight,” relying upon quotation for any waggery or pathos. A swift narrative of circumstantial detail, a picture of the hero as brave and imperturbable (if not impudent, as Defoe said Wild was),²¹ and an amazing, shocking history are the expected features of these biographies.

Apparently Savage scornfully declined to comply with a bookseller's offer to publish an account of his life.²² But accounts appeared anyway.²³ One of them bore the title, The Life of Mr. Richard Savage. Who was Condemn'd with Mr. James Gregory, the last Sessions at the Old Baily, for the Murder of Mr. James Sinclair … With some very remarkable Circumstances, relating to the Birth and Education, of that Gentleman, which were never yet made publick. It was issued by J. Roberts, presumably before the royal pardon was obtained for Savage. It differs from the conventional criminal biographies partly because Savage was an unusual malefactor and partly because its authors²⁴ had the several previous lives to work from. They draw freely on The Plain Dealer and the preface to Miscellaneous Poems for heart-rending detail, using the “facts” but not the sarcasm in Savage's part of the latter. Eliza Haywood's succulent narrative is ignored altogether. The authors embroider and add a good deal—about the “poor Woman” who bred Savage up as her own, about Savage's being sent to a grammar school at St. Albans, about his literary works, including Woman's a Riddle, about Steele's proposal that Savage marry his illegitimate daughter and Savage's missing the chance by talking too freely about the Steeles. Twice it is said that Savage was given money by a lady, the first time by a “Lady, whose Duty it seem'd to have been to take some Care of him,” the second time by a lady whose identity the authors likewise do not settle but instead choose “to leave the Reader to guess at.” When the authors are not borrowing from the earlier lives one gathers that they are repeating gossip, some of which they are afraid or unable to make definite. Though not sensational journalists, they shape the story throughout to win compassion for the condemned hero as a harmless, much abused, unusually tender-hearted man.²⁵

The printed treatments of the affairs of Richard Savage in the next two years, somewhat puzzling works, tell us chiefly about emotional life. In March, 1728, J. Roberts, who had published the 1727 biography, issued a seven-page poem entitled Nature in Perfection; or, The Mother unveil'd: being a Congratulatory Poem to Mrs. Bret, upon his Majesty's most gracious Pardon granted to Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the late Earl Rivers. What we have here is a complete trick, a piece of bitter irony sustained as expertly as that of Swift's Modest Proposal published the following year.²⁶ The poem relates the story of Mrs. Brett's terrible grief when Savage was arrested for the Sinclair murder, her going everywhere, even to the jailor, to plead for his life, her refraining from visiting him in prison only because it would have been too agonizing, and her ecstasy at the news of his pardon, ecstasy that might make her forgetful of everything, even her child. This remarkable piece of double talk would presumably be read by the uninitiated with complete sympathy for Mrs. Brett, “the softest of her Kind.” And as far as this poem alone is concerned, if the lady now wished to assume the decent role of affectionate mother, it was not too late. But the modern reader, familiar with Johnson's life of Savage, will recognize not only the relics of Hill's sentimental supplication but also a devastating attack on the lady.

Three weeks later the mask was off, though the sentimental appeal incongruously survived. The Bastard. A Poem Inscribed with all due Reverence to Mrs. Brett, once Countess of Macclesfield. By Richard Savage, Son of the late Earl Rivers suggests better than anything else he wrote the extremity of Savage's neurotic determination. He advises Mrs. Brett to acknowledge him; he says, rather to our surprise, that he has “ever behaved [him]self towards her like one, who thought it his Duty to support with Patience all Afflictions from that Quarter”; alluding indelicately to the moment of his begetting, he rebukes her for causing all his troubles. Then the poem relates his thoughts and emotions about his killing Sinclair. Here is psychological biography of a crude but striking sort.

Among the printed accounts of Savage's life we should notice a paragraph in Defoe's Augusta Triumphans, also of 1728, about a “sober young Nobleman” who is plainly our man. New information is that Savage, “a Vagabond, forced to every Shift,” had starved for many years.²⁷ Defoe, concerned in this pamphlet with the problem of foundlings and foundling hospitals, imagines how Savage, if treated better as a child, might “have fill'd some handsome Post in the Government with Applause, and call'd as much for Respect, as he does now for Pity.”

The biographical additions in Savage's long poem The Wanderer, published the following year, have to be dug out from what Johnson with imperfect accuracy called this “heap of shining materials.” Among the obscurities of Canto III are an apostrophe to “Ye cruel Mothers,” a passage on unfortunate children, including babes murdered to preserve a mother's fame, much about neglected and insulted poets, as well as a ghastly re-creation in the mind of a “conscious Murd'rer” of the bloody circumstances of a killing. What seems to be a new biographical—or autobiographical—item occurs in an account of a “languid Youth” which goes as follows:

Unstrengthen'd Virtue scarce his Bosom fir'd,
And fearful from his growing Wants retir'd.
(Oh, let none censure if, untried by Grief,
If amidst Woe untempted by Relief!)
He stoop'd reluctant to low Arts of Shame,
Which then, ev'n then he scorn'd, and blush'd to name.
Heav'n sees, and makes th'imperfect Worth its Care,
And chears the trembling Heart, unform'd to bear.
Now rising Fortune elevates his Mind,
He shines unclouded, and adorns Mankind.

Johnson, quoting part of this passage, supposed that in it Savage refers to his own conduct and to such “disreputable practices” as borrowing money from his acquaintances without any intention of repaying it. Pimping, alleged by Eliza Haywood, is the only “art of shame” that any previous biographer had mentioned. Whatever the modern psychologist might make of Canto III, the ordinary reader in 1729 would have to think of Savage's inner life as extraordinarily unhappy.²⁸ And in An Author To be Lett, of the same year, probably by Savage, there is a collection of scandalous anecdotes about hack-writers and journalists that suggest further shameful and miserable possibilities for the neglected poet. In this pamphlet, by the way, one finds insulting remarks about Giles Jacob, Edmund Curll, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe, all of whom had helped to sail Savage's story down the, alas, muddy river of time.

The last years of Savage's life, miserable ones spent partly in “the liberties of the Fleet”²⁹ and partly in Wales and Bristol, provoked no more printed biographies. He died on August 1, 1743, and J. Roberts, who by publishing two accounts of Savage and Mrs. Brett already had something of a vested interest in those two much-discussed people, immediately planned a third account. Probably Edward Cave was also in on the plan from the outset.³⁰ Roberts, who had another story of a nobleman's bastard also to put into print, must have felt fairly confident of the popular interest in such stories and thought an author's name superfluous for either. The life of Savage was entrusted to the then unknown Samuel Johnson, and the life of James Annesley, whose story is curiously similar to Savage's, was written by someone whose talents and whose plan of composition were more like those of the authors of the 1727 Life of Savage.

Annesley was, he said, the legitimate son of Arthur, Lord Altham, grandson of the first Earl of Anglesea. He had been put out to nurse as a babe. His parents had quarreled and were separated for some years. Altham's mistresses and his brother Richard eventually persuaded Altham that James was not of his begetting and then that it would be to his advantage financially to get rid of the boy. So James was shipped off to the West Indies, perhaps without his father's knowledge, and sold as a slave. When Altham died in 1727 his brother took possession of his property and later became Earl of Anglesea. In 1740 James Annesley at last managed to return to England to try to claim his due. The case was rendered more sensational by his killing a man (in 1742), though in the resulting trial he was acquitted. Various people came forward to assist him in his claims, and at least one of the three accounts of his affairs printed in 1743³¹ was intended to win friends for him. It was a two-volume work entitled Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Return'd from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America … A Story founded on Truth, and address'd equally to the Head and Heart. Employing easily recognized substitutes for the real names of the people involved, the book presents Annesley's story with an abundance of romantic detail about the Altham household, the mistresses and servants, Altham's greedy, ambitious brother, the boy's life among the slaves and slave-owners of America, and the circumstances of both the trial for murder and the legal proceedings in November, 1743, to eject the uncle from the title and estates. The work shows its fictional element most plainly in the large amount of direct dialogue. But what is remarkable in this key-romance is that though there are numerous love-affairs, they are not treated erotically. Yet sober moralizings are few and brief. Installments of a digest of parts of the first volume ran in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1743 from February to June.³²

The literary problem faced in 1744 by Roberts' two authors of biographies of putative noble bastards was on the surface much the same. Obviously both lives, already made familiar by a variety of printed accounts, could be dashed off hastily, in one of two or three different styles, to appeal to the public that read criminal biographies and rogue stories. Or they could be aimed at those who liked scandalous histories of the lives of the rich and lofty. In the latter class of books some attention to inner experience would be welcome, if not obligatory. And this latter genre could not but have gained some prestige from the recent success of Pamela, that incredibly persuasive and intimate book of pretended fact about a maid-servant and a rich and well connected gentleman.

Both of Roberts' authors determined to stay on the side of “fact,” moderation, and respectability. And both accept the alleged nobleman's story as true. A Letter to a Nobleman In the Country, On the Affair of Mr. Annesley. Containing A Full and Distinct Account of that Extraordinary Transaction … Together with Some Particulars not hitherto mentioned. By an Impartial Pen … Printed for J. Roberts (1744) is a short pamphlet of thirty-four small pages. It is a straightforward narrative, sympathetic to its subject. Though there is not enough room for psychological development, the author is momentarily stopped, as Aaron Hill and Samuel Johnson were, by the spectacle of an unnatural parent. “It is very strange,” writes the author, thinking of Altham's eagerness to claim all the Anglesea estate, “that these sort of Motives should induce a Man to be cruel to his own Flesh and Blood, and even to form a Design of abandoning and disinheriting his only Son. A Son, whose Birth had given him so much Joy, and who had held the principle Place in his Affection for so many Years.”³³

Johnson's problem with his Life was greater, for he had known Savage, as the other author seems not to have known Annesley, and felt the pathos of his story sincerely. Furthermore, having already earned part of his living in recent years by compiling compact, “straight,” and not very exciting biographies of a physician, an admiral or two, a priest, and several scholars, he was now more ambitious as a biographer. Perhaps he was more sensitive to the literary pressures of the day. In an early announcement³⁴ that a new life of Savage was in progress Johnson made the customary promise that this work would be reliable. In addition he cut off all the hopes of readers of “Memoirs.” Other writers may be planning, “under the Title of the Life of Savage, … only a Novel, filled with romantick Adventures, and imaginary Amours,” but the book Roberts is to publish will be for lovers of truth and wit. What Johnson actually did was to combine genres, creating in effect a new one.

The early paragraphs in his Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers … Printed for J. Roberts are written in the rapid, dry manner, seemingly utterly reliable, of the better criminal biographies. The fact is that as Johnson goes over the Macclesfield divorce and Savage's early years, his language is taken practically verbatim from the 1727 Life. At the time of the divorce, according to the earlier authors, Mrs. Brett “had her Fortune, which was very considerable, paid back to her again, with full Liberty of marrying whom she pleased, which Liberty she made use of in a very short Time.”³⁵ Johnson repeats: her “fortune, which was very great, was repaid her, and who having, as well as her husband, the liberty of making another choice, was in a short time married to Colonel Brett.”³⁶ “Lady Mason,” wrote the earlier authors, “whether at her Daughter's Desire, or prompted by her own natural Compassion, I shall not pretend to determine, transacted every Thing with the Nurse.”³⁷ Again Johnson repeats: “the Lady Mason, whether in approbation of her design or to prevent more criminal contrivances, engaged to transact with the nurse. …”³⁸ But in the course of relating this part of the story Johnson interrupts to comment on its unnaturalness: “It is not indeed easy to discover what motives could be found to over-balance that natural affection of a parent, or what interest could be promoted by neglect or cruelty.”³⁹ Two more lengthy sentences of shocked bewilderment follow that remind one strongly of Aaron Hill's asking “what Monstrous Turn,” what “Prodigies over-ruling the whole Rational and Animal System” could cause a mother to look with aversion on her own child.⁴⁰ Johnson's numerous footnotes indicate that he is drawing on the Plain Dealer papers, the 1726 preface, and the 1727 Life. But without the footnotes a comparison of the texts, both as to the “facts” and the tone of their presentation, would reveal the sources of Johnson's early paragraphs. The striking novelty about this new true history of Savage is that it eventually paints in the dark side of his character quite devastatingly besides repeating the accumulated sentimental (and possibly fictitious) detail.

To say, thinking of certain portions of this work, that it is a late, sophisticated addition to the early eighteenth-century library of criminal biographies would misrepresent the whole. But there is enough truth in the remark to make it suggestive. The swift account of family facts at the outset, a careful report of the murder and the printing of a speech from the trial, plentiful appeal to our admiration for the hero's courage and to our pity and understanding for his bad luck—all these belong to the genre. The work begins with generalities, emphasizes the man's “genius” as well as reporting his faults and his rejection of good advice, and ends with a paragraph justifying the work by its moral lesson for readers similarly circumstanced. Some dishonest tricks practiced on innocent men by the depredators of society are exposed. The story part ends with the colorful hero's last words uttered in the squalor of a prison and with the pleasing thought that the jailor was a kind man.

But to describe Johnson's Savage as a criminal biography does it great injustice even if one is thinking not only of the ordinary “true lives” but also of Defoe's Moll Flanders, in which the element of psychology, of emotional and intellectual experience, is very much augmented. Like Defoe and the author of Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Johnson creates a narrative of considerable amplitude and pours into his work an abundance of specific biographical detail. In the expressiveness of some of the personal detail—Savage's planning the typography of a book not yet written, Savage's resenting the gift of a much needed suit of clothes because he was not allowed to summon the tailor—one may imagine he sees a resemblance between Johnson's method and that of “the great master of nature,” Sallust, whose character-drawing he admired.⁴¹

Still another distinguishing feature of the Savage is some forty pages of quotation from Savage's poems, letters, and prefaces. No other biography of Johnson's before the “Lives of the Poets” (1779-81), not even the biographies of Ascham (1763) and Sir Thomas Browne (1756), allowed much room to his interest in literature; so in this respect also the Savage is extraordinary.

But by quoting so freely from Savage's works, in which maudlin self-pity and either plaintive or angry references to Mrs. Brett are almost continuous, Johnson gave to his work a kinship with a still different class of publications, the histoire scandaleuse. Not, of course, that he gave the usual development to the lascivious possibilities of the story, for indeed he did not develop them at all, unless when quoting Savage. Nor does he disguise the names of any of the people, whether living or dead, whom he has occasion to mention.⁴² The Savage is, if one may be allowed the phrase, a moral histoire scandaleuse. There are, as I have suggested, some departures from the traditions of the genre. What Savage did on those occasions when a pension was paid and he vanished to spend it in a hurry; what his relations were with women, especially with Mrs. Haywood and Mrs. Sansom, if not also Mrs. Oldfield; what his early activities in the Jacobite cause brought him in personal associations; and what he learned in the vagabond, shameful parts of his life—all this Mrs. Manley, whether she knew the facts or were obliged instead to imagine them, would never have omitted.

None the less, Johnson's Savage is a book about “the passions.” In the preface to The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) Mrs. Manley had extolled the “Little Histories of this Kind” for their character-portrayal, meritorious because the authors knew how to reveal “Nice Distinctions” among men and “the Motion of the Heart.” In February, 1744, the editor of The Champion praised the new Savage not just for accuracy in the facts but also for its reflections which “open to us all the Recesses of the human Heart.”⁴³ Modern critics have continued to praise Johnson for his full and vivid re-creation of the complex personality of his subject. But it seems unlikely that his depiction of Savage's inner nature would have been so ample had there not been published by 1744 so many volumes of “secret history”—emotional secret history—as well as so many rather emotional accounts of Savage's story. It should be recognized in addition that the characterization in Johnson's account is not quite that of the accumulated tradition. By modifying or ignoring chronology—the outrageous, brutal Bastard is placed after the lacrimose Wanderer instead of before it—and by other small changes, Johnson diminishes, though only slightly, the effusive unsteadiness of Savage's feelings for his supposed mother as revealed in the material already in print. After the first quarter of the book we forget the resemblances of Savage to Roxana's Susan. Yet Johnson's characterization is unquestionably dependent upon the sentimental and psychological version of Savage's story presented in The Plain Dealer, which, read in connection with Savage's many autobiographical passages, creates an unusual vision of emotional disturbance as well as arousing feelings of sympathy and disgust, both of which Johnson has amplified. Johnson happened to have the sort of temperament for which the spectacle of a deep struggle between strong passion and moral conscience held great appeal. He liked Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, Rowe's Fair Penitent, and Richardson's analytical novels. In these works are to be found not the “characters of manners” which he later deprecated in the novels of Fielding but the “characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart.”⁴⁴ The history of Richard Savage as Johnson saw and told it was rich in revelations of “nature,” and though biography, his narrative gains by what it shares with contemporary fiction, especially of the emotional variety. Yet there are also a few reminders in it of the facetious pages of Fielding and Smollett, as when he writes of his imperturbable hero that “he was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never be communicated to his money.”⁴⁵

In the histories of Savage from the outset, part of the interest was due to the elusive figure of Mrs. Brett, the former countess. In real life the lady had refused with remarkable firmness to become involved in any public repudiation of Savage or in any other public connection with the man who insisted he was her son. In the biographies she is sometimes portrayed as the charming adulteress, resembling the frail but lovely heroines of some early eighteenth-century “she-tragedies.” Savage oscillated between that sort of depiction of her and the portrayal of her as a fortunate mistress, selfish, cruel, and gay. In his writings he never relinquished the image of her as tender-hearted and perhaps about to claim him.

But there is no uncertainty in Johnson's attitude toward her, whatever the awkward “facts” he found to relate. He writes a great deal about her. Since he believed the printed report, no doubt emphasized by Savage, that she had on one occasion given Savage money, he judges that she must have been impelled into so doing only by “the prospect of sudden affluence” in the South Sea speculations. Drawing on the published lives and probably on additional talk from Savage, Johnson makes Mrs. Brett heartless, barbarous, pointlessly malignant, happy to embitter all his hours and to starve him if she could. Oddly enough, in repeating the printed report that she had once tried to apprentice Savage to a shoemaker, Johnson rejects Savage's version of the ending of the episode and says that her effort was successful, though like Roxana Johnson regards this sort of fate as unworthy of the mother's son. Throughout, Johnson's indignation is intense; the only descent into colloquial expression in this formal-mannered work comes in a moment of rage over the lies Mrs. Brett “had the front” to spread about Savage.⁴⁶ Brooding on the lady's conduct—for unlike Roxana she did not explain why she would not acknowledge her child, and unlike James Annesley's father and uncle she could not have been driven by financial reasons—Johnson is led into inventing his own account of her psychology. We must, therefore, regard as prose fiction those parts of this true history which assert that Mrs. Brett “resolved to neglect” Savage,⁴⁷ that her “whole interest” was spent against him,⁴⁸ that on occasion she was “hardened in her aversion,”⁴⁹ that she “rejoices to see him overwhelmed with calamities,”⁵⁰ and that when The Bastard appeared, “though she felt no pain from guilt,” she probably for the first time “discovered a sense of shame.”⁵¹ Johnson could have had no real information about the personal feelings of the lady who upset him so much and to whom, because she was still living, he addressed, in one paragraph, a fearful rebuke.⁵² Unlike Hill and Savage and Mrs. Haywood, Johnson refuses to sentimentalize her. But he cannot drop her. So he creates her in a new image, worse than any of the previous ones and more shocking than the pictures of Roxana or Moll or even the old bawds in Richardson's novels. Cymbeline's queen and Lady Macbeth, though cruel, have not her lust. Perhaps the elder Annesleys as seen in the Memoirs are the nearest to her, but they are men. Mrs. Brett is Johnson's own terrible vision of the debauched lady of fashion. Some years later he declared that the novelist must never corrupt readers with a characterization of a hero who, though wicked, is seductively attractive.⁵³ And in writing a life, said Johnson in one of the not wholly consistent statements he made on the subject of biography,⁵⁴ one may do more harm than good by telling the whole truth. In his Life of Savage, however fictional his account of the inner experience of Mrs. Brett, Johnson put an end to the ambiguous portrayal of this notorious lady.⁵⁵ No one can say certainly which of the various depictions of her was most exact. In Johnson's account she is more consistent than in Hill's and Savage's, and in that respect the work satisfies Johnson's familiar requirement that literature should present the general and universal. But it is the susceptible, alluring, unsteady, emotional woman suggested by Hill, Savage, and Mrs. Haywood that reminds us of the struggling Roxana, Calista, Eloisa, and, with certain important differences, Clarissa.

Although it is not my purpose to carry to the end the history of the histories of Richard Savage, it should be said that the subject does not terminate in 1744 with respect either to the “true” biographies or the fictional developments. The year after Johnson's Savage appeared, there was published at the end of an edition of Defoe's Fortunate Mistress a continuation of the story which exploited the situation of Susan's pursuit of her guilty, frightened mother. The daughter achieves what Savage never did: she at last triumphantly enters the presence of her mother to expose her, and she turns Roxana's kind husband unrelentingly against her, thus bringing her life down in ruins. It is hard to believe that the author was not prompted to his work by Johnson's biography, and the hostility towards a cruel mother aroused in the reader of Johnson's book would be more than satisfied by the misery brought upon her counterpart in the other book.

Johnson's biography continued to reappear—in 1748, in 1767, in 1769. But that is not all. When the Life was reprinted in the collected Works of Savage in 1775 and 1777 there was a significant modification. By omitting almost all of the quotations from Savage's verse—the emotional lines and the flattery addressed to his friend Aaron Hill, the angry satire on Judge Page, both the maudlin and the melodramatic passages from The Bastard and The Wanderer, the effusive praise of Tyrconnel contradicted in later paragraphs of text, and the very pathetic appeal to the Queen—the publisher or author toned down considerably the suggestions of uncontrolled emotionalism in the portrait of the poet. And when Johnson prepared the Savage for inclusion in his “Lives of the Poets”⁵⁶ he omitted in addition the lines from The Plain Dealer in which the tearful poet, “Hopeless, abandon'd,” begged for love and aid from Mrs. Brett, the “sweet Neglecter” of his woes. Also omitted in 1781 was the contradictory harsh wit at her expense which Savage had put at the beginning of his Miscellaneous Poems. As Johnson in the original composition had made Mrs. Brett more consistent (and more heartless) than she had been in previous depictions, so in this final version Savage was brought a little closer to probable humanity. The repellent and unrestrained self-pity and the unsteady passionateness toward his alleged mother which Johnson's first picture necessarily acquired from the man's own writings have been moderated; in the version of the biography which most modern readers have seen Savage appears somewhat less outrageous. And Johnson's final deletions carried the work farther away from the sentimental tone and shameless intimacy of the histoires scandaleuses. But they diminished the fullness and accuracy of the original characterization. Fortunately the omissions did not otherwise damage the subjectivity, the revelation of “the Recesses of the human Heart,” which Johnson had developed beyond what he had found in the earlier biographies of Savage.

Notes

1. Johnson's numerous pronouncements on the subject of biography are quoted or summarized by Bergen Evans in “Dr. Johnson's Theory of Biography,” RES, X (1934), 301-310.

2. Clarence Tracy, The Artificial Bastard, A Biography of Richard Savage (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).

3. Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1944), p. 79. But James L. Clifford in Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1955), p. 208, seems, following Tracy, to accept Savage's claims as true.

4. See James R. Sutherland's communication in the Times Literary Supplement, January 1, 1938, p. 12.

5. The Poetical Register, pp. 297-298.

6. W. R. Chetwood, The British Theatre (Dublin, 1750), p. 164.

7. See Tracy, pp. 38-41, for further discussion of this question.

8. Roxana; or the Fortunate Mistress, in The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Daniel DeFoe (Oxford, 1840-41), XI, 211.

9. Ibid., p. 334.

10. Ibid., p. 353.

11. The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London, 1935), II, 371.

12. My quotations are from The Plain Dealer … Publish'd Originally in the Year 1724. And now first Collected into Two Volumes (1730). The above quotation is from I, 113.

13. See the letters from Hill to Savage printed in the European Magazine, VI (1784), 189-194, 277-282, and the commentary on them by Alan D. McKillop in Notes and Queries, New Series, I (1954), 388-391.

14. European Magazine, VI, 277.

15. The Plain Dealer (1730), I, 223.

16. See Johnson's Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744) as reprinted in Lives of the English Poets By Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), II, 342.

17. See Tracy, pp. 72-73, for a discussion of the doubtful possibility that Mrs. Brett did assist Savage at this time.

18. Tatler number 84.

19. The preface seems to have been deleted from some copies of the book. See Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1727), pp. 7, 19, and Tracy, pp. 77-78, 94-95 and n.

20. Frank W. Chandler, The Literature of Roguery (Boston, 1907), I. 171; William R. Irwin, The Making of Jonathan Wild (New York, 1941), p. 81 and n.

21. See the “Introduction” in The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the late Jonathan Wild (1725), in Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, ed. George A. Aitken (1895), XVI, 239.

22. See Tracy, pp. 57-58.

23. There were apparently two accounts of the trial printed in 1727 (The Old Bailey Sessions Papers [December] and The Proceedings at Justice Hall) and a third in 1735 (Select Trials at the Session House in the Old Bailey), besides the Life (1727) which I describe. See Lives of the English Poets, II, 345n. and 354n.; Tracy, pp. 83-84n. Presumably all three accounts dealt chiefly with the trial, not with the rest of Savage's history.

24. Johnson said that the Life was written by “Mr. Beckingham and another Gentleman” (Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage [1744], p. 47n.).

25. In a letter to Elizabeth Carter in 1739 (see Montagu Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter [Boston, 1809], pp. 49-51) Savage said that this Life was reliable except for two or three errors, one of which was that the “mean nurse” was “quite a fictitious character,” his real guardian being Mrs. Lloyd, “a lady that kept her chariot and lived accordingly.” Also, Steele's proposal he had always declined. Mrs. Oldfield, Savage indicates, was one of the benefactresses whose identity the 1727 Life had left the reader to guess at.

26. G. B. Hill (Lives of the English Poets, II, 376n.) attributes this clever poem to Savage, but Mr. Tracy (p. 93n.) does not.

27. Page 13.

28. Canto V also seems to contain veiled autobiography, dealing this time with Savage's Jacobite phase.

29. Tracy, p. 138.

30. Cave was the one who paid Johnson for the work (see Lives of the English Poets, II, 435-436), and his name rather than Roberts' appeared on the title page of the second edition (1748). See Clifford, Young Sam Johnson, pp. 273-275.

31. The British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books lists for 1743 The Book of the Chronicle of James the Nephew by “Belshazzar Kapha” dealing with Annesley as well as The trial at bar between Campbell Craig, lessee of J[ames] A[nnesley], Esq., plaintiff; and Richard, Earl of Anglesey, defendant. In 1742 there was also The trial of J[ames] A[nnesley] … at the … Old Bailey, on … 15 July, 1742, for the murder of T. Egglestone. I have not been able to see any of these works nor another one of 1744 listed by Pickering and Chatto, Ltd., booksellers, in their catalogue 356 (1954); Fortune's Favourite: Containing Memoirs of the many Hardships … of Jacobo Anglicano, a young Nobleman … The several persecutions of his uncle after his return. There were two other printed accounts of Annesley's trial in 1744.

32. Gentleman's Magazine, XIII, 93-94, 204-205, 306-307, 332.

33. Page 19.

34. In The Gentleman's Magazine for August, 1743, p. 416.

35. Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1727), p. 4.

36. Lives of the English Poets, II, 323.

37. Life of Mr. Richard Savage, p. 6.

38. Lives of the English Poets, II, 324-325.

39. Ibid., II, 323.

40. See p. 580 above.

41. Rambler number 60.

42. An exception to the usual frankness of Johnson's narrative is his neglecting to identify Pope as the persistent promoter of Savage's affairs in his last years. See Lives of the English Poets, II, 412 n., 419 n.

43. Thus quoted in The Gentleman's Magazine, XIV (1744), 78.

44. See Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934-50), II, 49. It is worth noticing that Boswell has Johnson use a phrase in praising Richardson's novels that The Champion used in praising Johnson's biography.

45. Lives of the English Poets, II, 403.

46. Ibid., II, 352.

47. Ibid., II, 329.

48. Ibid., II, 337.

49. Ibid., II, 342.

50. Ibid., II, 338.

51. Ibid., II, 378.

52. Ibid., II, 353.

53. Rambler number 4.

54. Boswell's Life of Johnson, III, 155.

55. Cf. Rambler number 164: “It is particularly the duty of those who consign illustrious names to posterity, to take care lest their readers be misled by ambiguous examples.”

56. Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, IX (1781).