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Product Description
Times Literary Supplement
'...brilliant introduction by Holmes...taken together these books provide a valuable insight into the way biography has evolved...'
Product Description
Lives that Never Grow Old
Part of a radical new series –edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Johnson’s book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.
When he first came to London, young Samuel Johnson was befriended by the flamboyant poet, playwright and blackmailer, Richard Savage. Walking the backstreets at night, he learned Savage’s extraordinary story – supposedly persecuted by a ‘cruel mother’, sentenced to death for a murder in a brothel, appointed Volunteer Poet Laureate to the Queen, and finally broken and outcast.
With this moving and intimate account, Johnson created a brilliant black comedy of 18th-century Grub Street which revolutionised English biography by its psychological realism. Yet Savage’s destructive charm and delusions of grandeur sometimes even threatened to entangle Johnson himself.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The cover on this book is all wrong. This hefty, middle-aged man is Boswell's Johnson, the Great Cham of Literature, with the extraordinary learning and the largely conservative views. The Johnson who wrote the "Life of Richard Savage" was a brilliant, moody, resentful, failed young school teacher from the Midlands trying to make ends meet as a Grub Street hack for the "Gentleman's Magazine." He is in his early 30s, bony, ungainly, ugly, poor, possessed of spectacular intellectual powers, and bristling under a sense of being unrecognized and unappreciated. To this vulnerable young genius, the charismatic, worldly, self-destructive poet Richard Savage appeared as a figure of rare glamor and a victim of a hideous injustice. And Johnson swooned.
For two years, Johnson and Savage haunted London's lower depths in the 1730s as a sort of literary Faust and Mephistopheles. Then, a few months after Savage's death in debtor's prison, Johnson anonymously published "The Life of Mr Richard Savage." It was Johnson's first best seller and is still one of Johnson's most immediately compelling works. Savage claimed to be the illegitimate son of the Earl Rivers by Lady Macclesfield, insisting throughout his life that at around age 16 or 17 he found letters revealing the secret of his birth, though he was never able to produce them. Lady Macclesfield, much more plausibly, insisted that the young man was an impostor. And the war of wills between them filled the tabloids of early eighteenth-century London literally for decades. It only added to the scandalous fascination of the story that Savage ran a man through in a drunken brawl, was sentenced to hang, and was then pardoned by the King. Savage made, and alienated, friends, of high and low rank, with remarkable facility; was impulsively generous and compulsively mendacious; and tended to drink up in short order any money he earned or, more often, mooched. He also seems to have had spectacular gifts as a conversationalist, since otherwise it is hard to imagine the skeptical, shrewd, honest Johnson so convinced that his cock-and-bull account of his birth was true.
The "Life of Savage" moves at a great clip; it is recklessly entertaining. The subject, again, is the stuff of tabloid journalism, though the work itself is written with extraordinary power and subtlety in Johnson's tensile steel prose. It is clearly a partisan biography - Johnson loved Savage deeply - but though he may have been duped by Savage's story, he had few illusions about the man's character. The better Johnson comes to know Savage, the more profoundly mixed a character he appears to him. It is, in part, the revelation of how wildly mixed a character Savage is that keeps the reader turning pages.
This is, to my knowledge, the only edition of the "Life of Savage" printed by itself. Johnson included the biography in his famous "Lives of the Poets," and that's usually the only way to purchase it. In fact, in America it can't be found by itself at all, so I had to replace the copy I bought in Oxford from the UK Amazon site and pay the extra to have it shipped back to Chicago. This edition also has an excellent introduction by Richard Holmes, whose beautifully written and engaging "Dr Johnson and Mr Savage" is the obvious companion piece to this volume. If one has not read Johnson before, this is an ideal place to start.
For two years, Johnson and Savage haunted London's lower depths in the 1730s as a sort of literary Faust and Mephistopheles. Then, a few months after Savage's death in debtor's prison, Johnson anonymously published "The Life of Mr Richard Savage." It was Johnson's first best seller and is still one of Johnson's most immediately compelling works. Savage claimed to be the illegitimate son of the Earl Rivers by Lady Macclesfield, insisting throughout his life that at around age 16 or 17 he found letters revealing the secret of his birth, though he was never able to produce them. Lady Macclesfield, much more plausibly, insisted that the young man was an impostor. And the war of wills between them filled the tabloids of early eighteenth-century London literally for decades. It only added to the scandalous fascination of the story that Savage ran a man through in a drunken brawl, was sentenced to hang, and was then pardoned by the King. Savage made, and alienated, friends, of high and low rank, with remarkable facility; was impulsively generous and compulsively mendacious; and tended to drink up in short order any money he earned or, more often, mooched. He also seems to have had spectacular gifts as a conversationalist, since otherwise it is hard to imagine the skeptical, shrewd, honest Johnson so convinced that his cock-and-bull account of his birth was true.
The "Life of Savage" moves at a great clip; it is recklessly entertaining. The subject, again, is the stuff of tabloid journalism, though the work itself is written with extraordinary power and subtlety in Johnson's tensile steel prose. It is clearly a partisan biography - Johnson loved Savage deeply - but though he may have been duped by Savage's story, he had few illusions about the man's character. The better Johnson comes to know Savage, the more profoundly mixed a character he appears to him. It is, in part, the revelation of how wildly mixed a character Savage is that keeps the reader turning pages.
This is, to my knowledge, the only edition of the "Life of Savage" printed by itself. Johnson included the biography in his famous "Lives of the Poets," and that's usually the only way to purchase it. In fact, in America it can't be found by itself at all, so I had to replace the copy I bought in Oxford from the UK Amazon site and pay the extra to have it shipped back to Chicago. This edition also has an excellent introduction by Richard Holmes, whose beautifully written and engaging "Dr Johnson and Mr Savage" is the obvious companion piece to this volume. If one has not read Johnson before, this is an ideal place to start.
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