Ghostwriting, reworking old material, writing about subjects one
doesn’t know for little or, in some cases, no pay: Dr. Johnson’s
Grub Street sounds a lot like today’s publishing industry, doesn’t
it? So says Laura Miller anyway, in a recent
Salon essay about the ink slingers, penny a liners,
and fourth-rate bibliopolists who lived on the physical outskirts
of London near Moorfields, where refugees had fled the Great Fire
of 1666, and labored along the threadbare edges of the city’s
literary scene.
Richard Savage, poet, pamphleteer, and Grub Street warrior
extraordinaire, figures into Miller’s essay as the thankless quill
driver behind “An Author to be Lett,” the pseudonymous memoir of
one Iscariot Hackney. Hackney, who serves as Savage’s stand-in for
any number of eighteenth century London scribblers, is a
prototypical, well, hack who languishes in obscurity dashing off
books about crime, politics, French literature, and beau monde
gossip while dreaming of the day when he “might make a Fortune
writing for the stage.” Miller compares Hackney’s plight to that of
today’s underpaid, underfed adjective jerker (“every laptop-toting
hopeful camped out at a Williamsburg cafe to work on a screenplay”)
and concludes, probably rightly, that there is nothing new under
the literary sun.
Her essay, however, is mostly about Edmund Curll, the
notoriously under-handed publisher (and subject of an excellent
2007 biography by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers), so she can be
forgiven for not making as much as she might have out of the
extraordinary figure of Richard Savage himself. Savage, with the
exception of Samuel Johnson, is the most noteworthy writer to have
worked in Grub Street at its height (or nadir) during the ministry
of Robert Walpole, the great Whig statesman whom Johnson and
Savage, both dyed-in-the-wool Tories, naturally despised. (Later in
life, Johnson would come to think somewhat more highly of Walpole,
just as he more or less renounced his youthful Jacobitsm.)
Much of what is popularly known about Savage comes from
Johnson’s own Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage,
published in 1744, less than a year after Savage’s death in a
Bristol debtor’s prison. This great book (Walter Jackson Bate
called it the first “critical” biography) about the life of a hack
writer was itself a piece of hack-work: Johnson claimed to have
written 48 of the Life’s 186 pages in a single sitting and
drew mainly from Savage’s own recollections (though he also
collected Savage’s letters and sought interviews with others who
had known him). The clearly established facts of Savage’s life are
few. Thus, how seriously one takes the story (at least as I relate
it here) depends upon the extent to which one thinks the author of
The Vanity of Human Wishes capable of credulity. Certainly
some of what Savage told Johnson engenders suspicion (he seems to
have gotten wrong the date of his birth and misremembered the name
of his godmother), but there is not enough counter-evidence to
suggest that Johnson’s book comes very wide of the mark, especially
in its account of Savage’s adult life.
Savage claimed to have, and there is at least evidence to
suggest that he really may have been, the son of Richard Savage,
4th Earl Rivers, and Ann Macclesfield, the wife of Charles Gerard,
2nd Earl of Macclesfield. Lady Macclesfield, intent upon leaving
her husband, confessed her infidelities to him in 1697. An
annulment of their marriage was secured by an Act of Parliament the
next year. Ann then remarried and placed her infant son under the
care of another woman.
Johnson knew almost nothing about the circumstances of Savage’s
childhood, and subsequent historians and biographers have found
very little to supplement the account that Johnson supplies. His
foster mother Anne Portlock was a woman of very limited means, and
his necessities were provided for by his grandmother Lady Mason and
his godmother, whom he called “Mrs Lloyd,” but who may actually
have been named Dorothea Ousley. Lady Mason arranged for the boy to
attend a grammar school in Hertfordshire, where he seems to have
achieved some measure of success as a pupil. According to Johnson,
Savage “always spoke with respect of his master,” which for him
suggests that “the mean rank, in which he then appeared, did not
hinder [Savage’s] genius from being distinguished, or his industry
from being rewarded.”
On his death-bed in 1712, it appears that Earl Rivers asked for
the boy’s whereabouts, hoping to leave him £6000, a sum now equal
to several millions. Savage’s mother, by then the wife of Henry
Brett (later lieutenant-colonel in an infantry regiment and
sometime Tory MP for Bishop’s Gate, Shropshire), told her former
lover that the boy was dead. Such casual (and unprofitable, for the
money did not pass on to her) malice was inexplicable to Johnson,
who loathed cruelty, especially when its object was innocent:
This was therefore an act of wickedness which could not be
defeated, because it could not be suspected: the Earl did not
imagine that there could exist in a human form a mother that would
ruin her son without enriching herself…
From here Johnson’s narrative progresses very rapidly. The boy
eventually became a shoemaker’s apprentice and soon took up the
last himself, apparently for several years. When his foster mother
died, however, Savage claimed that he discovered among her papers a
letter from his grandmother in which the circumstances of his birth
were discussed. He set out to meet his mother, who refused him
entry to her home:
Savage was at the same time so touched with the discovery of his
real mother that it was his frequent practice to walk in the dark
evenings for several hours before her door, in hopes of seeing her
as she might come by accident to the window, or cross her apartment
with a candle in her hand.
I wish it were not the case, but I find Savage’s prowling around
the Bretts’ home after dark sinister and obsessive. (Where I see
evil stars, Johnson sees “assiduity and tenderness,” however.) At
any rate, nothing came of his attempts to make contact with Anne
Brett, and so Savage, “reduced to the utmost miseries of want,” and
“having no profession” (he seems to have abandoned cobbling by this
time), “became by necessity an author.”
By the time Johnson met up with him in the late 1730s, Savage
had written numerous pamphlets, plays (some of these translated
very loosely from Spanish, one of the many languages with which he
seems to have become somewhat inexactly acquainted), and poems, one
of which, The Bastard (1728) was luridly autobiographical.
He had also secured (and lost) a yearly pension of £200 from Anne
Brett’s nephew John Brownlow, a member of the Irish peerage; acted
unsuccessfully in a tragedy of his own composition; made himself
useful to Alexander Pope by scooping up rumors for use in the
Dunciad; and killed a man named James Sinclair. His
hand-to-mouth bohemianism is well-described in this very
atmospheric passage from Johnson’s Life:
He lodged as much by accident as he dined, and passed the night
sometimes in mean houses, which are set open at night to any casual
wanderers, sometimes in cellars, among the riot and filth of the
meanest and most profligate of the rabble; and sometimes, when he
had not money to support even the expences of these receptacles,
walked about the streets till he was weary, and lay down in the
summer upon a bulk, or in the winter, with his associates in
poverty, among the ashes of a glass-house.
Johnson seems to have taken immediately to Savage, who by then
was widely considered one of London’s greatest conversationalists
and went about in a striking scarlet cloak and shoes in need of
mending calling himself the “Volunteer Laureate” (Colley Cibber,
the actual Poet Laureate at the time, is famous today mainly as the
model for Pope’s King of Dunces); and together they would walk the
London streets at all hours, too broke to eat or rest indoors,
railing against the Whig dogs. Much was done by Johnson (even amid
his own desperate poverty) and others to help Savage; there were
innumerable schemes for subscriptions, stagings, and pensions, but
he spent money much faster than he could earn (or rather receive)
it, and his debts mounted.
Eventually, it became clear that if Savage stayed in London any
longer, he would find himself in choky; and so, with the help of
Pope, it was arranged that he would move to Wales and live on the
very generous sum of £50 per year. Once there, he planned to revise
his works and publish them in a new complete edition; moreover he
would (he was sure) do so amid the most pleasant possible
surroundings:
He had planned out a scheme of life for the country, of which he
had no knowledge but from pastorals and songs. He imagined that he
should be transported to scenes of flowery felicity, like those
which one poet has reflected to another; and had projected a
perpetual round of innocent pleasures, of which he suspected no
interruption from pride, or ignorance, or brutality.
Unsurprisingly, Savage did not make good on his literary
promises, nor did he much prosper from the change of scenery. After
leaving London (“with tears in his eyes,” according to Johnson) in
1739, he went not immediately to Wales but first to Bristol, where
he would die a few years later in 1743 in, of all places, a
debtor’s prison. Yet Johnson manages to end the Life on a
note of high defiance, with a kind of anti-apologia for
his friend, who (at least if his claims concerning his origins are
to be credited) did not live half as well as his birth entitled him
to have done but thought, talked, and wrote much better than anyone
would have expected given the circumstances into which he was
forced:
If he was not always sufficiently instructed in his subject, his
knowledge was at least greater than could have been attained by
others in the same state. If his works were sometimes unfinished,
accuracy cannot reasonably be exacted from a man oppressed with
want, which he has no hope of relieving but by a speedy
publication. The insolence and resentment of which he is accused
were not easily to be avoided by a great mind, irritated by
perpetual hardships, and constrained hourly to return the spurns of
contempt and repress the insolence of prosperity; and vanity may
surely readily be pardoned in him, to whom life afforded no other
comforts than barren praises, and the consciousness of deserving
them.
Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered
away their time on the down of plenty, nor will any wise man
presume to say, “Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have
lived or written better than Savage.”
