If we look at William Hogarth’s famous prints of London life, which date from Sam’s first decades in the city, we see its cobbles, signs and lamps, its paupers and fanatics, charlatans and tipplers, the mad and the sick, the textures of material profusion, the chaos of the crowd. But not all London is in Hogarth, and for a more Johnsonian flavour of the city we can turn to the Gentleman’s Magazine. Its issue for March 1737 contains an account of 300 footmen rioting after being denied access to their usual places at the Drury Lane playhouse; the report mentions that they fought their way to the stage door, forced it open, and wounded twenty-five people. The following month it notes that the cost of rice has gone up dramatically as a result of a trade embargo, and a terse report of the sessions at the Old Bailey on Saturday 23rd records eight people being sentenced to death and thirty-three condemned to be transported to the colonies. A glance at April’s bills of mortality shows that more than half the month’s deaths were children under the age of five. In May there is a reference to Dick Turpin, ‘the noted Butcher Highwayman’, who ‘almost every day this month, committed some robbery or other’; another small item concerns a mad ox that swam across the Thames, injured a couple of bystanders when it reached the shore, and was shot to prevent further nuisance. In June, ‘the officers of excise gave information against 300 persons for selling punch’.
Sam would have read all this with less and less amazement. Depressed by the filth and hubbub around the Strand, where he first lodged, he moved for a few months to Greenwich, which was comparatively sedate.8 Perhaps he remembered Daniel Defoe’s claim that it had the best air and views in England, as well as the best conversation. But the point of moving to London had not been to find a salubrious spot to roost. When one chooses to live in a city, it’s in order to experience its swarming density, to collaborate and be exposed to unfamiliar stimuli, to step outside oneself, to share in its madness and productive antagonisms. The retreat to Greenwich had to be temporary.
By the end of the year he appeared committed for good to life in the capital. There would later be one last attempt to secure a teaching job in the Midlands, but that autumn Tetty felt able to join him in London. They lodged close to Oxford Street, first near Hanover Square and then in the house of a Mrs Crow on Castle Street, two minutes from Cavendish Square. This, you might think, was a fashionable address, but the square was embarrassingly unfinished, twenty years after building work had begun. In 1734 James Ralph, in a critique of London architecture, had cited its ‘neglected condition’ as a perfect example of how ‘the modern plague of building’ could produce dismal results, with many projects abandoned.9 An all too familiar case, this, of a scheme of improvement that ends up being an eyesore, and Sam was quick to take an interest in the relationship between the city’s fabric and the conditions of its people. Ultimately this would lead him to reflect on how London’s infrastructure could be upgraded, and it would crystallize more than twenty years later in his support for the architect John Gwynn’s proposal that the design of inner London be subject to central planning, not the piecemeal efforts of speculators. In the short term, he was simply unimpressed with the mess and muddle of his surroundings, and he was adamant that once Irene was a hit they could move somewhere better.
But he had to find ways to scrape a living. With the draft of Irene stashed in a drawer, he tried a more fluently populist style of writing, and it was not long before he gained notice – with a wittily disillusioned poem about his new home. London, published on 12 May 1738, pictures a city full of fiery fops, raging rabbles, prowling lawyers and thieves waiting to ambush unwary pedestrians. These images tumble from the mouth of Thales, a self-pitying poet who is leaving the town for a new home in the country; he addresses a younger man, who is planning to stay. He complains that in London the houses keep collapsing, hangings are so frequent that there isn’t enough hemp to produce the necessary rope, and everything is for sale – even smiles. If you are really unlucky, a drunk will stab you for a joke.
This was a sensationalist image of the city, but not one that entirely misrepresented it. Plenty of Londoners could relate to Thales, and plenty who saw him as a caricature of an embittered satirist were nevertheless amused by his strident commentary on the city’s corruption. The first printing sold out in a week, the second inside a month, and literary London was curious to know the identity of the poem’s unnamed author. Its best-known couplet is ‘This mournful truth is everywhere confess’d, / SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESS’D’. The next line, ‘But here more slow, where all are slaves to gold’, makes it clear that the problem, though universal, is felt very keenly in the city. Yet the decision to set just one of the poem’s 263 lines in capitals makes it stand apart from its context and look like a motto. Or perhaps it’s an idea for an epitaph: Sam imagines that, if he were to die right now at the age of twenty-eight, this would be a suitable statement to chisel on his gravestone. It is not so much a ‘mournful truth . . . everywhere confess’d’ as his mournful truth, and feels like a lament for the time he has lost, in London certainly but also before arriving there.
That his condition was truly one of ‘poverty’ is open to question. Yet by convention poets were regarded as beggarly – a generation later, one of the members of Sam’s circle, Oliver Goldsmith, could write that ‘The poet’s poverty is a standing topic of contempt’ – and for the next few years, whenever Sam earned money by his pen, lax management and generosity to others meant that too much of it slipped through his fingers.10 In London his references to poverty form part of a complaint about the gulf between ordinary citizens and their unprincipled overlords. He writes with feeling about society’s grossest insults being directed exclusively at the poor. ‘All crimes are safe, but hated poverty,’ he claims, and ‘This, only this, the rigid law pursues’. By contrast, the rich persist in fraud, knowing they’ll get away with it. Sam attacks the corruption of a parliament full of hypocrites who are easily bought, and attacks the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who can resist no opportunity to increase his personal fortunes. In the end, London is less about the physical detail of the city than about the moods it provokes: outrage, disgust, and an exhilaration that his attempts at satirical aloofness can’t quite disguise.
By the time he wrote London, Sam was often consorting with other writers, inhabitants of Grub Street, a place associated with plague, penury and, on account of its proximity of the lunatic asylum at Bedlam, mental infirmity. In his Dictionary he would identify the physical space it occupied: ‘originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems’. But Grub Street was also a state of mind: to be there was to be a literary hopeful, trying to scrape a living. The name makes one think of worms and maggots; since the seventeenth century, grub has been a word for a person with unlovely manners or limited abilities, and Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1731 defines the plural grubs as ‘a kind of white, unctuous, little pimples or tumours’. Inevitably we picture not just hacks manufacturing third-rate literature – people who can’t hold their ink – but also filth and parasitism. Here, in the valley of the shadow of books, one might learn a lot about human motives.11
8
In which we observe the peculiarities of Friendship, manifest in Samuel Johnson’s association with the notorious Mr Richard Savage
Among Sam’s Grub Street associates was Richard Savage, a poet whose best-known works were The Bastard and The Wanderer – titles that sum up the main themes of his existence. Much about Savage’s life remains unclear, but among the details that are certain two stand out: in 1727 he killed a man in a fight at a Charing Cross coffee house, and in 1743 he died penniless in a Bristol jail. Altogether more mysterious were his origins. He alleged that he was the illegitimate son of another Richard Savage, the fourth Earl Rivers, and his mistress Anne, Countess of Macclesfield. His adult life was devoted to trying to prove his nobility. Pursuing Lady Macclesfield with violent persistence,
he lurched from one drunken accident to the next. Obsessive, vain and malicious, but also a wit and an outrageous mimic, he had twin talents for making friends and for turning friends into enemies, and seemed doomed to repeat a pattern of intimacy, extravagance, insult and disaster.
Sam fell in with him in 1738, at a time when Savage often spent his nights roaming the London streets. By Sam’s account, he would sleep ‘in cellars among the riot and filth of the meanest and most profligate of the rabble’ or outdoors on the warm ash from a workshop. Down in the dirt with the derelicts and vermin, he seems the archetypal literary vagabond/bum, a precursor of the Beat poets, hungry and delinquent but convinced that he holds the keys to the palace of wisdom. It is tempting to identify him with the character of Thales in London, although it’s not clear that Sam had met Savage at the point when he wrote the poem. Rather, the great testament to the two men’s relationship is Sam’s Life of Savage, published in February 1744. This is a story of Grub Street and also very much a Grub Street product, yet even as it depicts its subject at his lowest points it transcends the squalor of that world, dignified by the precision of its insights.1
What Sam doesn’t mention, though, is that he joined Savage on his weary night-walks, and that in the dark they talked at length. Their conversation was of a sort I associate with pubs: they spoke of dethroning authority and creating new forms of government, and as they set the world to rights – for that is what we’d now call it – they clung to the principle that, no matter what, ‘they would stand by their country’. Those words stink of booze. But the truth is that Sam and Savage often couldn’t afford to drink much, and they were full to the brim with fervour, not ale or brandy. Sam’s new friend was an egalitarian and a critic of imperialism. In politics, as in all other things, Savage was erratic, but he could be counted on to rail against the cruelty of colonial exploitation. Sam was repeatedly struck by ‘the extent of his knowledge, compared with the small time which he spent in visible endeavours to acquire it’. The two men shared an appreciation of poetry and the belief that society had not properly acknowledged their talents. They may also have bonded over their feelings of resentment towards their mothers; each thought that he had not been accepted by the person whose acceptance would have meant most to him. Savage was the closest Sam came to having a mentor in London; while for the most part his example was cautionary, he was a rich source of information about how the literary world worked. Richard Holmes, who has written sympathetically about their relationship, likens Sam at this time to a young Faust, guided by Savage’s Mephistopheles, and pictures them ‘walking in enemy territory’ – the west of London, associated with power and privilege, into which the two of them crept ‘like spies in the night, their very presence a provocation’.2
For a couple of years they enjoyed a degree of closeness that would later puzzle and appal the guardians of Sam’s reputation. Boswell hints that Savage caused Sam to do some sleazy things that he would later find distressing to recall. When Sam told Boswell that ‘There is a certain degree of temptation which will overcome any virtue’, he wasn’t thinking of his time with Savage, but he spoke with a knowingness born of experiencing temptation rather than just speculating about it. We can imagine Savage’s bad habits being at least briefly contagious. Yet if Sam regretted some of his actions during those vagrant years, he was nonetheless grateful for Savage’s friendship and the truths about human nature that it taught him. The Life of Savage concludes with an account of its subject’s personality: he ‘appeared to think himself born to be supported by others’ and was ‘the slave of every passion’; ‘easily disgusted’, he retained hatreds ‘tenaciously’, and ‘very small offences were sufficient to provoke him’. Mingled with these criticisms, though, are tributes to his ‘eminently exact’ judgement, ‘open and respectful’ style of conversation, powers of focus (‘his attention never deserted him’) and readiness ‘to reject that praise to which he had no claim’. These are recorded partly in order to exonerate a figure who certainly needs exonerating, and partly in order to account for how Sam could be close to such a person. He needed to explain this to others, and also to himself.
Sam suggests that Savage’s vindictiveness meant that his friendship was of limited value, but the Life of Savage is a celebration of the paradoxes of friendship. To be a friend is to have a relationship that is at the same time binding and informal, robust and fragile, voluntary and exigent, luxuriant and sacrificial. Friendship involves discovery but also stability; it is closer than the relationships we inherit yet more combustible, and manages to feel both precious and ubiquitous. At any moment it seems fully formed, yet at every moment it is under development. And though we for the most part know just who our friends are, the precise features and definition of friendship are blurry, suggesting something that is simultaneously happily snug and completely without boundaries.
Time spent with Savage was an education in such contradictions – or rather, in the difference between what seems incongruous and what feels right. In 1743, the year before the Life of Savage and the year of its subject’s death, Sam published ‘An Ode on Friendship’, a poem that praises its ‘guiltless joys’. He explains that love is the ‘parent of rage and hot desires’ and that it finds its way into both ‘the human and the savage breast’, which it ‘inflames alike with equal fires’. By contrast, the role of friendship is as a guide that helps us negotiate the ‘darksome’ journey of life; its pleasures are ‘all transporting, all divine’. It is tempting to see this as a comment on his unlikely bond with Savage. A similar reference to that bond seems to be embedded in the Dictionary, for, as Richard Holmes has pointed out, the few words that it illustrates with quotations from Savage are elevate, expanse, fondly, lone, squander, sterilise and suicide, and these ‘to an analyst . . . might suggest something about the nature of that most puzzling relationship’.3 Associating with this prodigal figure deepened Sam’s sense of the perils, both practical and psychological, of life as an author, and made him apprehend more keenly the need for some means of relieving life’s darkness.
There is no greater cliché of social life than ‘Opposites attract’. Yet even if we resist the glibness of that two-word formula, we know the allure and interest of friendship (and other kinds of relationship) with people whose qualities and inclinations differ from our own. Who hasn’t enjoyed being taken somewhere entirely unfamiliar by an acquaintance whose tastes and attitudes seem exotic? Who hasn’t observed the frisson of gracious disagreement? More than that, though, friendship is an escape from oneself that is also a journey deeper into oneself. It begins, as C. S. Lewis observed, when we say to another person ‘What! You too?’ (the words are in many cases thought rather than spoken), and at its rarest moments it creates a sense that part of our soul resides in another person’s body. Yet it’s the sharing across a divide, not the closing of the divide, that makes the magic; the pleasure of friendship is not finding someone who does everything just as we do it, but finding intense similarities with someone who, in also differing from us, can enlarge who we are.
In Savage we find a classic story of pretence solidifying into conviction – of a person who makes a claim about himself with such persistence that he erases the truth from his mind. But Sam sees instead a story that calls for compassion; the impulse to judge is always matched by sympathy, and he reflects that no one could sensibly say, ‘Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.’ At one point he offers the dry comment that Savage, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an author’. This is both a good joke and an unpleasant truth. It’s a vignette of himself and of the literary sphere they both inhabited. But it’s more than that. For although the impulse to write is fired by passions for reading, sharing, inveighing and inventing, writers are very often people constitutionally and temperamentally unsuited to other forms of work. In Savage’s struggles he saw the likeness of his own, and saw too a man within whom vice and virtue were perpetually at war – not a unique ord
eal, but a paradigm of the human condition.
Savage’s most significant poem was The Wanderer, which in its strange and meandering way praises a life of quiet contemplation. Its title would influence Sam’s decision to call his first great series of moral essays the Rambler. The name wasn’t in line with their sobriety, but it suited their improvised nature – as well as affording him a handy degree of flexibility about subject matter. For while the Rambler essays aren’t loosely discursive, they are the product of a life spent roving and loitering, and of Sam’s needing every few days to translate his excursions (around the city or literature) into a piece he could publish. Like the wanderer, the rambler gives the impression of being homeless; both are open and vulnerable figures, haunted by uncertainty about whether they can sustain their journey, yet ready to know the vastness of the world. Long after Savage’s death, Sam continued to think of life as an unorthodox pilgrimage, and kept in mind some spirited words from his friend’s best poem: ‘Great my attempt, though hazardous my flight.’
9
A resting-place – where the reader may take refreshment, and where vexed matters are resolved
The picture that emerges here of Sam’s early experience of London is at odds with the most famous of his sayings – ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ There is evidence that Sam, who spoke these words with more than a trace of his native Staffordshire accent, was sometimes tired of London; his first few years in the city made him homesick for the West Midlands, and in old age he liked to withdraw periodically to quieter places. But he uttered this judgement in 1777, when Boswell wondered if living full-time in the city might dampen appreciation of its ‘exquisite zest’, and by then he had been in London forty years; piqued by Boswell’s doubts, he was saluting the place that had been the backdrop for all his success. In any case, what he meant by these words was a little different from what we now understand. In 1777, London was Europe’s largest city, having within living memory surpassed Constantinople, and, given Britons’ lack of awareness then of the world beyond Europe, it was assumed to be the largest city in the world. As such, it was a symbol of the possibilities of urban life. Whoever asserted its inexhaustibility was applauding its role as a temple of commerce, invention and art.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life Page 7