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To place this work in its right context we need to go back thirty-three years to 1744. We also need to leave behind the older Johnson, whose name attached to any work assures profits, and go to a young Johnson who is just starting out in London, a Johnson who is just emerging from the position of a Grub Street hack “who signed his letters in 1738 ‘impransus’ – supperless” (Holmes 9).
Johnson was writing anonymously for the Gentleman’s Magazine. By 1742 he had published a short series of lives of scholars, physicians, scientists, priests, and others. A year later his friend, the poet Richard Savage, died, and in 1744 Johnson wrote his biography. This work, alongside poems like “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” which he signed openly, established Johnson as a figure of major literary force and fame.
Why pick Savage who was little more than a frustrated genius even for his contemporaries? For the answer we need to look in two different directions. One is personal: Savage was a friend of Johnson’s youth. Together they suffered poverty. Johnson made it, but Savage never did. After a life of misfortune, misunderstanding, waste, and self-destruction Savage died in prison, penniless and virtually friendless. Johnson used biography to justify Savage’s ways to the public, to clear his name for posterity. Ironically, he made his friend immortal through literature, something which Savage himself was unable to realize with his own claim to genius and his literary output.
The second direction is Johnson’s moralistic approach to biography which he later formulated in the two essays he wrote for The Rambler and The Idler. In The Rambler No: 60 he writes:
I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. For, not only every man has, in mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind. (95)
If so, what better material for a biography could there be than Savage’s life? Savage claimed that he was the illegitimate son of Earl Rivers and Anne Countess of Macclesfield. His parentage was never acknowledged and he never got the inheritance which he believed was due to him. He lived a life of poverty with occasional bubbles of good fortune which burst just as soon as they materialized.
Johnson opens his rendition of this “fit for fiction” life with an echo of his moralistic approach. He makes a general statement about the human condition. This is not a conventional opening for a biography. The common practice is to introduce the subject directly, in the very first paragraph. Here, we find that the introductory paragraph does not highlight an individual but what may be considered common to humanity in general, indicating that Johnson is particularly interested in the extent to which this life will awaken empathy in others, and provide them with instruction and comfort.
In this opening section Johnson states that power or fortune does not guarantee happiness. The ordinary person who possesses much of neither, falls into the mistake of believing the opposite and thinks himself unfortunate. Life is full of examples to the contrary. Since power and fortune are “extrinsic,” it is understandable that they do not bring happiness. But one expects more from “intrinsic” attributes such as “intellectual greatness.” Although Savage was unable to gain either power or fortune, Johnson implies that he was a literary gem and thus blessed with “intrinsic” value; however, the biography will show that this advantage is not enough either. Hence Johnson defines Life of Savage as “a mournful narrative.” In the beginning, the Savage Johnson sees is a gifted man who suffers in life because of misfortunes beyond his control: q