Synopses & Reviews
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage recounts a story of a mysterious 18th-century friendship between Richard Savage poet, playwright, and convicted murderer and the young Samuel Johnson, an unknown provincial schoolmaster just arrived in London to seek his literary fortune. In a book that the Times Literary Supplement has called "a chiaroscuro masterpiece, as gothic as a ghost story, as heroic as a myth," Richard Holmes brilliantly reconstructs the puzzling emotional intimacy between the naive Johnson and the seductive, contradictory Savage whose days (when he was not in prison) were spent in taverns, brothels, and society salons. Holmes's spellbinding account shows how their relationship shaped Dr. Johnson's experience of the world and his profound knowledge of human passion, and how it led directly to his early masterpiece, The Life of Richard Savage, a book that revolutionized the art of biography and invented the figure of the poet as a romantic outcast. In Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, Richard Holmes, says Alfred Kazin, "has shown us the young Johnson that Boswell was afraid to portray," and transformed our understanding of biography itself.
Review
"Holmes provides a fairly full biography of Savage...It is at once learned and a pleasure to read." Library Journal
Review
"Holmes enlivens his study with keen insights into the art of biography and evocative glimpses into the professional literary industry of 18th-century London...." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Holmes...once again brings his humane intelligence and imagination to bear in an exemplary and delightful piece of biographical detection." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Providing a steady stream of insights into life in Hanoverian London as experienced by its poets, this is a splendid, thought-provoking book." Booklist
Synopsis
In this outstanding, eminently readable work of literary scholarship, Holmes explores the enigmatic friendship between Samuel Johnson and the poet Richard Savage, whom Johnson memorialized in
Lives of the Poets. Synthesizing a wide array of contradictory historical sources, from Johnson's
Life of Savage to Boswell's
Life of Johnson, the correspondence of Johnson's contemporaries and modern scholarship, Holmes shows that Savage was a notorious and alluring figure when Johnson first arrived in London in 1737. . . .
"Holmes enlivens his study with keen insights into the art of biography and evocative glimpses into the professional literary industry of 18th-century London: its oppositional politics, literary journals and Grub Street coffee houses bustling with impoverished writers."--Publishers Weekly
"In the course of explaining how and why Johnson told his story as he did, Holmes provides a fairly full biography of Savage, the first book-length study since Clarence Tracy's The Artificial Bastard (1953). Holmes' book . . . is at once learned and a pleasure to read."--Library Journal
About the Author
Biographer Richard Holmes was born in London, England on November 5, 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, was published in 1974 and won a Somerset Maugham Award.