Johnson on Savage: The Life of Mr Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson

Johnson on Savage: The Life of Mr Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson Richard Holmes Lives that Never Grow OldPart of a radical 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. CLASSIC BIOGRAPHIES EDITED BY RICHARD HOLMES Defoe on Sheppard and Wild Johnson on Savage Godwin on Wolhtonecraft Southey on Nelson Gilchrist on Blake Scott on Zelide JOHNSON ON SAVAGE An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers by Samuel Johnson, LL.D With three essays on Biography EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD HOLMES HARPER PERENNIAL London, New York, Toronto and Sydney CONTENTS Cover (#u25388e02-d108-5a5a-969e-f96f49b60999) Title Page (#u36d29f40-3047-5fa1-a07e-592a35cd958f) Introduction by Richard Holmes (#u01f446e9-ea46-58cf-9464-aa6feb94a7e4) Select Chronology (#uea2d26d6-1552-5b79-92b4-dec07770a91a) An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (#u470dcf5c-7a15-5cd9-be54-6b380bffa560) The Rambler, No. 60: Biography (#litres_trial_promo) The Idler, No. 84: Autobiography (#litres_trial_promo) The Idler, No. 102: Literary Biography (#litres_trial_promo) Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright About the Publisher INTRODUCTION (#ulink_2e46751d-7dce-5bfe-8397-1449b2766e7f) 1 ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts,’ wrote W.H. Auden in his wry sonnet about the shortcomings of biography. But very few facts are known with absolute certainty about the flamboyant 18th century poet who called himself Richard Savage (including his real identity). Yet he is the subject of one of the greatest short biographies in the English language. One fact is that Savage always claimed to be ‘son of the late Earl Rivers’, but could never prove it. Another is that he was convicted of killing a man in a brothel near Charing Cross, London, on 20 November 1727. A third is that he published a bestselling poem called ‘The Bastard’ in 1728, which ran to five editions in five months. A fourth is that he died penniless in a debtors’ prison in Bristol in 1743. To which we can add a fifth, that his Life was written by Samuel Johnson. In January 1744, the London Evening Post carried the following tantalizing advertisement for this biography. An account of the life of Mr Richard Savage, son of the late Earl Rivers. Who was, soon after he came into the world, bastardised by an act of Parliament; and deprived of the tide and estate to which he was born; was committed by his mother, the Countess of Macclesfield, to a poor woman, to be bred up as her own son; came to the knowledge of his real mother, now alive, but abandoned by her, persecuted, and condemned for murder, and against all her endeavours, pardoned; made Poet Laureate to Queen Caroline, became very eminent for his writings, of which many are quoted in this Work, particularly ‘The Bastard’ and the Wanderer…went into Wales, to be supported by a subscription, promoted by Mr Pope, but at last died in Prison. Johnson’s unlikely friendship with Savage, which inspired this extraordinary work, is one of the strangest episodes in Johnson’s whole career. It belongs to his earliest and darkest days in London, long before he had published his great Dictionary (1755), or formed his Club, or met his own biographer James Boswell (1763). Sir John Hawkins, one of the very few people who knew both Johnson and Savage at this obscure time, remarked that it was ‘an intimacy, the motives for which may probably seem harder to account for, than any one particular in his entire life’. Boswell later agreed with this uneasy verdict: ‘Richard Savage: a man of whom it is difficult to speak impartially, without wondering that he was for some time the intimate companion of Johnson; for his character was marked by profligacy, insolence and ingratitude.’ He added that Savage had a reputation for ‘fire, rudeness, pride, meanness, and ferocity’. But he may also have appeared a curiously glamorous figure to Johnson. At the time they first met in 1737, ‘Sam’ Johnson was not the great Doctor of later legend. He was 29 years old, an aspiring but virtually unpublished author from the provinces. Large, shambling, grotesquely scarred by childhood scrofula, he was subject to physical convulsions and disabling episodes of mental depression. Abrupt and awkward in company, he was a unsuccessful schoolmaster from Lichfield, who had come up to London (with his last pupil David Garrick) to try his literary fortunes by contributing poems and translations to the Gentleman’s Magazine. By contrast, Richard Savage, then in his early forties (his exact birthdate is uncertain), was a stylish, celebrated and even notorious personality in literary London. Universally known in the coffee-houses, he cut a dandyish figure as observed by Hawkins. ‘Savage, as to his exterior, was to a remarkable degree, accomplished; he was a handsome, well-made man, and very courteous in the modes of salutation’. Hawkins added dryly: ‘I have been told that in taking off his hat and disposing it under his arm, and in his bow, he displayed as much grace as those actions were capable of.’ For most of his life Savage had claimed to be the illegitimate offspring of a love-affair between the Countess Macclesfield and Richard Savage, the 4th Earl Rivers. This claim had never been recognised, and remains unproven to this day. But Lord Rivers having died in 1712, Savage had begun to style himself ‘natural Son of the Late Earl Rivers’, and for more than twenty years pursued his claims against the wealthy, widowed Lady Macclesfield, with heroic - or relentless - determination. This became the subject of his notorious poem ‘The Bastard’, published in 1728, shortly after he had received the royal pardon for the murder at Charing Cross: Blest be the Bastard’s birth! Through wond’rous ways He shines eccentric like a Comet’s blaze. No sickly fruit of faint compliance he; He! Stampt in nature’s mint of extasy! He lives to build, not boast, a gen’rous race: No tenth transmitter of a foolish face. This brisk, ebullient declaration still enshrines Savage in the modern Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Less well-known is the subsequent passage in which he sardonically and publicly thanks Lady Macclesfield for his illegitimacy: O Mother, yet no Mother – ’tis to you, My thanks for such distinguish’d claims are due. You, unenslav’d to Nature’s narrow laws, Warm championess for Freedom’s sacred cause, From all the dry devoirs of blood and line, From ties maternal, moral and divine, Discharg’d my grasping soul; push’d me from shore, And launch’d me into life without an oar. Although Savage’s campaigns and publications between 1724 and 1737 sometimes have the appearance of blackmail, young Johnson was profoundly touched by his oft-repeated tale of emotional rejection and maternal persecution. Though since the real Lady Macclesfield was still alive and living in Old Bond Street, London, it is perhaps curious that Johnson neither attempted to interview her nor correspond with her. Nevertheless, the motif of Savage’s ‘cruel Mother’ drives the early part of his biography with vivid conviction, summoning a kind of fairy-tale power and imagery. Such was the beginning of the life of Richard Savage. Born with a legal claim to honour and to affluence, he was, in two months, illegitimated by the Parliament, and disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life, only that he might be swallowed by its quicksands, or dashed upon its rocks, (p.6) Johnson was not the only one to be so moved. Savage was also known as one of the most shameless and successful financial spongers in London. With his poignant story of the ‘cruel Mother’ he had at various times succeeded in obtaining money from the essayist Sir Richard Steele, the actress Anne Oldfield, the editor Aaron Hill, the Irish peer and literary patron Lord Tyrconnel (Lady Macclesfield’s nephew), and none other than the great poet Alexander Pope, who eventually organized a charitable subscription for Savage’s benefit in 1739. All these episodes are recounted with shrewd insight by Johnson in the Life, including the ‘mournful’ fact that they nearly all ended in furious quarrels. ‘It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added that he had not often a friend long, without obliging him to become a stranger, (p. 41) Possibly his most astonishing financial coup was the grant of a royal pension by the Queen. Savage had unsuccessfully applied for the post of Poet Laureate to the new King George II in 1731 (just 4 years after his trial for murder). Having been rejected in favour of Colley Cibber, he had unblushingly appointed himself ‘Volunteer Laureate to Queen Caroline’, and begun publishing an annual Birthday Ode in her honour, for which he was paid a pension of ?50 a year, until the Queen’s death in 1737. Johnson records this ‘odd’ triumph, together with Cibber’s acid observation that Savage might with ‘equal propriety style himself a Volunteer Lord or Volunteer Baronet’. (p.56) This did not prevent Savage from eventually descending into absolute poverty in London. Significantly perhaps, this was at the very time he first met Johnson, so that the shared nightmare experience of indigence in Grub Street, without proper food or lodgings, became another powerful bond between the two men. It is an experience that also shapes the second half of the biography, and its most dramatic passages of appeal to the reader’s sympathy. This was also the first time that young Johnson was temporarily separated from his wife Tetty (who remained back in Lichfield), and was exposed to all the temptations and seductions of the capital city. Boswell recalls that at the very end of his life, Johnson looked back at it with uneasiness and perhaps, also, some secret nostalgia. ‘His conduct, after he came to London, and had associated with Savage and others, was not so strictly virtuous, in one respect, as when he was a younger man [at Lichfield]. It was well known that his amorous inclinations were uncommonly strong and impetuous…in his combats with them, he was sometimes overcome.’ 2 Johnson heard of Savage’s death in Bristol in August 1743, through their mutual friend Edward Cave, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. It was evidently a great personal blow to him, as he immediately determined to write Savage’s Life. Johnson had in fact already published several short biographical essays with Cave, notably on the piratical sailor Sir Francis Drake (1740), and the Dutch scientist Herman Boerhaave (1739). But this was to be his first attempt at a full length biography on a contemporary subject from original materials. It was also the first to be written con amore. It would eventually run to a book of 180 pages (45,000 words), much longer than any of his subsequent Lives of the Poets. Within three weeks he announced his intention to defend ‘the unfortunate and ingenious Mr Savage’, in a long letter to the magazine that Cave published in September. The Life would ‘speedily be published by a person who was favoured with his Confidences, and received from himself an Account of most of his Transactions’. This Life would be authentic, and would preserve Savage’s memory from ‘insults and calumnies’. Johnson then made an historic and combative claim about the nature of biography, distinguishing it from romance or fiction. It may be reasonably imagined that others may have the same Design, but as it is not credible that they can obtain the same Materials, it must be expected they will supply from Invention the want of Intelligence, and that under the Tide of the Life of Savage they will publish only a Novel filled with romantick Adventures, and imaginary Amours. You may therefore perhaps gratify the Lovers of Truth and Wit by giving me leave to inform them in your Magazine, that my Account will be published in 8vo by Mr Roberts of Warwick-Lane. Johnson had several different kinds of material to draw on. For a start, he had talked a great deal with Savage, and heard his story at length from his own mouth. The accounts of Johnson and Savage walking and talking together all night through the London streets in 1737–8, especially around Westminster and St James’s Square, were eventually to became legendary. This is how Sir John Hawkins remembered them: Johnson has told me, that whole nights have been spent by him and Savage in conversation of this kind, not under the hospitable roof of a tavern, where warmth might have invigorated their spirits, and wine dispelled their care; but in a perambulation round the squares of Westminster, St James’s in particular, when all the money the could raise was less than sufficient to purchase them the shelter and sordid comforts of a night cellar… A later friend and biographer, the Irish poet Arthur Murphy, gently embroidered on Johnson’s memories, and moving their location slightly westwards into fashionable Mayfair, gave them an exquisite touch of Dublin absurdity. ‘Johnson has been often heard to relate, that he and Savage walked round Grosvenor Square till four in the morning; in the course of their conversation reforming the world, dethroning princes, establishing new forms of government, and giving laws to the several states of Europe, till fatigued at length with their legislative office, they began to feel the want of refreshment; but could not muster up more than fourpence halfpenny.’ It is therefore particularly interesting that Johnson chooses never to introduce himself explicitly into the Life of Savage. This reticence is unlike, for example, Boswell who appears in propria persona throughout his Life of Johnson (1791); or William Godwin who plays a decisive role in the second half of his Memoirs (1798) of Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson makes only one passing reference to himself in the third person, at the fateful moment in 1739, when Savage finally leaves London for Wales, never to return. Yet this moment is intensely emotional. ‘Full of these salutary resolutions, [Savage] left London in July 1739, having taken leave, with great tenderness, of his friends, and parted with the author of this narrative with tears in his eyes’, (p.85). Johnson’s sentence seems to leave deliberately ambiguous whether the tears belonged to himself or Savage. Perhaps this was deliberate. But in a marginal note later added to a copy he was correcting in 1748, Johnson wrote: ‘I had then a slight fever’. This surely claims the tears - and the intense emotion - as his own. Johnson’s personal identification with Savage’s fate is one of the most subtle issues underlying the entire biography. It deeply affects his partial handling of evidence, and wonderfully colours the continuous, shifting ambiguity of its narrative tone. Young Johnson makes common cause with Savage, in his bohemian style of life, his love of late-night talk, his proud sense of being a social outcast, and in his intense political anger at oppression by the rich and powerful. Yet this same self-identification produces strange biographical distortions. How deeply Johnson’s feelings were engaged, and how far objective biography becomes distilled into subjective autobiography, is one of the enduring mysteries of its power, and raises larger questions about the whole genre. 3 Johnson took about 3 months compiling and expanding the biography, between mid-September and 14 December 1743, when he signed a receipt for 15 guineas on delivery of the manuscript to Cave. In January 1744, in a deadline crisis familiar to many biographers, he ‘sat up all night’ correcting and revising the last ‘forty-eight pages of the printed octavo’, probably because he had just received copies of Savage’s last three letters from Bristol. The Life was finally published in February 1744. During this time he sent several notes to his editor, many of them giving painful glimpses of the Grub Street writer’s life which he had shared with Savage. Once, the printer’s boy finds Johnson ‘writing this, almost in the dark’ because he lacks candles. Later he is writing hard but lacks ‘good Pens’. Then he has been ill, the writing has been interrupted, but he is ‘almost well again’ and so humbly begs ‘another Guinea’ in advance. Finally, most bleakly of all, he is ‘impransus’- supperless. Meanwhile he bombards Cave with requests for further information. ‘Towards Mr Savage’s Life what more have you got?’ He asks for a transcript of Savage’s trial for murder; for a copy of his Defence speech at the Old Bailey, and a copy of his 1726 Miscellaneous Poems, ‘on account of the Preface’ which attacks Lady Macclesfield. He also wants some articles in the Plain Dealer describing Savage’s case, and ‘all the Magazines that have anything of his or relating to him’. Johnson had all Savage’s major publications to draw on, and several of his rare letters (less than 30 are known) preserved by Cave at the Gentleman’s Magazine, especially those Savage had written from Newgate Gaol in Bristol in 1743. Johnson would use extracts from these to powerful effect in the final section of the Life, showing the extraordinary shifts in pose and self-presentation which Savage was capable of adopting. Even when cornered and reduced to the most desperate circumstances, Savage was incorrigeable and changeling-like. He also had copies of the poems and essays that Aaron Hill had published during the Plain Dealer’s campaign of 1724 to establish Savage’s claim against Lady Macclesfield. Most remarkable among these was Savage’s ‘Lament’, published in June 1724. In it Savage transforms his ‘cruel Mother’ into a cruel Lover. Hopeless, abandoned, aimless, and oppress’d, Lost to Delight, and every Way distress’d; Cross his cold Bed, in wild Disorder thrown, Thus sigh’d Alexis, friendless and alone – ’Why do I breathe? - What joy can Being give? When she, who gave me Life, forgets I live! Feels not these wintry blasts; - nor heeds my Smart; But shuts me from the Shelter of her Heart!… In the first edition of the Life, Johnson printed extensive extracts from these works in a score of footnotes, many of them several pages long, which almost amounted to a separate anthology. Besides the ‘Lament’, he drew notably on the libelous (and hastily suppressed) ‘Preface to the Miscellaneous Poems’ of 1726, ‘The Bastard’, The Wanderer, The Volunteer Laureates’, and ‘London and Bristol Delineated’. Though fascinating, they obstruct the natural flow of the biographical narrative, and he eventually omitted them in definitive edition incorporated into the Lives of the Eminent English Poets in 1781. 4 Johnson had one other major biographical source of information. He obtained from Cave a 29 page pamphlet written anonymously at the time of Savage’s conviction for murder in 1727. It was entitled The Life of Mr Richard Savage…Who was Condemned at the last Sessions of the Old Bailey, for Murder…With some very remarkable Circumstances relating to the Birth and Education of that Gentleman, which were Never before made Publick. This was the pamphlet, hurriedly organized by Aaron Hill, intended to save Savage from the hangman’s noose. It was dashed off in 2 days by a fellow Grub Street journalist, one Thomas Cooke, who worked in the upstairs room of a Fleet Street tavern, hoping to save ‘a brother poet - how unworthy soever of the appellation’ from the gallows. It was from this work that Johnson drew his extraordinary portrait of Lady Macclesfield, which dramatically sets the combative tone of the opening. Johnson’s righteous anger is felt throughout this early section, with an unrelenting series of attacks on Lady Macclesfield’s ‘barbarous’, ‘cruel’ and ‘unnatural’ behaviour. He recounts a breathless (and gripping) series of incidents in which she denies Savage’s birthright, suppresses his name, farms him out to a nurse, frustrates a ?300 inheritance, attempts to apprentice him to a shoemaker, and dispatch him to the American colonies. Finally she promotes his execution by seeking to prevent the royal pardon, (p.26–7) The mounting bitterness of these accusations, their rhetorical force, and their melodramatic repetitions, cannot quite hide from an alert reader their curious and unsubstantiated nature. Most problematic of all, Johnson can find no real motive - moral, prudential or pecuniary - for these maternal crimes, (p.5). Yet it is difficult to doubt Johnson’s good faith, and since Lady Macclesfield was still alive (a point he reiterates), one assumes he had documentary evidence that would have protected him and his publisher against libel. But he did not. All these stories were simply taken from the Old Bailey pamphlet of 1727. No doubt they were confirmed by Savage in his long conversations with Johnson, yet the fact is that they have no other independent documentary source. Even the ‘convincing Original Letters’ which Savage claimed he had discovered and proved his birth, were never actually produced. They are mentioned in the Old Bailey pamphlet, and the editor Aaron Hill claimed he once saw them in 1724, but they were never printed and have long since disappeared. One concludes that Johnson simply wanted - or needed - to believe Savage’s version of events. And to defend Savage, he must also make his reader believe. Johnson’s defence of Savage’s whole disastrous life - the sponging, the blackmail, the murder charge, the ingratitude to his patron Tyrconnel; and later the obscene poetry, the reckless improvidence, the moral blindness, and the self-destructive behaviour in London and Bristol - depends upon his convincing the reader that Savage was a lifelong victim of Lady Macclesfield’s persecutions. So she is consistently presented as Savage’s evil star, his nemesis, his avenging angel. This mother is still alive, and may, perhaps, even yet, though her malice was so often defeated, enjoy the pleasure of reflecting that the life which she often endeavored to destroy, was at least shortened by her maternal offices; that, though she could not transport her son to the plantations, bury him in the shop of a mechanick, or hasten the hand of the public executioner, she has yet had the satisfaction of embittering all his hours, and forcing him into exigencies that hurried his death, (p.28) Over forty years later, Boswell the professional biographer and trained lawyer (he had a brilliant success in defending a sheep-stealer at the Scottish Bar) was also strangely puzzled by what he saw as Johnson’s credulousness over Savage’s claims. ‘Johnson’s partiality for Savage made him entertain no doubt of his story, however extraordinary and improbable. It never occurred to him to question his being the son of the Countess of Macclesfield, of whose unrelenting barbarity he so loudly complained, and the particulars of which are related in so strong and affecting a manner in Johnson’s Life of him.’ His own subsequent researches cast much doubt over the entire story and left him, in a memorable phrase, ‘vibrating in uncertainty’. Modern scholars, like Clarence Tracy and James L. Clifford, have felt the same perplexity. (See Further Reading) It is interesting that the great French Enlightenment critic and novelist Denis Diderot, in a review of a French translation of the Life which appeared in Paris in 1771, also singled out the peculiar nature of Johnson’s handling of Lady Macclesfield. He wondered, with a wry smile, if a fiction-writer would have got away with it. This Countess of Macclesfield is a strange woman, persecuting a love-child with a rage sustained for many years, never extinguished and founded on nothing. If a writer decided to introduce, in a play or a novel, a character of this kind, it would be booed.’ The implication is that Johnson has broken the Aristotelian rule of ‘probability’. Yet Diderot finally gives Johnson (not after all a French classicist) the benefit of the doubt. ‘Nevertheless it is compatible with reality. And is reality then sometimes to be booed? Why not! Does it never deserve it?’ It has been suggested that the chameleon anti-hero of Diderot’s own subsequent novel, Le Neveu de Rameau, may partly have been inspired by Savage’s machinations. It is certainly possible that Savage may have been what he constantly, obsessively, unfailingly (even under sentence of death) claimed to be: Lady Macclesfield rejected son. Johnson may have been right: his honesty and intellectual judgement were always formidable After all, he later saw through the claims of the epic poet ‘Ossian’, and the Rowley ‘forgeries’ of Thomas Chatterton. On the other hand, his profound sympathy for Savage may simply have misled him. His later confidante, Hester Thrale remarked tenderly: ‘Dear Dr Johnson was not difficult to be imposed on where the Heart came into question.’ Yet there is a strange fury in these biting, unsubstantiated denunciations of Lady Macclesfield which suggest other, obscurer forces at work. They might perhaps be connected with young Johnson’s own darker feelings towards women: his repulsive appearance, his difficulties with his wife Tetty (20 years his senior and increasingly reliant on ‘cordials’); and his own unloving mother Sarah Johnson. A modern poet and biographer, John Wain, has speculated in this direction rather further than Boswell. There were also deeper emotional reasons. Savage had, by his own account, been cruelly rejected by an unnatural mother. Now Johnson, as we have seen, had strong and ambivalent feelings towards his own mother…This resentment of Sarah for her failure to give him love and emotional security was buttoned down tightly out of sight and watched over by an unsleeping censor. All the more eagerly did he listen to Savage’s tirades against the mother who had similarly, and far more spectacularly, failed him. Chords which his own fingers were forbidden to touch became vibrant at the eloquent recital of Savage’s wrongs. How deep did Savage’s influence go? Very deep, I think. His presence touched the hidden springs of Johnson’s deep feelings, and may, here and there, have caused some strange streams to gush from the rock. He was, for some crucial months, closer to Johnson than anyone else. Certainly, closer than Tetty.’ (Wain, 1974) 5 Yet there is a further layer to the enigma. An attentive reading of the Old Bailey pamphlet, which was after all written specifically to exculpate Savage, also suggests that Johnson - out of loyalty—may have been avoiding a much harsher possible interpretation of Savage’s character in the early years. Leaving aside the historical truth of Savage’s claims, one begins to ask just who was persecuting whom? Savage’s emotional appeals to Lady Macclesfield as the hopeless, abandoned, sighing ‘Alexis’ in 1724, have within three years later taken on a far more aggressive and imperious tone. With the publication of his Miscellaneous Poems of 1726, shortly before the unfortunate murder, he seems to be conducting something indistinguishable from a successful blackmail campaign. How else should one interpret the following passage from Old Bailey? He had also wrote a long Preface to [the Poems], giving some Account of his Mother’s unparalleled ill Treatment of him; but was prevail’d on through the imposition of some very considerable Persons to cancel it; and about that time he had a Pension of 50 pounds a year settled upon him. It will not venture to say whether this Allowance came from her, or, if so, upon what Motives she was induced to grant it; but choose to leave the Reader to guess at it. Johnson also avoids the notion of blackmail in his account of the subsequent publication of Savage’s most famous poem, ‘The Bastard’. It was the most severe and successful attack Savage had ever mounted against Lady Macclesfield, and her public humiliation at Bath is fully, and indeed appreciatively described by Johnson, as an act of necessary justice for a lifetime’s persecution. He accordingly assigns its publication to 1735, after Lord Tyrconnel had withdrawn his splendid ?200 annual pension, and Savage was once again reduced to poverty. (See Select Chronology.) The poem is presented as Savage’s final, bitter and fully justified riposte. ‘Thus Savage had the satisfaction of finding that, though he could not reform his mother, he could punish her, and that he did not always suffer alone.’ (p.50) But either deliberately, or unconsciously, Johnson has crucially altered the publication date to suit his defence of Savage. The fact - one of those few, definite ‘shilling’ facts - is that ‘The Bastard’, in all 5 of its editions, appeared seven years earlier in the spring and summer of 1728. It appeared, therefore, shortly before Lady Macclesfield’s nephew Lord Tyrconnel made Savage the ?200 pension, and therefore seems to have had an entirely different motivation. It may certainly be seen as a successful demand for money, with menaces. ?200 per annum was the cost of silence, and it is true that Savage published nothing again against Lady Macclesfield until the pension was abruptly terminated (after a quarrel) in 1735. The Old Bailey pamphlet also first mentions the romantic ‘candle’ incident, which so moved Johnson and seems to summon up a whole world of tragic outcasts, rejected children, and homeless wanderers. This is the emotive picture his source draws. While Nature acted so weakly on the Humanity of the Parent, she seems on the Son’s side to have doubled her usual Influence. Even the most shocking personal Repulses, and a severity of Contempt and Injuries received at her Hands, through the whole Course of his Life, were not able to erase from his Heart the impressions of his filial Duty, nor, which is more strange, of his Affection. I have known him walk three or four Times in a dark Evening, through the Street this Mother lives in, only for the melancholy Pleasure of looking up at her Windows, in hopes to catch a Moment’s Sight of her as she might cross the Room by Candlelight. Johnson brilliantly deploys and develops this memorable image of the outcast in the dark streets, adding layers of pathos and irony. ‘But all his assiduity and tenderness were without effect, for he could neither soften her heart nor open her hand, and was reduced to the utmost miseries of want, while he was endeavoring to awaken the affection of a mother. He was therefore, obliged to seek some other means of support, and having no profession, became by necessity an author.’ (p.9–10) But in order to sustain the pathetic, benighted picture of young Savage, Johnson is compelled to hold over in the chronology of his narrative the alarming ‘stalking’ incident in which these evening vigils culminated. This incident is Omitted in the order of time’ (as he cautiously explains) until it can be more safely placed in the account of Savage’s trial. So only when Savage is himself in danger of death, does Johnson reveal the supremely damaging story of Savage actually slipping into Lady Macclesfield’s Old Bond Street house at night, silently entering her bedroom, and only thinking it ‘prudent to retire’ when the terrified woman, fearful of ‘murder’, woke the whole household with her ‘screams’. This was, Johnson calmly asserts, nothing but ‘a fictitious assault’, (p.26) Indeed Johnson’s handling of the entire trial is a masterpiece of forensic legerdemain, in which he appears to be adopting a cool and judicious stance, while actually arguing passionately for the defence. A transcript of the actual trial has survived (see Further Reading), and it reveals how brilliantly Johnson deflected the hostile evidence of the landlady and her maid; ignored the deposition of the surgeon (who demonstrated how Savage’s fatal sword-thrust could not have been delivered when the murdered man Sinclair was in ‘a posture of defence’); and played the distracting card of Lady Macclesfield’s vindictiveness. In his ringing phrase, ‘Thus had Savage perished by the evidence of a bawd, a strumpet, and his mother…’ (p.27). Johnson’s triumph is the handling of the condemnation speech of the Judge, Mr Justice Page. Francis Page was a notorious ‘hanging judge’ (also caricatured by Henry Field in Tom Jones, 1749), and on the West Country circuit there was a popular song, ‘God in his rage made old Judge Page’. But no authentic record exists of his summing-up in this case. Johnson simply invents it. For this Johnson could claim the classical authority of Tacitus, who invents the speeches of his heroes at signal moments. But he does better than this, by claiming that this ‘eloquent harangue’ is exactly ‘as Mr Savage used to relate it’. (p.24). He transforms Judge Page’s judgement into an theatrical comedy, as Savage afterwards used to perform it for admiring friends. The judge’s grim appeals to the ‘Gentleman of the Jury’, are farcically turned to Savage’s advantage. 6 Up to this point in the biography, Johnson appears largely in the role of Savage’s advocate, skillfully pleading his case, plangently emphasising his misfortunes, and thunderously attacking his enemies. It is a brilliant rhetorical performance. The reader is wonderfully gripped and impressed, even if not entirely convinced. But from the moment Savage is pardoned in 1728, and his fashionable ‘golden’ period of social success and patronage begins, a subtle change starts to steal over Johnson’s narrative. (p-32) Melodrama shifts to satire, increasingly at Savage’s expense. A note of black comedy creeps in, and Savage’s outrageous behaviour towards Lord Tyrconnel points towards something incorrigeable and profoundly damaged in his nature. He luxuriates in the wealthy patronage, but also exploits it shamelessly and thoughtlessly. He causes chaos in Lord Tyrconnel’s apartments; he orders about his servants; he brings cronies back to the house late at night, and drinks his cellars dry of their best wines. Having given him a collection of valuable books, stamped with his own arms, [Tyrconnel] had the mortification to see them, in a short time, exposed to sale upon the stalls, it being usual with Mr Savage, when he wanted a small sum, to take his books to the pawnbroker, (p.41) As Savage repeatedly fails to take control of his life, there is a new note of philosophical reflection. Imperceptibly, advocacy gives way to moral enquiry. Savage’s character, rather than his brazen claims, gradually becomes Johnson’s central concern, and he sees him embarked on a never-ending Dantesque treadmill of self-deception. ‘He proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at least forgetting it to amuse himself with phantoms of happiness, which were dancing before him; and willingly turned his eyes from the light of reason, when it would have discovered the illusion, and shown him, what he never wished to see, his real state.’ (p.52) The episodes of the Volunteer Laureateship, the publication of the obscene poem The Progress of a Divine’, and the disastrous quarrel with Tyrconnel mark a steadily downward trajectory. Now black comedy is shifting towards a more human and universal tragedy. Johnson himself seems to move closer to the narrative surface. We become increasingly aware, if only subliminally, of Johnson as the shrewd eyewitness. He is the sympathetic companion, but the also undeceived judge of character Observing Savage’s mixture of professional pride and childlike vanity as a poet, he recalls with a painful smile. ‘He could not easily leave off, once he had begun to mention himself and his works; nor ever read his verses without stealing his eyes from the page, to discover in the faces of his audience, how they were effected by any favourite passage.’ (p.103) Such a remark could only have been made by someone who had spent, and perhaps endured, many hours in Savage’s company. Johnson’s presence as the anonymous observer, or unnamed ‘friend’ increases throughout the penultimate part of the biography that covers Savage’s return, in the winter of 1737–8, to the lonely and humiliating poverty of Grub Street (p.70). Many incidents begin to reflect Johnson’s own experiences at Lichfield and Oxford, such as the shameful time well-meaning friends left him a pair of boots at his college door when he was a poverty-stricken undergraduate. Savage’s friends also humiliated him with good intentions. Savage ’came to the lodgings of a friend [clearly Johnson] with the most violent agonies of rage; and, being asked what it could be that gave him such disturbance, he replied, with the utmost vehemence of indignation, ‘that they had sent for a tailor to measure him.’ (p.83) Savage’s love of conversation, his hunger for company, and terror of loneliness are also, hauntingly, those of the isolated and depressive young Johnson. ‘He was generally censured for not knowing when to retire; but that was not the defect of his judgement, but of his fortune: when he left his company, he was frequently to spend the remaining part of the night in the street, or at least abandoned to gloomy reflections, which is not strange that he delayed as long as he could; and sometimes forgot that he gave others pain to avoid it himself.’ (p.102) This whole section is dominated by the bleak image of the night-walks which they shared for several months in 1738–9. Here Johnson’s great elegiac summary of Savage’s harsh misfortunes and missed opportunities, is written in a tragic register that is quite unlike anything that has proceeded it. ‘On a bulk, in a cellar, or in a glass-house, among thieves and beggars, was to be found the author of the Wanderer, the man of exalted sentiments, extensive views, and curious observations; the man whose remarks on life might have assisted the statesman, whose ideas of virtue might have enlightened the moralist, whose eloquence might have influenced senates, and whose delicacy might have polished courts.’ (p.70) Johnson is also more and more present in the precision, deliberation and authority of his style. In a favoured rhetorical device (technically known as ironic chiasmus, or reversal of terms) he repeatedly gives Savage generous praise with one hand, only to withdraw it regretfully with the other. ‘He was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never be communicated to his money.’ (p.74) This gesture of reversed and suspended judgement, like a musical motif, begins to dominate the entire biographical composition. The delicate, almost trembling fluctuation between praise and condemnation, love and mockery, sympathy and reproach, becomes a central truth of the Life. It also expresses Johnson’s generous, but essentially tragic view of human nature. 7 In the final section of the biography, Johnson makes a last brilliant adjustment to the tone and angle of his narrative. It is clear that he disapproves of Savage’s delusory scheme to ‘retire’ into rural Wales, and live off the subscription organized by Pope, until he has re-written his failed play Sir Thomas Overbury. But his account is subtly and sympathetically pitched. It begins in a gentle satire of Savage’s dreamlike ideas of country life, ‘of which he had no knowledge but from pastorals and songs’, and where he fondly imagined that ‘the melody of the nightingale’ was to be heard ‘from every bramble’. This seems unavoidably like the echo of an actual conversation they had. (p.82) But it ends in the bleak reporting of a nightmare, with Savage ill, penniless and friendless in Bristol, sleeping in the garret of an ‘obscure inn’ by day (probably drunk); and slipping out by night - again that theme of obsessive night-walking - only to avoid creditors and restore ‘the action of his stomach by a cordial.’ (p.90). Yet once in the debtor’s prison, Johnson tenderly shows many of Savage’s strongest qualities reasserting themselves: his wit, his stoicism, his inexhaustible interest in those around him (even the lowest inmates working in the prison kitchens). His seductive charm also seems miraculously sustained, and Johnson gravely reports how Savage makes a final conquest of his kindly gaoler, Mr Able Dagge. We may be sure that Mr Dagge also came to believe he was ‘the son of the late Earl Rivers’. In a surprising and effective move, Johnson for the first time uses long quotations from three of Savage’s own letters to bring us most closely into his company. This is the section that Johnson re-wrote all night in January 1744 against his publisher’s deadline, and shows how the prospect of immanent execution - as he later remarked in another context - wonderfully concentrates the writer’s mind. The first of these letters is to a Bristol friend, Saunders; the last evidently to his publisher, the faithful Edward Cave; the middle one is anonymous, ‘to one of his friends in London’. In each we hear Savage’s own voice, and experience his fantastic and violent shifts of mood - resignation, followed by fury, pride, bitterness, insouciance, despair, charm, enigmatic mystery. The changes are so volatile, so swift and so extreme, that one might almost think one was witnessing actual changes in Savage’s personality—or identity. No doubt Johnson intended his readers to reflect on the psychological implications of that too. It is possible that the confidential and touching middle letter, to the unnamed ‘friend in London’, was actually to Johnson himself. It has a stoic piety that Johnson would have admired. It also seems to make an unmistakable, rueful, smiling reference to their previous argument about the charms of rural life, and the amiable delusion of birds singing from every bramble. Typically, Savage finds a delightful way of proving that young Johnson was wrong, and that he - Savage - was telling the truth all along. ‘I thank the Almighty, I am now all collected in myself; and, though my person is in Confinement, my mind can expatiate on ample and useful subjects with all the freedom imaginable. I am now more conversant with the Nine than ever, and if, instead of a Newgate-bird, I am allowed to be a bird of the Muses, I assure you, Sir, I sing very freely in my Cage; sometimes, indeed, in the plaintive notes of the Nightingale; but at others in the cheerful strains of the Lark.’ (p.95) The end, when it comes, is swift but enigmatic. The dying Savage has one more secret to impart, but moving his hand ‘in a melancholy manner’, fails to tell it to his kindly gaoler - or to his attentive biographer. Johnson’s elegant summary of Savage’s extraordinary mixture of vices and virtues maintains its tender, ironic balance to the last. Although, not quite to the last. The final appeal is made directly to the reader’s sympathy, to his heart, in what became Johnson’s most celebrated biographical peroration. ‘For his life, or for his writings, none who candidly consider his fortune, will think an apology either necessary or difficult…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.”’ (p.105) There is in fact one more paragraph, which concludes with a more severe and conventional verdict, bringing the two words ‘genius’ and ‘contemptible’ into irreconcilable contact. But against this, Savage’s friend and advocate later wrote dismissively in the margin of his own 1748 copy: ‘Added’. 8 The biography was an immediate and dazzling success. It became the book of the season, the talk of the London coffee-houses, and the subject of ecstatic reviews. The monthly Champion was representative: This pamphlet is, without flattery to its [anonymous] author, as just and well written a piece of its kind I ever saw…It is not only the story of Mr Savage, but innumerable incidents relating to other persons and other affairs, which renders this a very amusing and withal a very instructive and valuable performance…The author’s observations are short, significant and just…His reflections open to all the recesses of the human heart.’ Johnson would particularly have liked that last phrase. The reaction of the fashionable painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, was typical of contemporary readers. He was delighted by the picturesque elements of Savage’s story, and even more by Johnson’s wonderfully shrewd comments and reflections. He did not question the historical truth of Savage’s claims, but was simply gripped and mesmerized by its human drama. Reynolds told Boswell that ‘upon his return from Italy he met with it in Devonshire, knowing nothing of its author, and began to read it while he was standing with his arm leaning against a chimney-piece. It seized his attention so strongly, that, not being able to lay down the book till he had finished it, when he attempted to move, he found his arm totally benumbed.’ Although anonymous, it would be true to say that the publication of the Life of Richard Savage in 1744 made Johnson’s name, and determined him to continue as a professional author in London. He was 35, and from henceforth he began to sign his own books and poems. Within three years he was able to agree the contract for the Dictionary, with a substantial advance payment of ?1,575 from a syndicate of London publishers, and take the famous house in Gough Square. A second edition of the Life of Savage was also published by Cave in 1748, and his greatest poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ followed in 1749. No doubt Savage would have been pleased by all this, and made one of his famous, hat-doffing bows to his young protegee. Johnson’s further reflections on Biography and Autobiography appear in three short essays, which are appended to this edition. In Rambler No. 60, ‘On the Dignity and Usefulness of Biography’ he made the first great modern defence of the form (1750). He argued both for its intimate nature, and its universal appeal, and enshrined these in some notable aphorisms. ‘More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral’, (p.114). He also raised the question of how far we can believe in autobiography; and suggested the particular value of literary biography, with its emphasis on inner imaginative drama. ‘The gradations of a hero’s life are from battle to battle; and an author’s from book to book.’ (p.126) In after years Johnson often talked to Boswell about the nature and appeal of biography. In 1763, the year they met, he boasted that ‘the biographical part of literature is what I love most.’ Later in 1772, clearly thinking back to his time with Savage, he gave it as his opinion that ‘nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.’ But later still, in 1776, talking with Thomas Warton at Trinity College Cambridge, he added that even biography based on personal intimacy was ‘rarely well executed…Few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him’. However, he never revived the question of the historical truth of Savage’s claims in Boswell’s hearing. Yet, right or wrong, Johnson had done something normally associated with much later 20 century biography. He had made Savage’s childhood and adolescence a determining factor in his adult struggles. Whether genuinely a rejected child, or a brilliant obsessive fraud, a tragic self-deluded impostor, Savage was defined by a ‘lost’ childhood identity. It would of course be anachronistic to talk of Freudian insights in an early 18 century text. But Johnson’s treatment of Savage’s obsession with his ‘Cruel Mother’ always repays further reading. Beyond the historical controversy, it can be seen to yield remarkable psychological insights. Johnson noted, for example, that when the actress Anne Oldfield (with whom Savage may have had an affair) died in 1730, ‘he endeavored to show his gratitude in the most decent manner, by wearing mourning as for a Mother.’ (p.15). He also observed that throughout his adult life Savage should be ‘considered as a child exposed to all the temptations of indigence’, (p.53). His final appeal is not for formal justice, but for the warmth of human understanding. In a longer perspective, one can see that Johnson had championed English biography as a virtually new genre. He had saved it from the medieval tradition of solemnly extended hagiography, or the lifeless accumulations of 17 century biographical Dictionaries. He had shown that it was not ‘compiled’, but narrated, argued and brought dramatically alive. He had also raised it above those commercial compilations of scandalous anecdote, that were still so much in vogue, like Theophilus Cibber’s Lives of the Poets (1753, 200 poets packed like sardines into 5 volumes). He had separated it from gossip and cheap romance, and redirected it towards ‘the Lovers of Truth and Wit’. By introducing the subject’s own writings - poetry, essays, letters - into the narrative, he had made it more scholarly and authentic. Nor was it any longer dependent on classical models and the lives of the great and eminent - as those by Plutarch, Tacitus, or Suetonius. Instead it had absorbed several popular and indigenous English forms - the Newgate confession, the sentimental ballad, the courtroom drama, even the Restoration comedy of manners. Moreover English biography was no longer necessarily about fame and success. It could take obscure, failed and damaged lives, and make them intensely moving and revealing. Biography was an act of imaginative friendship, and depended on moral intelligence and human sympathy. Biography had become a new kind of narrative about the mysteries of the human heart. Many years later Johnson is reported to have told Boswell, ‘that he could write the Life of a Broomstick’. Johnson made minor corrections to The Life of Richard Savage in the second edition of 1748, and reduced the footnotes in the subsequent editions of 1775 and the definitive edition incorporated into The Lives of the Eminent English Poets of 1781. (See Select Chronology) The text used here is based on the 1781 edition, with some modernizing of capital letters and punctuation. SELECT CHRONOLOGY (#ulink_eecf7853-2847-5522-a3ad-63dca162461d) AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE OF MR. RICHARD SAVAGE, SON OF THE EARL RIVERS (#ulink_93b5ea27-ad72-5540-8d63-709dab10c302) It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy, in those who look up to them from a lower station: whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or, that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent or more severe. That affluence and power, advantages extrinsick and adventitious, and therefore easily separable from those by whom they are possessed, should very often flatter the mind with expectations of felicity which they cannot give, raises no astonishment; but it seems rational to hope, that intellectual greatness should produce better effects; that minds qualified for great attainments should first endeavour their own benefit; and that they, who are most able to teach others the way to happiness, should with most certainty follow it themselves. But this expectation, however plausible, has been very frequently disappointed. The heroes of literary as well as civil history, have been very often no less remarkable for what they have suffered, than for what they have achieved; and volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives and untimely deaths. To these mournful narratives, I am about to add the life of Richard Savage, a man whose writings entitle him to an eminent rank in the classes of learning, and whose misfortunes claim a degree of compassion, not always due to the unhappy, as they were often the consequences of the crimes of others, rather than his own. In the year 1697, Anne, countess of Macclesfield, having lived for some time upon very uneasy terms with her husband, thought a publick confession of adultery the most obvious and expeditious method of obtaining her liberty, and therefore declared that the child, with which she was then great, was begotten by the Earl Rivers. This, as may be imagined, made her husband no less desirous of a separation than herself, and he prosecuted his design in the most effectual manner; for he applied not to the ecclesiastical courts for a divorce, but to the Parliament for an act, by which his marriage might be dissolved, the nuptial contract totally annulled, and the children of his wife illegitimated. This act, after the usual deliberation, he obtained, though without the approbation of some, who considered marriage as an affair only cognizable by ecclesiastical judges; and on March 3rd was separated from his wife, whose fortune, which was very great, was repaid her, and who having as well as her husband the liberty of making another choice was in a short time married to colonel Brett. While the Earl of Macclesfield was prosecuting this affair his wife was on the 10th of January 1697–8 delivered of a son; and the Earl Rivers, by appearing to consider him as his own, left none any reason to doubt of the sincerity of her declaration; for he was his godfather and gave him his own name which was, by his direction, inserted in the register of St Andrew’s parish in Holborn but, unfortunately, left him to the care of his mother, whom, as she was now set free from her husband, he probably imagined likely to treat with great tenderness the child that had contributed to so pleasing an event. It is not indeed easy to discover what motives could be found to overbalance that natural affection of a parent, or what interest could be promoted by neglect or cruelty. The dread of shame or of poverty, by which some wretches have been incited to abandon or to murder their children, cannot be supposed to have affected a woman who had proclaimed her crimes and solicited reproach, and on whom the clemency of the legislature had undeservedly bestowed a fortune, which would have been very little diminished by the expenses which the care of her child could have brought upon her. It was therefore not likely that she would be wicked without temptation; that she would look upon her son, from his birth, with a kind of resentment and abhorrence; and, instead of supporting, assisting, and defending him, delight to see him struggling with misery, or that she would take every opportunity of aggravating his misfortunes, and obstructing his resources, and, with an implacable and restless cruelty, continue her persecution from the first hour of his life to the last. But, whatever were her motives, no sooner was her son born, than she discovered a resolution of disowning him; and in a very short time removed him from her sight, by committing him to the care of a poor woman, whom she directed to educate him as her own, and enjoined never to inform him of his true parents. Such was the beginning of the life of Richard Savage. Born with a legal claim to honour and to affluence, he was, in two months, illegitimated by the Parliament, and disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life, only that he might be swallowed by its quicksands, or dashed upon its rocks. His mother could not indeed infect others with the same cruelty. As it was impossible to avoid the inquiries which the curiosity or tenderness of her relations made after her child, she was obliged to give some account of the measures she had taken; and her mother, the Lady Mason, whether in approbation of her design, or to prevent more criminal contrivances, engaged to transact with the nurse, to pay her for her care, and to superintend the education of the child. In this charitable office she was assisted by his godmother, Mrs Lloyd, who, while she lived, always looked upon him with that tenderness which the barbarity of his mother made peculiarly necessary, but her death, which happened in his tenth year, was another of the misfortunes of his childhood; for though she kindly endeavoured to alleviate his loss by a legacy of three hundred pounds, yet, as he had none to prosecute his claim, to shelter him from oppression or call in law to the assistance of justice, her will was eluded by the executors and no part of the money was ever paid. He was, however, not yet wholly abandoned. The Lady Mason still continued her care, and directed him to be placed at a small grammar-school near St Alban’s, where he was called by the name of his nurse, without the least intimation that he had a claim to any other. Here he was initiated in literature, and passed through several of the classes, with what rapidity or with what applause cannot now be known. As he always spoke with respect of his master, it is probable that the mean rank, in which he then appeared, did not hinder his genius from being distinguished, or his industry from being rewarded; and if in so low a state he obtained distinction and rewards, it is not likely they were gained but by genius and industry. It is very reasonable to conjecture that his application was equal to his abilities because his improvement was more than proportioned to the opportunities which he enjoyed; nor can it be doubted that if his earliest productions had been preserved, like those of happier students, we might in some have found vigorous sallies of that sprightly humour which distinguishes the Author to be Let, and in others strong touches of that ardent imagination which painted the solemn scenes of the Wanderer. While he was thus cultivating his genius his father, the Earl Rivers, was seized with a distemper which, in a short time, put an end to his life. He had frequently inquired after his son, and had always been amused with fallacious and evasive answers; but, being now, in his own opinion, on his deathbed he thought it his duty to provide for him among his other natural children, and therefore demanded a positive account of him with an importunity not to be diverted or denied. His mother, who could no longer refuse an answer determined at least to give such as should cut him off for ever from that happiness which competence affords and therefore declared that he was dead; which is perhaps the first instance of a lie invented by a mother to deprive her son of a provision which was designed him by another, and which she could not expect herself, though he should lose it. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/richard-holmes/johnson-on-savage-the-life-of-mr-richard-savage-by-samuel-j/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.