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The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by a then-unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson. Richard Savage (1697—1743) was a poet, playwright, and satirist who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a late earl and to have been denied his inheritance and viciously persecuted by his mother. He was urbane, charming, a brilliant conversationalist, but also irresponsible and impulsive. His role in a tavern brawl almost led him to the gallows, though his life was saved by an eleventh-hour pardon by the King. Over time he attracted many supporters, practically all of whom he managed to alienate by the time of his death in a debtors' prison in Bristol. Johnson, who had been friends with Savage for a little over a year, drew on published documents and his own memories of Savage to produce one of the first great English biographies.
The edition is supplemented by other writings by Johnson, a selection of Savage's prose and verse, contemporary and posthumous responses to Savage and to Johnson's biography, and selections by Johnson's first two major biographers, Sir John Hawkins and James Boswell.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Note on Money
Richard Savage and Samuel Johnson: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers
Johnson's extended footnotes to the Life
Appendix A: Errors of Fact in Johnson's Life of Savage
Appendix B: Related Writings by Johnson
London (1738)
The Rambler no. 60 (13 October 1750)
From The Rambler no. 145 (6 August 1751)
The Idler no. 84 (24 November 1759)
"The Life of Collins" (1781)
Appendix C: Richard Savage, Satirist
The Bastard (1728)
"Fulvia" (c. 1728)
From An Author to Be Let (1729)
From The Progress of a Divine (1735)
Appendix D: Savage's Contemporary Reputation
From Eliza Haywood, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1724)
From The Life of Mr. Richard Savage [The "Newgate Biography"] (1727)
From Nature in Perfection (1728)
From William Saunders, "On Richard Savage, Esq" (1742)
Appendix E: Savage's Posthumous Reputation
Denis Diderot, Review of L'Histoire de Savage (1771)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Prologue to Sir Thomas Overbury (1777)
"On Richard Savage, the Poet" (1790)
Appendix F: Johnson's Biographers
From Sir John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson (1787)
From James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
Glossary
Select Bibliography
