In an interview on Samuel Johnson

And now the Richard Holmes book about Johnson’s friendship with the poet, Richard Savage.

When Johnson was still young and poor in London he got to know Richard Savage who was also poor. Savage claimed to be the illegitimate son of a countess. He was wanted for murder, he was dissolute and dissipated and part of the Jacobite “out group”, sympathisers with the House of Stuart. Johnson and Savage wandered the streets, slept out in the open and set the world to rights, as one does at that age! Samuel Johnson wrote the life of Richard Savage in his Lives of the Poets, and it’s a very sympathetic account, including the dissipation.

Savage had indeed committed a murder, of James Sinclair in a drunken brawl, and he was convicted and sentenced to death, but was reprieved after the intercession of the Countess of Hertford in 1727. It was a strange alliance, that of a dissolute, drunken and murderous poet and the upright Christian Samuel Johnson. Well, I suppose Savage was Christian too, but just not very good at it. Holmes does a sort of Sherlock Holmes account of their friendship. His book doesn’t, as I recall, come up with any kind of key to the mystery of their friendship. The friendship is only a mystery to those who live by stereotypes. Johnson wrote: “Those are not proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty. Nor will any wise mine presume to say, “Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.”