Book description
A classic reissue of Richard Holmes's brilliant book on Samuel
Johnson's friendship with the poet Richard Savage, which won the James
Tait Black Prize for Biography.
Dr Johnson & Mr Savage is the story of a mysterious
eighteenth-century friendship. Richard Savage was a poet, playwright and
convicted murderer who roamed through the brothels and society salons of
Augustan England creating a legend of poetic injustice. Strangest of all
his achievements was the friendship he inspired in Samuel Johnson, then
a young, unknown schoolmaster just arrived in London to seek his
literary fortune. This puzzling intimacy helped to form Johnson's
experience of the world and human passions, and led to his masterpiece
The Life of Richard Savage, which revolutionized the art of biography
and virtually invented the idea of the poet as a romantic, outcast figure.
Richard Holmes gradually reconstructs this alliance, throwing suprising
new light on the character of Dr Johnson. This extraordinary book also
questions the very nature of life-writing and exposes the conflicts
between friendship, truth and advocacy which the modern form has
inherited. 'As tense as a detective story and as rich as a Hogarth
print, this is the work of a master-biographer.' John Carey, Sunday Times
'Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson & Mr Savage is enthralling,
well-written and convincing, a model of tactful psychological biography.
One reads it with the pleasure one derives from great imaginative
literature.' Theodore Dalrymple, Spectator
'Samuel Johnson's Life of Mr Richard Savage is now perfectly
complemented by Holmes's volume which acts as a Baedeker through the
reeking purlieus of an 18th-century Grub Street, while at the same time
bringing fully to life two of the most complex and fascinating
characters of English letters.' Peter Ackroyd
'Holmes, one of the most subtle and imaginative of contemporary
biographers, is a virtuoso sleuth, an inspired rooter out of the human
being netted in the web of words spun by a poem or a memoir. He combines
scholarship with a rare gift of empathy, a deep personal involvement
with his subject…His writing seems to glow from the fusion of an acute
critical intelligence with a deep poetic and imaginative insight.'
Patrick Taylor Martin, Literary Review
'A chiaroscuro masterpiece.' David Nokes, TLS Richard Holmes is
Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, and
editor of the Harper Perennial series Classic Biographies launched in
2004. His is a Fellow of the British Academy, has honorary doctorates
from UEA and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992.
His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in
1974. Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year,
and Dr Johnson & Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize.
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, won the Duff Cooper Prize and the
Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography,
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer in 1985, and Sidetracks:
Explorations of a Romantic Biographer in 2000.
