Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage - Hardcover

Holmes, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679435859 ISBN 13: 9780679435853

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1994

Synopsis

Dr Johnson & 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. Richard Holmes brilliantly reconstructs the puzzling emotional intimacy between the naive Johnson and the seductive, contradictory Savage whose days (when not in prison) were spent in taverns, brothels and society salons.l

About this title

Product Description:

A critically acclaimed biographer reconstructs the unusual friendship of eighteenth-century poet, playwright, and convicted murderer Richard Savage with a young, unknown, provincial schoolmaster, Samuel Johnson. 10,000 first printing.

Review:

‘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

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679435859
• ISBN 13: 9780679435853
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260