Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage - Softcover

Holmes, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679757708 ISBN 13: 9780679757702

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1996

Synopsis

Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage recounts a story of a mysterious eighteenth-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. In a book that the Times Literary Supplement has called "a chiaroscuro masterpiece, as gothic as a ghost story, as heroic as a myth, " Richard Holmes brilliantly reconstructs the puzzling emotional intimacy between the naive Johnson and the seductive, contradictory Savage whose days (when he was not in prison) were spent in taverns, brothels, and society salons. Holmes's spellbinding account shows how their relationship shaped Dr. Johnson's experience of the world and his profound knowledge of human passion, and how it led directly to his early masterpiece, The Life of Richard Savage, a book that revolutionized the art of biography and invented the figure of the poet as a romantic outcast. In Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage, Richard Holmes, says Alfred Kazin, "has shown us the young Johnson that Boswell was afraid to portray, " and transformed our understanding of biography itself.

About this title

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

From the Back Cover:

' 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, when 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 revolutionised the art of biography and virtually invented the idea of the poet as a romantic outcast figure. Richard Holmes gradually reconstructs this alliance, throwing surprising 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'

"A chiaroscuro masterpiece."
DAVID NOKES, 'Times Literary Supplement'

"Holmes, one of the most subtle and imaginative of contemporary biographers, is a virtuoso sleuth, and 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 deep poetic and imaginative insight."
PATRICK TAYLOR-MARTIN, 'Literary Review'

"Holmes, our most acute and elegant literary biographer, animates the story with wonderful sympathy and intelligence. I cannot imagine that a better book could be written on this fascinating subject."
ALLAN MASSIE, 'Daily Telegraph'

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679757708
• ISBN 13: 9780679757702
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272