Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

About the Book

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.

About the Author :

Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of the ten New York Times’ Best Books of the Year in 2009. His balloon book, Falling Upwards, was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by seven newspapers in 2013. His other biographies include Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Duff Cooper Prize), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). This Long Pursuit completes the autobiographical trilogy begun in Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 2010. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization for sustained achievement in biography. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

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