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Richard Savage

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Richard Savage (c. 1697 – 1 August 1743) was an English poet. He is best known as the subject of Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, originally published anonymously in 1744, on which is based one of the most elaborate of Johnson's Lives of the English Poets.

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Life
Early life

Title page of Life of Mr Richard Savage
What is known about Savage's early life mostly comes from Johnson's Life of Savage. However, such information is not entirely trustworthy, since Johnson did not feel the need to thoroughly investigate Savage's past. Johnson relied almost solely on books, papers and magazines that publisher Edward Cave retrieved for him from The Gentleman's Magazine's archives.

In 1698 Charles Gerard, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield, obtained a divorce from his wife, Anne, daughter of Sir Richard Mason. Shortly afterwards she married Colonel Henry Brett. Lady Macclesfield had two children by Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers, the second of whom was born at Fox Court, Holborn, on 16 January 1697, and christened two days later at St Andrew, Holborn, as Richard Smith. Six months later the child was placed with nurse Anne Portlock in Covent Garden. Nothing more is positively known of him, but Savage later claimed to be this child. He stated that he had been cared for by Lady Mason, his grandmother, who had put him in a school near St Albans, and by his godmother, one Mrs Lloyd. He said he had been pursued by the relentless hostility of his mother, by then Mrs Brett, who had prevented Lord Rivers from leaving £6,000 to him, had tried to have him abducted to the West Indies and then apprenticed him as a shoemaker in Holborn. Savage claimed to have discovered his true identity in 1714, through reading some letters by Mrs Lloyd. The first recorded occurrence of his name dates back to 1715, when he identified himself as "Mr. Savage, natural son to the late Earl Rivers" after being arrested for possessing a censored political pamphlet. He continued to use this name afterwards and gave further details of his parentage in Jacob's Poetical Register.

Early career
Savage's first certain work was a poem satirizing Bishop Hoadly, entitled The Convocation, or The Battle of Pamphlets (1717), which he afterwards tried to suppress. He adapted from the Spanish a comedy, Love in a Veil (acted 1718, printed 1719), which gained him the friendship of Sir Richard Steele, who became his first patron, and of Robert Wilks. With Steele, however, he soon quarrelled. In 1723 he played without success in the title role of his tragedy, Sir Thomas Overbury (1724), which nonetheless provided him a considerable amount of notoriety.

By that time, Savage's story had become well known among literary circles, and he appeared lightly disguised in Eliza Haywood's novel Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725). Haywood, an actress and best-selling novelist whose works were often a cause of scandal, purportedly had a romantic relationship with Savage, with whom she was rumored to have had a son. Savage actively participated with Haywood in the era's propensity for satire and praised her in several works, such as his prefatory poem for Haywood's Love in Excess. The two later quarrelled, and Savage satirized her in scathing terms in Authors of the Town (1725) and in An Author to be Let (1730), in which he referred to her as a "cast-off Dame" who "Writes Scandal in Romance." Haywood was also lampooned as nothing more than a literary prostitute in Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, for which Savage was one of the chief sources of petty gossip about the "dunces" of Grub Street portrayed in the satire.

In 1724 Savage was taken up by writer Aaron Hill, thus becoming part of a circle known as the "Hillarian Group", which included several young poets such as John Dyer and James Thomson. Hill promoted their work in the bi-weekly magazine The Plain Dealer. Savage's relationship with Hill, which developed over a period of ten years, proved instrumental in providing him the most important contacts in his career and, above all, in launching a persistent campaign to extort recognition and money from Mrs Brett.

Savage's Miscellaneous Poems were published by subscription in 1726. Savage openly exposed the story of his birth in the Preface, and made repeated oblique references to his mother and his status of abandoned genius in many of the poems. Mrs Brett reportedly paid him money to suppress the Poems, either to soothe him or to silence him.

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