JOHNSON, BIOGRAPHY AND THE NOVEL: THE FICTIONAL AFTERLIFE OF RICHARD SAVAGE

seager, nicholas;

This article analyses three novels based on Richard Savage, the scapegrace eighteenth-century poet immortalized in Samuel Johnson’s first major biography. Charles Whitehead’s Richard Savage: A Romance of Real Life (1909–42), Stanley V. Makower’s Richard Savage: A Mystery in Biography (1935), and Gwyn Jones’s Richard Savage (1744) each engage with ethical and formal problems posed by Johnson: how to complicate moral treatment of character and incident in narrative; how to handle the admixture of fact and fiction produced by an account of Savage’s chequered but charming life, full as it is with vagaries and vagueness. These novels use quite different formal strategies in response to the social imperatives and formal expectations of their times. The article contends that the fictional afterlives of Savage – the adaptations and appropriations of Johnson’s Life of Savage into works of fiction – indicate Johnson’s enduring influence on the novel, as well as biography.