The Life of Mr Richard Savage
The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by a then-unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson. Richard Savage (1697—1743) was a poet, playwright, and satirist who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a late earl and to have been denied his inheritance and viciously persecuted by his mother. He was urbane,…
From James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
[The following is an excerpt from Appendix F in our recently published The Life of Mr Richard Savage, written by Samuel Johnson. You can see more information about our new edition, edited by Nicholas Seager and Lance Wilcox, on our website.] The young Scots law student James Boswell (1740-95) first met Johnson in 1763, and…