SOURCE: Boyce, Benjamin. “Johnson's Life of Savage and Its Literary Background.” Studies in Philology 53 (1956): 576-98.

In the following essay, Boyce examines the many biographies written about Savage from 1715 to 1744, including the one by Samuel Johnson.

Among the many biographies written by Samuel Johnson the most readable one, the one of greatest intrinsic interest, must surely be his early, anonymously published Life of Richard Savage (1744). It has usually been regarded as a fine illustration of Johnson's theory, announced much later,¹ that a biographer should have eaten and drunk and lived familiarly with his subject. That view of the Savage is proper. But it may also prove illuminating to consider it in connection with Johnson's practice, well established in the eight biographies he had already published, of compiling his work from previous printed accounts, with some effort to reconcile, interpret, and moralize the material. The superiority of the Life of...