Items related to Johnson and Savage: A Biographical Mystery
Synopsis
Physical description; xii, 260 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. Subjects; Johnson, Samuel 1709-1784 - Friends and associates. Savage, Richard d. 1743 - Friends and associates.
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About the Author
Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Books Critics Circle Award, and was one of the New York Times Book Review's Best Books of the Year in 2009. Holmes's other books include This Long Pursuit, Footsteps, Sidetracks, Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the James Tait Black Prize). He was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in England.
From Kirkus Reviews
Holmes (Footsteps, 1985) once again brings his humane intelligence and imagination to bear in an exemplary and delightful piece of biographical detection. Working with what he admits are scarce documentary resources, Holmes unravels an enigma that has troubled admirers of Dr. Samuel Johnson from James Boswell forward--i.e., the moralist's two-year friendship with the notorious poet Richard Savage after Johnson's arrival in London in 1737 as a young man. Johnson became his friend's biographer and apologist after Savage's death in debtor's prison--the sorry end to a colorful, if reprobate, life. Savage titillated le tout London in the 1720s by claiming to be the illegitimate son of a countess and an earl; condemned to hang for murder after a coffee-house brawl, he obtained a royal pardon; and he was lionized and then vilified by London society. He was charming and violent, ingratiating and ungrateful, a poet and an extortionist. What drew the scholarly young Johnson to such a man? Closely reading Johnson's Life of Savage, Holmes learns as much about the biographer as about his subject, uncovering a surprising and moving portrait of Johnson as lonely literary aspirant and political radical, a man of intense, if tragically unsatisfied, erotic passion. As a down-and-out newcomer to an unwelcoming London, he roamed the city's streets at night with Savage, who was then shabby but proud and who railed against the society that had rejected him. To Johnson, he represented the poet as outcast--and in this image Holmes locates some unexpected seeds of Romanticism, as well as the model for Thales in Johnson's work London. While recognizing Savage's faults, Johnson remained faithful to his friend. Holmes concludes that for Johnson ``the moral meaning of Savage's existence...lay in the capacity of even a flawed man to struggle nobly against the misfortunes of life.'' A brilliant excursion in the company of three fascinating men- -Samuel Johnson, Richard Savage, and Richard Holmes. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherHodder & Stoughton General Division
- Publication date1993
- ISBN 10 0340529741
- ISBN 13 9780340529744
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Rating
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Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage: A Biographical Mystery
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Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage: A Biographical Mystery
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Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage: A Biographical Mystery
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Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage: A Biographical Mystery
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Hardcover. Condition: Fair. Dust Jacket Condition: Fair. Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. Hardback, d/j, 8vo, xii,260pp. D/j slightly bumped and shelf worn. A fair copy. 0340529741/0.6uk. Seller Inventory # 364126
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Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage
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First Edition. Fine cloth copy in an equally fine dust-wrapper. Particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered. Physical description: xii, 260p. : ill. ; 24cm. Subjects: Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784) -- Friends and associates. Savage, Richard (d. 1743) -- Friends and associates. 1 Kg. Seller Inventory # 288502
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Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, [From lost poems, trial transcripts, unpublished diaires and magazine scandals, the author reconstructs this strange alliance between the young Sam Johnson and Richard Savage, poet, playwright and convicted murderer.]
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Condition: see description. first edition, xii,260pp, all chapter-head illustrations are by William Hogarth, from Hogarth's Graphic Works, red tinted endpapers, those at the front overprinted with an early street map of London just north of the Thames, before Charing Cross railway station was built, and continuing east on the back endpapers as far as St Paul's Catherdral, publisher's boards, title gilt on spine, dw with a Hogarth-style illustration, a signature otherwise nearly as new. Seller Inventory # 91572
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Dr Johnson and Mr Savage
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ISBN 13: 9780340529744
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Hard Cover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. 260pp. Complete illustrated dustjacket in a removeable protective plastic sleeve. Endpaper maps. B + w chapter header illustrations. A very clean copy. The unlikely friendship between Samuel Johnson, aged twenty seven and just arrived in London, and the self invented poet, playwright and convicted murderer Richard Savage. COMES with a newspaper review of the book. Seller Inventory # 16049
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