Richard Savage

English writer

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Born:: c. 1697,, England

Died:: Aug. 1, 1743, Bristol

Notable Works:: “Miscellaneous Poems”; “The Wanderer”

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Richard Savage (born c. 1697, England—died Aug. 1, 1743, Bristol) was an English poet and satirist and subject of one of the best short biographies in English, Samuel Johnson’s An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744).

By his own account in the preface to the second edition of his Miscellaneous Poems (1728; 1st ed., 1726), Savage was the illegitimate son of Anne, Countess of Macclesfield, and Richard Savage, the 4th Earl of Rivers. His exact date of birth is uncertain. In any event, in November 1715 a young man taken into custody for having written treasonable (i.e., Jacobite) doggerel identified himself as “Mr. Savage, natural son to the late Earl Rivers” and continued so to describe himself for the rest of his life. This was the poet Savage whose life Johnson chronicled. In 1727 Savage was tried for the murder of one James Sinclair in a tavern brawl but was acquitted.

In 1717 he published The Convocation, a poem about a religious dispute known as the Bangorian controversy, and in 1718 Love in a Veil (published 1719), a comedy adapted from the Spanish of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, was produced at Drury Lane. There, in 1723, his Neoclassical tragedy Sir Thomas Overbury was also produced. His most considerable poem, The Wanderer, a discursive work revealing the influence of James Thomson’s The Seasons, appeared in 1729, as did his prose satire on Grub Street, An Author to be Let. In 1737–38 he met Samuel Johnson, then newly arrived in London, and to Johnson’s perceptive and compassionate biography he owes his continuing fame. Savage was a quarrelsome and an impecunious man. His friends, Alexander Pope prominent among them, eventually provided him money to convey him out of London. After a year in Wales, he died miserably in debtor’s prison.

4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul

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Grub Street

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Grub Street

literary hacks

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Grub Street, the world of literary hacks, or mediocre, needy writers who write for hire. The term originated in the 18th century and was frequently used by writers. There was even a Grub-Street Journal. According to Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, Grub Street was “originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet.” The term was a metaphor for the commercial production of printed matter, regardless of whether such matter actually originated on Grub Street itself. The street was renamed Milton Street in 1830. The novelist Tobias Smollett, himself engaged much of his life in Grub Street hackwork, provided a memorable scene of a Grub Street dinner party in Humphry Clinker. George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street (1891) also deals with London literary life.