Of course people who knew Johnson would’ve commented upon his condition. The poet Pope described it as ‘an infirmity of the convulsive kind, that attacks him sometimes, so as to make Him a sad Spectacle.’ Boswell remarks that, ‘The infirmity to which Mr. Pope alludes, appeared to me also, as I have elsewhere observed, to be of the convulsive kind, and of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus’s dance…’ He describes the condition, as told to him by Sydenham, a medical authority: ‘‘This disorder is a kind of convulsion. It manifests itself by halting or unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like an ideot. If the hand of the same side be applied to the breast, or any other part of the body, he cannot keep it a moment in the same posture, but it will be drawn into a different one by a convulsion, notwithstanding all his efforts to the contrary.’’ However Joshua Reynolds, the painter disagreed. Boswell writes that Reynolds told him that Johnson could sit still, ‘when he was told so to do, [he painted him around 1772]: ‘My opinion is, that it proceeded from a habit which he had indulged himself in, of accompanying his thoughts with certain untoward actions, and those actions always appeared to me as if they were meant to reprobate some part of his past conduct.’ Reynolds said Johnson hated to be alone as then his condition worsened, and told Boswell that Johnson had said, ‘the great business of his life, was to escape from himself; this disposition [his condition], he considered as the disease of his mind, which nothing cured but company.’
Boswell writes: ‘When he [Johnson] and I took a journey together into the West, we visited the late Mr. Banks of Dorsetshire; the conversation turning upon pictures, which Johnson could not well see, he retired to a corner of the room, stretching out his right leg as far as he could reach before him, then bringing up his left leg, and stretching his right still further on. The old gentleman observing him, went up to him, and in a very courteous manner assured him, though it was not a new house, the flooring was perfectly safe. The Doctor [Johnson] started from his reverie like a person waked out of his sleep, but spoke not a word.’
Sometime in 1744, Johnson met Richard Savage, a poet who some believed to be the bastard son of the Countess of Macclesfield as he himself claimed all his adult life. He was so obsessed with her and ‘her cruelty for having given him up as a child,’ that from time to time, he stalked her. Here she is:
Savage is such an extraordinary character that I found myself diverging from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and reading, greedily, Johnson’s own book on Savage: The Life of Mr Richard Savage, and Richard Holmes book Dr Johnson and Mr Savage [Harper Perennial, 2010 edition].
Boswell regarded the Johnson/Savage relationship as very perplexing, as did many people; Savage was a sophisticated, fickle, hedonistic spend-thrift, [and like a lot of serious hedonists, it was everyone else’s money he spent]. Boswell was ugly, gawky, disabled and depressed. The one most obvious thing they had in common was a great fear of being alone, Johnson because he believed that the only way he could hold his peculiar ‘convulsions’ at bay was to be in the company of people, and as far as I can yet work out, Savage because it meant he didn’t have to confront himself and the reality of his life.
Boswell wrote that Johnson produced The Life of Richard Savage in 1744, and nothing much else, but that was enough to maintain the high reputation he had acquired. About Savage he said, ‘a man of whom it is difficult to speak impartially, without wondering that he was for some time [a couple of years] the intimate companion of Johnson; for his character was marked by profligacy, insolence, and ingratitude….’ However he goes on to suggest that Savage ‘…undoubtedly had a warm and vigorous, though unregulated mind…’
When one of his kindest benefactors dropped him, Boswell records that Savage wrote the following:-
‘‘Right Honourable Brute and Booby,
I find you want (as Mr. – is pleased to hint,) to swear away my life, that is, the life of your creditor, because he asks you for a debt. – The Publick shall soon be acquainted with this, to judge whether you are not fitter to be an Irish Evidence, than an Irish Peer. – I defy and despise you.
I am,
Your determined adversary,
- S.’’
[I couldn’t find out what ‘an Irish Evidence’ means.]
During the period of time that Johnson and Savage were friends, and during which they spent nights roaming the streets deep in conversation, Tetty Johnson was not in the picture, that is to say no mention is made of her for a while by Boswell. I have a sense that things are not going to turn out well for the Johnsons.
