Lost in the night

{Cottage on Fire at Night (c. 1785-1793), Joseph Wright of Derby}
From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

NIGHTWARD
Approaching towards night.

Their night-ward studies, wherewith they close the day's work.
MILTON ON EDUCATION.

Tonight I'm returning one last time to the well of fascinating knowledge that is Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993). The book's primary story, which I've barely addressed in the couple of posts for which I've already drawn on the book, is in itself full of interest: Holmes applies all his skills as a biographer to discover the nature of Samuel Johnson's friendship with the poet Richard Savage, whose biography Johnson would write in the year after Savage's death. The pursuit of that friendship allows Holmes to draw attention to--and conclusions about--the young Johnson in the years before his fame; to that, he adds an affecting portrait of the talented, maddening, irascible, self-destructive Savage.

But what I enjoyed most in the book were the incidental discoveries and asides that Holmes delivers, the facts and ideas that help him to flesh out his portrait of Augustan England. I wrote a few days ago about some archaic points of eighteenth-century English law that caught my eye; today I'll turn to one last example in that line. Holmes points it out during Savage's last months, at the end of 1742, when, broke and increasingly forlorn, he became an increasing burden on his friends and patrons, and,

[B]y the end of the year, the old pattern of his city life reasserted itself. "All the Charms of his Conversation could not compensate" for his hopeless irregularity as a house-guest. He harassed friends with his talk and his drinking; and he finally repelled them with his endless schemes and demands. His clothes, like his novelty value, started to wear thin. He began to be pursued by small debtors, and slowly reverted to the tramp-like existence of his former days, lodging at taverns and wandering the streets at night.

That wandering was in part habitual, possibly even preferred: Savage had long been a late-night carouser; in fact, the event that brought him his greatest fame--his conviction for murder--had come about as a result of a wee-hours brawl.

NIGHTBRAWLER
One who raises disturbances in the night.

You unlace your reputation,
And spend your rich opinion for the name
Of a night-brawler.
SHAKESPEARE'S OTHELLO.

But his turn to the nocturnal this time had a further, more specific purpose as well. As Holmes explains,

This grim, lethargic life was partly forced on Savage by municipal laws, which prevented bailiffs from arresting anyone for debt between the hours of sunset and sunrise. Night thus became the only time Savage could venture out from his hiding-place, which was a back-street tavern called the White Lion.

In his At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (2005), A. Roger Ekirch fleshes out the picture a bit:

Numerous folk, besides burglars, robbers, and other hardened rogues, exploited the evening darkness, often for illicit purposes. . . . For poor families, social and legal constraints of all sorts eased. . . . Likewise, debtors and other fugitives, fearful of arrest [in the day], traveled freely. At night, wrote Thomas Dekker, "The banckrupt, the fellon, and all that owed any mony, and for feare of arrests, or justices warrants, had like so many snayles kept their houses over their heads all day before, began to creep out of their shels."

Ekirch even points out a custom that could possibly have helped Savage, exiled (at the suggestion of and with a handsome stipend provided by Alexander Pope) as he was in Bristol, save on lodging:

Squatters in parts of Western England and Wales laid more permanent claims. A local custom of uncertain origins permitted one to occupy a piece of waste or common land by building a turf cottage overnight, generally known as a caban unnos. The work had to be completed between twilight and dawn, though friends and family were permitted to help.

It's impossible, though, to imagine Savage, whose self-styling as a gentleman bastard was one of the great sources of his misery, turning his hand to such low building work. Instead, he remained afoot and a-stagger in the lanes of Bristol, suffering increasingly from illness, drink, and depression. As the winter wore on and the nights of wandering grew longer, Johnson tells us that "Distress stole upon him by imperceptible Degrees."

NIGHTFARING
Traveling in the night.

Will-a-Wisp misleads night-faring clowns,
O'er hills, and sinking bogs, and pathless downs.
GAY.

Finally Savage lost even his battle with the diurnal cycle, being nabbed when returning to his quarters after dawn from a too-long party. A group of bailiffs arrested him for a debt of eight pounds to a Mrs. Read, owner of a coffeehouse--whom Savage, with his usual ferocity towards his enemies, later referred to in letters as "Madame Wolf-Bitch."

Savage would die in jail just over six months later, leaving, in a sense, Johnson to write his epitaph, in the Life of Savage:

There are no proper Judges of his Conduct who have slumber'd away their Time on the Down of Plenty, nor will a wise Man easily presume to say, "Had I been in Savage's Condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage."

For tonight, though, I'll let Dr. Johnson reassume his lexicographer's hat and have a different--and single--last word.

NIGHTFOUNDERED
Lost or distressed in the night.

Either some one like us night-foundered here,
Or else some neighbour woodman, or at worst,
Some roving robber calling to his fellows.
MILTON.

"So inly swete a sweven," or, A passel of dreams

{The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of, John Anster Fitzgerald (1858)}

1 Saturday was my nephew's ninth birthday, and that night I dreamed about the party we'd attended for him that afternoon. The dream, however, featured two guests who hadn't attended the actual party: Marcel Proust and Eloise. The two of them seemed--not, I think, inaptly--to be great friends, spending the whole party sitting next to each other, sipping from the tiny teacups of a child's tea set and quietly sharing private jokes that caused them to break out in skeins of shared giggles. I'm sure you can imagine the smile I wore on waking.

Proust himself would have me doubt their identities--might they have been other people, real people from my life, in masquerade? He takes up the question in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919, translated by James Grieve in 2002):

I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel.

But the underlying simplicity and gentleness of this dream belie Proust's natural suspicions: the dream seemed to have no hidden message, was transmuting no disguised anxiety. In this case, I find myself agreeing with what Iris Murdoch said in a 1983 interview with John Haffenden, collected in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003):

I think dreams have a great many sorts of explanation. Once the Freud virus has, as it were, got into you, you keep on looking at things in that way. But surely there's a lot of pure accident in dreams. One has kinds of obsessions and fears that can't be given a sexual meaning. I think the inventiveness and details of dreams are amazing.

I'm sure Eloise and Proust were simply Eloise and Proust, linked, I can only imagine, because while in New York in September I read a few pages of Mary Ann Caws's Proust while in view of the Plaza Hotel, where Eloise presumably still makes her home. And from now on I'll imagine her there taking catty, gleeful tea with her friend Marcel.

2 Murdoch was a master of employing believably obscure, layered, and organic dreams in her novels; at their best, their richness allowed her to obliquely suggest reams about her characters in remarkably compressed form. But she wasn't interested, at least on the day of the above interview, in sharing her own dreams. When asked to supply an example, Murdoch--usually a very accommodating and open interview subject--responded, "I don't think I will." And she didn't.

3 Though it's hard to imagine Samuel Johnson having much truck with Freud, perhaps Freud could have reassured Johnson on the place of sexual dreams, if the following anecdote, first recounted by one of Johnson's closest friends, Hester Thrale, in her Anecdotes (1765), is to be believed. Here's how Richard Holmes relates it in his Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993):

Johnson came fretfully back from seeing Hester's son to school, suddenly immersed in memories of his own adolescence. "'Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered my heart was communicated in a dream.' 'What was it, Sir?' said I. 'Do not ask me,' replied he, with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation.

Again, this may just be the Freud virus speaking, but I think I have to disagree with the good Doctor: not every dream should be shared with one's mother.

4 A far more enigmatic dream turns up in Johnson's diary entry for January 23, 1759, the day of his mother's burial. The bulk of the entry is a prayer for his mother's soul and for the improvement, through meditation on her example, of his own. But Johnson closes with a brief, suggestive, unforgettable line:

The dream of my Brother I shall remember.

Donald Greene's note to that line in the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Major Works offers a partial explanation:

Nathanael Johnson died suddenly and mysteriously at the age of twenty-four, just at the time Samuel and David Garrick left for London; suicide has been suspected. His one surviving letter, written not long before his death, complains of his harsh treatment by his brother.

The dream itself, however, goes unannotated and unexplained. Boswell doesn't note it--and quite possibly didn't even know about it; Nathanael barely registers in the Life of Johnson, rating five mentions, the first of which flatly states that he "died in his twenty-fifth year."

Perhaps the dream was the travail of a single night, relatively unimportant. But just as Johnson resolved to remember the dream, by the troubling simplicity of that final line he has guaranteed that I will remember it, undreamt and unknown, as well.

5 I'll close with some lines from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370) that are never far from my mind because on first reading them fifteen years ago, I fell for the Middle English word for dream, "sweven," and have never forgotten it. It seems an appropriate way to end this post, since my dreams, like my daily life, are shot through with words--the magical, intoxicating power of which forms the one sweven from which I expect I'll never have to wake.

I hadde unneth that word y-sayd
Right thus as I have told hit yow,
That sodeynly, I niste how,
Swich a lust anoon me took
To slepe, that right upon my book
I fil aslepe, and therwith even
Me mette so inly swete a sweven,
So wonderful, that never yit
I trowe no man hadde the wit
To conne wel my sweven rede.

The legal aftermath of "th' ensanguin'd Floor"

{William Hogarth, The Four Times of Day: Night, 1738}

In reading Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993), a careful reconstruction of the brief but powerful friendship between the young Samuel Johnson, not yet a success, and Richard Savage, a raffish, arrogant, obsessive ne'er-do-well, bastard, poet, and, oh, yes, killer, I came across a couple of odd tidbits about archaic English law that seemed worth sharing.

In 1727, Savage stabbed a man to death with a sword during a late-night brawl at a coffeehouse. Though accounts differ--and much of the pleasure of Holmes's book is afforded by his careful parsing of those accounts--it seems clear that Savage and his two drunken companions, upon entering the coffeehouse, demanded that they be given a private room, and, when told that the room was occupied and temporarily unavailable, barged into it and began breaking furniture and acting in a haughty and threatening manner to its lower-class occupants. As Holmes succinctly notes,

Savage and his friends had assumed social precedence, the privilege of moneyed gentlemen to command and bully, which the habitues of Robinson's Coffee-house were not prepared to grant them

A scuffle ensued, during which Savage landed the fatal blow.

At his trial, Savage drew an infamous hanging-judge, Francis Page (who, Holmes points out, is caricatured in Tom Jones). Johnson, reconstructing the trial for his later, far-from-impartial Life of Savage, presents the following version of the Judge's summing-up of the case, taken from Savage's later recountings, that demonstrates how pointed the judge's remarks could be:

Gentlemen of the Jury, you are to consider, that Mr savage is a very great Man, a much greater Man than you or I, Gentlemen of the Jury; that he wears very fine Clothes, much finer Clothes than you or I, Gentlemen of the Jury; that he has an abundance of Money in his Pocket, much more money than you or I, Gentlemen of the Jury; but, Gentlemen of the Jury, it is not a very hard Case, Gentlemen of the Jury, that Mr Savage should therefore kill you or me, Gentlemen of the Jury.

Though that may strike you as a bit much coming from a judge--who is, after all, supposed to be instructing a jury to weigh the evidence and make their own decision--it's nothing compared to what came next. According to Alexander Pope, who watched the trial from the gallery, the judge concluded by instructing the jury to find all three men guilty of murder. Holmes is quick to point out that

Such positive direction would never be countenanced in a modern courtroom; yet it was not unusual in an eighteenth-century one.

Forthright instructions aside, the jury did actually make up its own mind, finding only two of the men--including Savage--guilty of "wilful murder," while naming the third guilty only of manslaughter.

Committed to Newgate to await his execution--which would eventually be forestalled by a pardon--Savage explained to his friend Theophilus Cibber that he was holding up well, aside from having to put up with the "insipid visits" of the Newgate padre, of whom there was no way of ridding himself,

except one; which was by talking on points of religion, and learning, a little above his capacity.

Holmes can't resist pointing out that there may have been a reason for the preacher's tenacity:

[I]ncidentally, by a curiosity of prison regulations, [the padre] had the publishing rights to any written confession he could extract from his charges.

I suppose that's one way for lawmakers, concerned about the souls of those confined to Newgate, to be sure that the churchmen would be properly attentive to their charges. And though that practice seems bizarre on its face, I'm not sure we're even now quite settled the question of how to deal with the confessions of a murderer: think of the Son of Sam laws and If I Did It. So long as the ghoulish interest remains, so will the question of divvying up the spoils.