Boswell, James

born Oct. 29, 1740, Edinburgh, Scot.

died May 19, 1795, London, Eng.

Scottish friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson.

Boswell, a lawyer, met Johnson in 1763 and visited him often (1772–84), making a superlatively detailed record in his journals of Johnson's conversations. His two-volume Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) is regarded as one of the greatest English biographies. His Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) is mainly an account of Johnson's responses to their 1773 trip to Scotland. The 20th-century publication of Boswell's journals showed him to have been also one of the world's greatest diarists.

Boswell, detail of an oil painting from the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1786; in the National ...

By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

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▪ Scottish biographer

Introduction

born October 29, 1740, Edinburgh, Scotland

died May 19, 1795, London, England

 friend and biographer (biography) of Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel) (Life of Johnson, 2 vol., 1791). The 20th-century publication of his journals proved him to be also one of the world's greatest diarists (diary).

Edinburgh and London

      Boswell's father, Alexander Boswell, advocate and laird of Auchinleck in Ayrshire from 1749, was raised to the bench with the judicial title of Lord Auchinleck in 1754. The Boswells were an old and well-connected family, and James was subjected to the strong pressure of an ambitious family.

      Boswell hated the select day school to which he was sent at age 5, and from 8 to 13 he was taught at home by tutors. From 1753 to 1758 he went through the arts course at the University of Edinburgh. Returning to the university in 1758 to study law, he became enthralled by the theatre and fell in love with a Roman Catholic actress. Lord Auchinleck thought it prudent to send him to the University of Glasgow, where he attended the lectures of Adam Smith (Smith, Adam). In the spring of 1760 he ran away to London. He was, he soon found, passionately fond of metropolitan culture, gregarious, high-spirited, sensual, and attractive to women; and London offered just the combination of gross and refined pleasures that seemed to fulfill him. At this time he contracted gonorrhea, an affliction that he was to endure many times in the course of his life.

      From 1760 to 1762 Boswell studied law at home under strict supervision and sought release from boredom in gallantry, in a waggish society called the Soaping Club, and in scribbling. His publications (many in verse and most of them anonymous) give no indication of conspicuous talent.

      When Boswell came of age, he was eager to enter the foot guards. Lord Auchinleck agreed that if he passed his trials in civil law, he would receive a supplementary annuity and be allowed to go to London to seek a commission through influence. Boswell passed the examination in July 1762.

      Anticipating great happiness, Boswell began, in the autumn, the journal that was to be the central expression of his genius. His great zest for life was not fully savoured until life was all written (nonfictional prose) down, and he had a rare faculty for imaginative verbal reconstruction. His journal is much more dramatic than most because he wrote up each event as though he were still living through it, as if he had no knowledge of anything that had happened later. People in his journal talk and are given their characteristic gestures.

      Boswell's second London visit lasted from November 1762 to August 1763. Soon after his arrival, he was informed of the birth in Scotland of a son, Charles, for whom he arranged Anglican Baptism. The mother (Peggy Doig) was probably a servant. He met Oliver Goldsmith, the novelist, playwright, and poet, as well as John Wilkes, the radical politician and polemicist. And on May 16, 1763, in the back parlour of the actor and bookseller Thomas Davies, he secured an unexpected introduction to Samuel Johnson, whose works he admired and whom he had long been trying to meet. Johnson was rough with him, but Boswell kept his temper, went to call a week later, and found himself liked—a great friendship was initiated. Johnson was 53 years old when they met, Boswell 22. There was condescension on both sides on account of differences in rank and intelligence. Having become genuinely convinced that the scheme to join the guards was not practicable, Boswell capitulated to his father and consented to become a lawyer. It was agreed that he should spend a winter studying civil law at Utrecht and should then make a modest foreign tour.

Continental tour

      In Holland Boswell befriended and unsuccessfully courted the novelist Isabella van Tuyll van Serooskerken (later called Isabelle de Charrière (Charrière, Isabelle-Agnès-Élizabeth de)). He had been deeply affected by Johnson's piety and on Christmas Day, in the ambassador's chapel at The Hague, received communion for the first time in the Church of England. His pious program proved stimulating for a time but palled when it had lost its novelty. He received word that his little boy had died. In the depression that ensued he had recurring nightmares of being hanged. He was discouraged to find that dissipation brought him more happiness than chastity and hard work, and he soon lapsed into his former promiscuity.

      From Utrecht, Boswell traveled to Berlin in the company of the old Jacobite Earl Marischal, friend and counselor of Frederick the Great, but he was never able to meet the king. Passing through Switzerland (December 1764), he secured interviews with both Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques) and Voltaire. Boswell stayed nine months in Italy, devoting himself systematically to sightseeing. At Naples he established an intimacy with Wilkes (then outlawed) and traveled with Lord Mountstuart, eldest son of the earl of Bute, the chief target of Wilkes's scurrilities.

      The most original act of his life followed when he made a six weeks' tour of the island of Corsica (autumn 1765) to interview the heroic Corsican chieftain Pasquale de Paoli (Paoli, Pasquale), then engaged in establishing his country's independence of Genoa. Paoli succumbed to his charm and became his lifelong friend. On his return to the mainland, Boswell sent off paragraphs to the newspapers, mingling facts with fantastic political speculation.

Scottish lawyer and laird

      Back in Scotland, Boswell was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates on July 26, 1766, and for 17 years practiced law at Edinburgh with complete regularity and a fair degree of assiduity. His cherished trips to London were by no means annual and until 1784 were always made during the vacations. He was an able courtroom lawyer, especially in criminal cases, but in Scotland neither fortune nor fame could be won in the criminal court.

      In February 1768 Boswell published An Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to That Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli and stepped into fame. France had unmasked its intention of annexing the island, and people were greedy for information about Corsica and Paoli. Motives of propaganda caused him to present himself in the book as completely naive and to cut the tour to a mere frame for the memoirs of Paoli, but the result is still pleasing. Paoli, probably wisely, is presented in a manner reminiscent of that which the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch employed in his lives of great men.

      Between 1766 and 1769 Boswell amused himself with various well-hedged schemes of marriage, maintaining meantime a liaison with a young Mrs. Dodds. Their daughter, Sally, like Charles, seems to have died in infancy. Boswell ended by marrying (November 1769) his first cousin, Margaret Montgomerie.

      During the first few years of his marriage, Boswell was on the whole happy, hard-working, faithful to his wife, and confident of getting a seat in Parliament, a good post in the government, or at the very least a Scots judgeship. Paoli visited him in Scotland in 1771; in 1773 he was elected to The Club, the brilliant circle that Sir Joshua Reynolds (Reynolds, Sir Joshua) had formed around Dr. Johnson; and later in the year Johnson made with him the famous tour of the Hebrides. He ultimately had five healthy and promising children. He was made an examiner of the Faculty of Advocates and one of the curators of the Advocates' Library; he served twice as master of the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge of Masons and declined nomination for the grand mastership of Scotland. But by 1776 he began to feel strong intimations of failure. A headlong entry into Ayrshire politics had ranged him in opposition to Henry Dundas, who was then emerging as a political despot in the management of the Scottish elections. His practice was not becoming more notable. He began to drink heavily to replenish his spirits, not, as formerly, to give them vent. He returned to his old traffic with women of the town when separated from his wife by distance, by her pregnancy, or by her frequent complaints. As early as 1778 it was obvious that she was critically ill with tuberculosis.

      Between 1777 and 1783 Boswell published in The London Magazine a series of 70 essays, significantly entitled The Hypochondriack, which deserve to be better known, though they do not engage his full powers. At the end of 1783, in the hope of attracting the attention of William Pitt (Pitt, William, The Younger)'s new government, he published a pamphlet attacking the East India Bill that had been introduced by Charles James Fox, Pitt's great rival. Pitt sent a note of thanks but made no move to employ him. Boswell succeeded to Auchinleck in 1782 and managed his estate with attention and some shrewdness. But he thought he could be happy only in London and encouraged himself in the groundless notion that he could be more successful at the English than at the Scottish bar.

Life of Johnson and London

      Johnson died on December 13, 1784. Boswell decided to take his time in writing the Life but to publish his journal of the Hebridean tour as a first installment. In the spring of 1785 he went to London to prepare the work for the press. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785) tops all the others published later. It comes from the soundest and happiest period of Boswell's life, the narrative of the tour is interesting in itself, and it provides us with 101 consecutive days with Johnson. The book was a best-seller, but it provoked the scornful charge of personal fatuity that has dogged Boswell's name ever since. His intelligence was not really in question. But he deliberately defied the basic literary rule that no author who wishes respect as a man may publish his own follies without suggesting compensatory strengths of character. Boswell analyzed and recorded his own vanity and weakness with the objectivity of a historian, and in his Johnsonian scenes he ruthlessly subordinated his own personality, reporting the blows that Johnson occasionally gave him without constantly reassuring the reader that he understood the implications of what he had written.

      In 1786 Boswell was called to the English bar from the Inner Temple and moved his family to London. Thereafter he had almost no legal practice. His principal business was the writing of the Life of Johnson, which he worked at irregularly but with anxious attention.

      Though straitened in income, Boswell gave his children expensive educations. He visited Edinburgh only once after his emigration and then almost surreptitiously. His wife pined for Auchinleck and insisted on being taken there when her health grew desperate. Boswell felt that he had to be in London in order to finish the Life and to be at the call of the earl of Lonsdale, who had given him unexpected encouragement and caused him to be elected recorder of Carlisle. When his wife died (June 4, 1789), he was not at her side; and when he tried to detach himself from Lonsdale, he was treated with shocking brutality.

      The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. was published in two volumes on May 16, 1791. Contemporary criticism set the pattern of acclaim for the work and derision for its author. Boswell took intense pleasure in his literary fame but felt himself to be a failure. His later years were prevailingly unhappy. His eccentricities of manner seemed merely self-indulgent in a man of 50 or more: people were afraid to talk freely in his presence, fearing that their talk would be reported, and his habit of getting drunk and noisy at other people's tables (he was never a solitary drinker) made him a difficult guest in any case. His five children, however, loved him deeply, and he never lost the solicitous affection of a few friends, including the great Shakespeare editor Edmund Malone (Malone, Edmund), who had encouraged him in his writing of the Life of Johnson. Boswell saw the second edition of the Life through the press (July 1793) and was at work on the third when he died in 1795.

Assessment

      For long it was believed that Boswell's private papers had been destroyed shortly after his death, but the bulk of them were recovered in the 1920s at Malahide Castle near Dublin and sold to an American collector, Ralph H. Isham, by Boswell's great-great-grandson, Lord Talbot de Malahide. These papers, as well as others found at Malahide Castle during the 1930s, were united with another portion discovered by a professor, Claude Colleer Abbott, in Aberdeenshire in the home of descendants of Boswell's executor and sold to Yale University, which, under the editorship of Frederick A. Pottle, began a systematic program of their multivolume publication, beginning with Boswell's London Journal, 1762–63 (1950). The papers give an extraordinary picture of an enlightened yet tormented man, a participant in the intellectual debates of his time who was often driven by sensual appetites and religious fears.

      The Life of Johnson will always be regarded as Boswell's greatest achievement, although, since the publication of his papers, its unique values can be seen to be derivative. It is the stretches of Johnson's conversation that make it superior, and those conversations were lifted bodily from the journal, sometimes with so little change that the journal leaves served as printer's copy. The extended commercial publication of the journal, by proving his ability to compete with 20th-century authors on their own terms, has confirmed and added to Boswell's stature as artist. It also for the first time gives the general reader a properly complex portrait.

Frederick A. Pottle Ed.

Additional Reading

Frederick A. Pottle, The Literary Career of James Boswell (1929, reissued 1967), and his article on Boswell in The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 2 (1971), provides a detailed biobibliography and selected list of works about Boswell, as well as an extensive list of criticism. Pottle's James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (1966, reissued 1985), was the first biography to draw on all the recovered papers; it is continued by Frank Brady, James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769–1795 (1984). Other biographies include D.B. Wyndham Lewis, James Boswell: A Short Life, 2nd ed. (1952, reprinted 1980), warmly pro-Boswellian; Chauncey Brewster Tinker, Young Boswell (1922, reissued 1970); and Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell (1999). Roger Craik, James Boswell, 1740–1795: The Scottish Perspective (1994), explores his Scottishness. David Daiches, James Boswell and His World (1976), is a good brief introduction.Critical studies include Geoffrey Scott, introductions to vol. 1–5 of Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle and vol. 6, The Making of The Life of Johnson . . . (1928–29); and Frederick A. Pottle, “The Life of Johnson: Art and Authenticity,” in James L. Clifford (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Boswell's Life of Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (1970), on the conversations in the Life, the quintessence of Boswell's view of Johnson. Greg Clingham (ed.), New Light on Boswell (1991), is a good collection of critical essays.

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