8

James Boswell, Also, Enters into Heaven

Boswell was a more serious philosopher than Hume. Not a better philosopher, obviously, but a more serious one. For Hume, philosophy was an intellectual exercise and professional vocation; it was academic, in something like our modern sense. Despite the immensity of the mature Hume’s philosophical ambitions and achievement, philosophy never seems to have given him any dark nights of the soul. He admired the ancients for whom it was an elite hobby: “Let us revive the happy times, when Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished agreeable matter to discourse and conversation.”¹

For Boswell, in contrast, philosophy was urgent, obsessing, existentially important. A philosophical treatise could catalyze an intense emotional reaction:

I went to Bothwell Castle in very good spirits. But unluckily, I believe the very day after my arrival there, I read in Lord Monboddo’s Ancient Metaphysics that there could be no such thing as contingency, and that every action of man was absolutely fixed… I then looked into Lord Kames’s Sketches, where … he maintains the necessity of human resolutions and actions in the most positive manner. I was shocked by such a notion and sunk into dreadful melancholy, so that I went out to the wood and groaned. I had with me Volusenus De Anima Tranquillitate, passages of which were a comfort to me, and I read some of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, one of which is in favour of human liberty.… But still the arguments for necessity were heavy upon me.²

The conceptual world of this passage belongs to the Enlightenment: unlike his Scottish Presbyterian ancestors, Boswell is concerned with necessity and free will rather than predestination and election. But his attitude to philosophy is the opposite of Hume’s pose of dix-huitième detachment. Boswell reads Monboddo and Kames, his father’s colleagues in the Court of Session and lesser lights of the Scottish Enlightenment behind Smith and Hume, with the affective earnestness of the Puritan encounter with scripture. The battle between Montesquieu and Monboddo in Boswell’s mind recalls not Cicero’s leisured Tusculan Disputations but rather John Bunyan’s record of how two Bible passages, one offering condemnation and the other redemption, “boulted both upon me at a time, and did work and struggle strangely in me for a while” until “at last, that about Esaus birthright began to wax weak, and withdraw, and vanish; and this about the sufficiency of Grace prevailed, with peace and joy.”³

Boswell responds to his philosophical perplexities and religious fears through writing. The paradigm of prose immortality, which Boswell fully realizes in the Life of Johnson, emerges, formally speaking, from the daily moral formation and being-toward-heaven of the Spectator and Night Thoughts, Richardson’s writing to the moment, and Johnson’s ethical-religious preoccupation with the proper cultivation of time and practice of biography as literary mode. Indeed, the chapters that precede this one in my study might serve as a résumé of Boswell’s major influences: he consciously modeled his life after Mr. Spectator during his year in London 1762–3, quoted Young frequently and saw Welwyn as a site of pilgrimage, and, of course, worshipped Johnson.⁴ Oddly, given their stylistic affinities, Boswell nowhere records reading Richardson, although the twentieth-century Boswellian Frederick Pottle believes that he must have done so. (Incidentally, the 1825 sale catalogue of James Boswell, Jr.’s library includes a 1749 Dublin edition of Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs, although it is not known whether it belonged previously to his father.⁵)

Although Boswell’s predecessors supply formal models, however, the impetus for the Life of Johnson can be found in Boswell’s own mental world: not only in his well-understood yearning for a father figure to replace the distant and icy Lord Auchinleck, but also in his preoccupations with heaven, ghosts, fame, inheritance, feudal continuity, and reanimating the dead. Contemplating death and what lies beyond elicited the same visceral emotions in Boswell as the treatises on human freedom and determinism cited above, and he grasped at every available means of preserving life. Illustrative is the case of John Reid, a petty criminal whom Boswell successfully defended against a charge of sheep-stealing before the Lords of Justiciary in 1766, but was unable to save from a death sentence for a similar crime in 1774. In addition to a passionate and imaginative courtroom defense of Reid, undertaken pro bono, Boswell drafted a petition for royal clemency on Reid’s behalf, made him promise “to write his life very fully,” commissioned a portrait of him from an Edinburgh painter, exhorted him with Bible in hand to full confession and repentance, enlisted a medical doctor in a scheme to reanimate Reid after hanging, and finally wrote up his client’s life and death for the newspapers. Like the man in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams who answers the charge that he returned a borrowed kettle in bad condition by protesting that “in the first place the kettle wasn’t damaged at all, in the second it already had a hole in it when he borrowed it, and in the third he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbor,” Boswell responds to the shadow of the gallows by simultaneously seeking to prove Reid’s innocence and convince him to confess; keep him from execution and prepare him for heaven; memorialize his death and bring him back to life.⁶ The accomplishment of the Life of Johnson lies in Boswell’s synthesis of his disparate protests against mortality into a harmonious whole. As Gordon Turnbull points out, “character” is what kills John Reid, as his conviction is based in part on his being in “habit and repute” a thief.⁷ In the Life of Johnson, character preserves, as Boswell’s forensic legal skills are turned to biographical research, which at once preserves Johnson’s earthly haeccitas and makes the case for his posthumous salvation.

In his lifelong quest to defeat finitude, the Life of Johnson is Boswell’s most successful gambit. The first task of this chapter will be to read the Life as a definitive instantiation of the prose immortality paradigm, both in its narrative techniques and in its conscious reflections about the purpose and nature of biography. The sections that follow trace Boswell’s varied uses of writing as an instrument not only of self-creation but also of self-preservation, through his diaries and memoranda, Account of Corsica, periodical essays, and other writings. As the John Reid case illustrates, Boswell is inconsistent and even self-contradicting in the uses to which he put writing and publication; but as the mental fight between Kames and Montesquieu at Bothwell Castle suggests, he treated literature as a matter of life and death. The chapter then concludes with a brief look at the nineteenth-century reception of the Life of Johnson, and how prose immortality provides a framework for understanding the book’s achievement.

“An Honourable Monument to His Memory”

Much of the Life of Johnson consists of Boswell’s diary entries from the years of his friendship with Johnson, edited and in some cases expanded for publication. When Boswell revised his 1763 journal to tell the story of his first meeting with Johnson in the Life, he gave Thomas Davies, the bookseller whose shop Johnson “unexpectedly came into” while Boswell and Davies were visiting, a new and crucial five-word speech: “Look, my Lord, it comes.”⁸ This Shakespearean quotation turns Boswell into Hamlet, Davies into Horatio and Johnson into Old Hamlet. Thus Boswell makes his biographical subject at once a ghost, a literary character, and his own father, at the moment that the two meet for the first time. There is a fitness to reading these words as an unconscious invention of the late 1780s when Boswell, his English legal career stillborn and his political ambitions in shambles, indeed had no choice but to “wipe away all trivial fond records” and remember Johnson “within the book and volume of [his] brain/Unmixed with baser matter” (Hamlet 1.5.99, 103–4). Whether “Look, my Lord, it comes,” was spoken by Davies in 1763 or imagined by Boswell over twenty-five years later, it is of a piece with the latter’s earliest recorded ambitions to undertake the Life of Johnson. In September 1764, Boswell was entering the second year of his continental studies and travels; in the year since Johnson had seen him to Harwich and on to the packet boat for Holland, Boswell had written Johnson several letters and received a single long one in reply. On the last day of the month, Boswell arrived at Wittenberg, where he visited the tombs of Luther and Melanchthon. The simple inscriptions on the reformers’ adjacent tombs record that they died at the same age, fourteen years apart. “In a true solemn humour” at the sight of Luther and his disciple undivided in death, Boswell records in his diary that “a most curious and agreeable idea presented itself, which was to write to Mr. Samuel Johnson from the tomb of Melanchthon.”⁹ Boswell lay down on the church floor in order that his pen and paper might literally rest on the monument as he wrote: “I vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy: and, if you die before me, I shall endeavour to do honour to your memory; and, elevated by the remembrance of you, persist in noble piety” (Life 3:122, emphasis added).

This prostration reenacts Boswell and Johnson’s visit to the church at Harwich before Boswell embarked for his year of studies at Utrecht; the Life records that Johnson “sent [Boswell] to his knees, saying ‘Now that you are going to leave your native country, recommend yourself to the protection of your CREATOR and REDEEMER’” (Life 1:471).¹⁰ In Wittenberg (young Hamlet’s university, in addition to Luther’s) praying becomes writing, and Johnson’s remembered and recorded example becomes an intercessory medium between Boswell and God. Boswell did not send the Melanchthon letter to Johnson until 1777, when he explained that he did not send it before lest he “should appear at once too superstitious and too enthusiastick” (Life 3:118).¹¹ In the intervening thirteen years Boswell’s vow had taken the form of a biographical project of which both Boswell and Johnson were conscious, as Boswell’s diary from his trip to the Hebrides with Johnson in 1773 makes clear: “I shall lay up authentic materials for The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., and if I survive him, I shall be one who shall most faithfully do honour to his memory.” Boswell perpends a footnote to his journal MS: “It is no small satisfaction to me to reflect that Dr. Johnson read this, and, after being apprised of my intention, communicated to me, at subsequent periods, many particulars of his life, which probably could not otherwise have been preserved.”¹² Boswell did survive Johnson, and the eventual Life indeed presents itself as honoring Johnson’s memory, in contrast to what Boswell believed to be the unfairly negative portraits found in Hawkins’s Life and Hester Piozzi’s Anecdotes. The germ of Boswell’s biography is thus in his enthusiastic response to two tombs that unite and memorialize a great religious hero and his younger disciple.¹³ In a Wittenberg church in the second year of their twenty-year friendship, Boswell already imagines Johnson (and himself) as dead and in need of a posthumous monument.

The advertisement to the first edition of the Life presents the biography in precisely these monumental terms. The dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Horation epigraph on the title page—which compares the autobiographical satires of Lucilius to a painted votive tablet—prepare the reader to think of the Life through the metaphor of portraiture, as what Boswell will later call his “Flemish picture” (Life 3:191). But Boswell’s first direct address to the reader asks us to imagine the book as a monumental cairn:¹⁴

The delay of [the Life’s] publication must be imputed, in a considerable degree, to the extraordinary zeal which has been shewn by distinguished persons in all quarters to supply me with additional information concerning its illustrious subject; resembling in this the grateful tribes of ancient nations, of which every individual was eager to throw a stone upon the grave of a departed Hero, and thus to share in the pious office of erecting an honourable monument to his memory. (Life 1:4)

There is a faint echo of Steele’s account in the final Spectator of wishing to write a work with Addison “which should bear the Name of the Monument, in Memory of our Friendship”; Boswell also locates himself in the classical tradition of venerating human excellence (“immortality” in Hannah Arendt’s sense) through the concentrated string of words derived from the register of Roman ritual duty with which the paragraph ends (“pious”/pius, “office” / officium, “erect” / erigere, “honourable” / honorabilis, “monument” / monumentum).¹⁵ The Life of Johnson is presented as if it were an epitaph, a textual double of the literal Johnson monument, originally intended for Westminster Abbey but eventually placed in St. Paul’s, for which Boswell collected subscriptions following Johnson’s death.¹⁶ As a monument, however, the Life differs from its marble double and their classical predecessors in that it comprises not a single inscription but an accumulation, a heaping up, of individual anecdotes. In the following pages, Boswell shifts to a new sepulchral metaphor, imagining the Life as the embalmed corpse of Johnson himself, incomplete only because not all of Johnson’s intimates preserved his sayings and doings as Boswell did: “Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved” (Life 1:30). As Paul Alkon points out, Boswell used this conceit several times when explaining the project of the Life to correspondents in the immediate wake of Johnson’s death, calling the book “an Egyptian Pyramid in which there will be a complete mummy of Johnson” and “a Mausoleum [containing] all of his precious remains that I can gather.”¹⁷

The Life of Johnson is unprecedented in its scrupulous organization of time, filled with dated letters and documents and framed by running titles that give not only the year but, where possible, the precise date of Johnson’s actions and conversations.¹⁸ The structure of the Life is not only chronological—that is, sequential—but chronometric. Like the dated Spectator essays reprinted in volume form, the Life of Johnson invites its reader to reenter a past sequence of calendar time. Yet, as Alkon’s study of “Boswellian Time” demonstrates, Boswell’s scrupulous dating nevertheless creates a sense of timeless present, because of its disproportionate focus on Johnson in his final years, in London, in literary conversation: “Towards the end, upon completion and during subsequent readings, there is aroused a sensation that it is almost always Easter, almost always April, almost always spring.… Also contributing to such deceleration is Boswell’s nonprogressive depiction of a character who does not develop or change from year to year.”¹⁹

Easter is crucial to Boswell’s diurnal yet timeless record of Johnson. As his manuscript prayers and meditations show, Easter week was the high point, beside the New Year and the anniversary of Tetty’s death, in Johnson’s annual round of spiritual self-examination. It was also Boswell’s preferred season for visiting London. This was certainly due to the Scottish legal calendar, which kept him in Edinburgh from November to March and June to August; it may also be an expression of the seasonal vicissitudes of Boswell’s hypochondria.²⁰ In a 1774 letter to Johnson, Boswell describes Easter in London as a pilgrimage, “like going up to Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover,” which conveyed a “strong devotion” that “diffused its influence on [his] mind through the rest of the year” (Life 2:275). Easter is the story of a dead body in a sealed tomb turning into a living interlocutor, who appears to the disciples in order to eat with them—and Boswell carefully records the food that Johnson eats during their visits in Easter season, whether the abstemious cross buns and milkless tea of Good Friday or the “very good soup, boiled leg of lamb and spinach, a veal pye, and a rice pudding” that they eat the first time Johnson invites Boswell for Easter dinner (Life 2:215). Easter is at once the zenith of the Christian liturgical year, what Charles Taylor calls “higher time,” and, counterintuitively, a deep source of secular time, as it was the need to set its date correctly that led to the promulgation of the Georgian calendar.²¹ It is thus a metaphor for Boswell’s project in the Life of turning a tomb with a mummy in it into a living conversationalist, the “bringing to life” that has been, I argue below, a mainstay of reader response to the Life for two centuries.

If Boswell’s Johnson is a type of Christ, Boswell’s Christ has some of the features of Johnson, as illustrated by a theological conversation from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:

I spoke of the satisfaction of Christ. [Johnson] said his notion was, that it did not atone for the sins of the world; but by satisfying divine justice, by showing that no less than the Son of God suffered for sin, it showed to men and innumerable created beings the heinousness of it.… The effect it should produce would be repentance and piety, by impressing upon the mind a just notion of sin.… He presented this solemn subject in a new light to me, and rendered much more rational and clear the doctrine of what our Saviour has done for us, as it removed the notion of imputed righteousness.… By this view Christ has done all already that he had to do, or is ever to do, for mankind, by making his great satisfaction; the consequences of which will affect each individual according to the particular conduct of each. (Life 5:88–89)

Boswell simplifies this complicated revision of a mysterious doctrine with an image: “Christ’s satisfaction resembles a sun placed to shew light to men, so that it depends upon themselves whether they will walk the right way or not” (ibid.). In two consecutive sentences, Johnson and Christ in turn provide light. The latter becomes not a substitute who covers man’s sin but a source of true moral knowledge that shows erring man the right way, Rambler as much as redeemer. When revising his 1773 journal for publication a dozen years later, Boswell supplies a footnote explaining that this was not the view with which Johnson died: “he afterwards was fully convinced of the propitiatory sacrifice” (ibid.). But Boswell’s own approval of a Johnsonian Christ whose suffering provides man with inspiration and guidance, rather than a sacrificial substitute, remains in the body of the text.²²

Johnson as ghostly Old Hamlet, as Luther, as Roman ancestor, as preserved corpse, as resurrected Christ; each metaphor is planted in the Life. One more metaphor lies below the surface, offering a full synthesis of personal and literary immortality: the Life of Johnson as heaven itself. In 1764, desperate to secure an interview with Rousseau in his retreat at Môtiers, Boswell had attempted to impress the philosopher with an autobiographical sketch, focusing in particular on his early religious education:

My mother was extremely pious. She inspired me with devotion. But unfortunately she taught me Calvinism. My catechism contained the gloomiest doctrines of that system. The eternity of punishment was the first great idea I ever formed. How it made me shudder! … I became the most timid and contemptible of beings. However, from the age of eight to the age of twelve I enjoyed reasonably good health. I had a tutor who was not without sentiment and sensibility.… He set me to reading The Spectator; and it was then that I acquired my first notions of taste for the fine arts and the pleasure there is in considering the variety of human nature.… My governor sometimes spoke to me of religion, but in a simple and pleasing way. He told me that if I behaved well during my life, I should be happy in the other world. There I should hear beautiful music. There I should acquire the sublime knowledge that God will grant to the righteous; and there I should meet all the great men of whom I had read, and all the dear friends I had known. At last my governor put me in love with heaven, and some hope entered into religion.²³

Boswell’s early religious education is divided between the hellfire of Scottish Calvinism and the elegant and sociable futurity of Addisonian Anglicanism. The allurements of heaven—“beautiful music,” “sublime knowledge,” and meeting “great men”—satisfy appetites developed by reading the Spectator: “taste for the fine arts” and “pleasure … in considering human nature.” Boswell never ceased to vacillate between these two visions of the hereafter, and between the fear and hope respectively that they elicited in him. More than any other part of his life, his spring visits to London during Johnson’s life prefigure the pleasures Boswell expects from the Spectator’s version of heaven. Even before getting to know Johnson, Boswell saw London in this way: the opening pages of his London Journal record that on sighting the city, Boswell recited the “soliloquy on the immortality of the soul” from Addison’s Cato while his own “soul bounded forth to a certain prospect of happy futurity” (43–44).²⁴ A decade later, his diary describes an intimate dinner at General Oglethorpe’s in April 1772 as though it were a beatific vision: “Mr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith and nobody else were the company. I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind. Here I am in London, at the house of General Oglethorpe, who introduced himself to me just because I had distinguished myself; and here is Mr. Johnson, whose character is so vast; here is Dr. Goldsmith, so distinguished in literature. Words cannot describe our feelings … the radiance of light cannot be painted” (For the Defense 104).

An extensive record of the conversation, reproduced in the Life, follows. The topics are typical of Boswell and Johnson: current events and law cases, ghosts and dueling. Of course, Boswell’s record of his own bliss to be at dinner with “great men” and “dear friends” is excluded from the Life. But the reader who enters into Boswell’s detailed accounts of Johnson’s table talk is not surprised to learn that he or she is experiencing what Boswell thought of as paradise. His most celebrated dinner scene, the meeting between Johnson and John Wilkes, “was not only pleasing at the time, but had the agreeable and benignant effect of reconciling any animosity … which … had been produced in the minds of two men, who though widely different, had so many things in common” (3:78). Boswell brings about the peaceable kingdom, in which the lion lies down with the lamb. In the closing pages of the Life, Boswell states explicitly that he imagines heaven as a place where he will be reunited with Johnson: “I look forward with humble hope of renewing our friendship in a better world” (4:380).²⁵

For all the pleasure transmitted by the Life’s conversational tableaux, it contains too much shade—Johnson’s early disappointments, late diseases, and constant battles with melancholy—to stand in fully as a substitute for Addisonian futurity. Precisely where the biography is not a type of the blessed afterlife, however, it becomes an instrument for getting there. This is true in two senses. First, Boswell holds up Johnson as a moral exemplar; even his guarded record of Johnson’s moral failings (4:395–98) is carefully calibrated to depict Johnson as the most imitable of sinners.²⁶ Bruce Redford points out that part of Boswell’s intention in writing Johnson’s life “in scenes” was to make him a vivid moral model: “He signals his intention by quoting part of a couplet from Pope’s prologue to Addison’s Cato: ‘To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold, / Live o’er each scene, and be what they behold.’”²⁷ This is not to say that Boswell sets Johnson up as a figure for universal imitation; he is too emphatic in depicting Johnson’s psychological and physical particularity for that. But the text clearly sets Johnson up as an heroic inspiration, deserving “admiration and reverence” (the final words of the Life, 4:430).²⁸ Second, the Life projects Johnson himself into heaven, much as Clarissa does its heroine, by presenting a peaceful and pious version of Johnson’s death, in which he is “perfectly resigned” and “seldom or never fretful or out of temper” (4:417). Boswell seeks to rebut the insinuations of Sir John Hawkins and others that Johnson either committed suicide or scarified himself into premature death through an impious avidity for life.²⁹ According to the writing-makes-it-so logic of Boswellian wish-fulfillment, Johnson’s last reported words, “God bless you, my dear!,” should usher him into heaven (4:418).

From the exotic, gothic conceit of erecting a pyramid for Johnson (itself mingled with suggestions of Catholic veneration of relics) to the elegant Addisonian heaven of Easter in London, the Life of Johnson mingles multiple streams of eighteenth-century religious rhetoric. Yet it is important to recognize that Boswell’s minutely documentary project is also grounded in his Scottish Enlightenment training, even as it goes beyond it. In the introduction to his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, a trial balloon for the fuller Life that Boswell published separately in 1785, Boswell supplies a detailed description of Johnson’s face, manners, clothes, shoes, (with “silver buckles”) and even his walking stick, and then states, “Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr. Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes instead of buckles” (Life 5:19). Boswell heard Smith’s lectures in 1759; a surviving copy of student notes taken from the 1762–63 academic year does not contain Smith’s remark on Milton, but lecture 22, which discusses panegyric oratory, shows that Boswell is indeed expressing Smith’s views: “The smallest circumstances, the most minute transactions of a great man are sought after with eagerness. Everything that is created with Grandeur seems to be important.”³⁰ Though he evidently used the example of Milton’s shoe-latchets when delivering the lecture to Boswell, in the surviving written text Smith gives Xenophon’s panegyric on Agesilaus—a traditional celebration of the victories and virtues of that Spartan king—as his paradigmatic example of a minute description of character. But Boswell’s unprecedented use of chronometric precision as well as anecdotal detail means that the completed Life goes beyond the model of Xenophon, just as it does Boswell’s own stated classical model, Plutarch.

Diary as Mirror

Johnson knew that Boswell meant to write his life, and despite some ambivalence he was in the end a not unwilling collaborator.³¹ Boswell could not claim an explicit imprimatur from his subject, but throughout the Journal of a Tour and the Life of Johnson, he shows himself in dialogue with Johnson about what kind of book the Life will be. He records Johnson’s collaboration in his documentary legwork, noting for instance the evening on which he gathered from Johnson the “authentick information” which is “incorporated in its proper place” in the Life (2:441). Boswell reports Johnson’s permission to publish his letters: “Nay, Sir, when I am dead, you may do as you will” (2:60). He intimates that Johnson is “secretly pleased to find so much of the fruit of his mind preserved” and “delighted … to find that his conversation teemed with point and energy” when Boswell reports to him in 1778 how much of the last fifteen years of his speech has been recorded in Boswell’s journal (3:260).³² The Journal of a Tour in particular contains a feedback loop throughout, as Boswell repeatedly records Johnson reading and praising Boswell’s journal, including its records of Johnson reading and praising earlier sections.³³

Throughout their friendship, Boswell talks with Johnson about the practice and theory of life writing and the ethics of publication. In addition to demonstrating that the project of the Life connects to Johnson’s own interests and anxieties, these discussions provide an entrée into the relationship between the biography of Johnson and the rest of Boswell’s writings, particularly his voluminous diaries and personal memoranda. The Life records a conversation on March 30, 1778, at Streatham, where, over coffee with Johnson, Mrs. Thrale, and Robert Barnewall (called by courtesy Lord Trimlestown, though his grandfather had lost the title for being a Jacobite), Boswell introduces the topic of an autobiographical “Life of Sir Robert Sibbald” that Boswell had purchased from his uncle John Boswell, MD.³⁴ He moots the possibility of publishing the manuscript, in which Sibbald, a seventeenth-century Scottish physician and geographer, recounts his return to Protestantism after a brief Catholic conversion because, as Boswell puts it, “he found the rigid fasting prescribed by the church very severe upon him.” A discussion follows:

MRS. THRALE: “I think you had as well let alone that publication. To discover such weakness exposes a man when he is gone.” JOHNSON: “Nay, it is an honest picture of human nature. How often are the primary motives of our greatest actions as small as Sibbald’s, for his reconversion.” MRS. THRALE: “But may they not as well be forgotten?” JOHNSON: “No, Madam, a man loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary, or journal.” LORD TRIMLESTOWN: “True, Sir. As the ladies love to see themselves in a glass; so a man likes to see himself in his journal.” BOSWELL: “A very pretty allusion.” JOHNSON: “Yes, indeed.” BOSWELL: “And as a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal.” I next year found the very same thought in Atterbury’s Funeral Sermon on Lady Cutts; where, having mentioned her Diary, he says, “In this glass she every day dressed her mind.” This is a proof of coincidence, and not of plagiarism; for I had never read that sermon before. (3:228)³⁵

Boswell’s authorial gift for organizing conversation is on brilliant display here. Mrs. Thrale’s opening is a foil for Johnson to express a characteristic gnomic truth (his rhetorical question about the smallness of “primary motives” paraphrases Rambler 141).³⁶ When Mrs. Thrale persists, Johnson subtly but decisively changes the topic, from the propriety of publishing Sibbald’s Life to the value of a diary to the individual diary-keeper. Trimlestown earns Boswell and Johnson’s applause when he picks up the submerged metaphor in Johnson’s use of the word “review” by comparing a diary to a mirror; even when Johnson does not make the cleverest remark, he remains, in the Life, the arbiter of conversation. Finally, Boswell completes the tricolon of “review … glass … mirror” by extending the analogy from self-regard to self-improvement. Boswell atypically gives himself the last word here, perhaps because using a diary as a tool of character formation was a lifelong project for him. Indeed, the biographical resonance of this passage is equal to its dramaturgic deftness. Like Sibbald (and Gibbon and Rousseau) before him, the young Boswell flirted with Catholicism, and like Sibbald was reclaimed from Rome for reasons that do little credit to Protestantism.³⁷ (As Frederick Pottle puts it, in the spring of 1760 Alexander Montgomerie, Lord Eglinton “rescued Boswell from religious error by making him a libertine, in every sense of that word.”)³⁸

Boswell praises Trimlestown’s comparison of “glass” and “journal” as “a very pretty allusion.” Trimlestown and Boswell are both updating a long-standing metaphor of biographies as mirrors in which readers can see themselves—as in the Elizabethan Mirror for Magistrates (1559), Samuel Clarke’s Nonconformist Mirror or Looking-Glasse Both for Saints and Sinners (1646), the Dutch Anabaptist Martyr’s Mirror (1660), and even Richard Steele’s Conscious Lovers (1723).³⁹ Boswell’s ostensible classical model for the Life, Plutarch, uses the image in the opening of his Life of Timoleon: “I find that I am continuing [the Lives] and delighting in it now for my own sake also, using history as a mirror and endeavouring in a manner to fashion and adorn my life in conformity with the virtues therein depicted.”⁴⁰ Boswell’s innovation is to imagine a man’s own diary, not the life record of a heroic predecessor, as the engine of self-fashioning. Johnson and Trimlestown here conceive of a diary as a source of narcissistic pleasure, Boswell as a way of adjusting “character.”

Boswell kept his diary (in various forms, and with some significant hiatus) from his eighteenth year until two months before his death.⁴¹ The segment of this massive archive that concerns his year in London from November 1762 to August 1763 (known to twentieth-century readers as the London Journal) begins with a programmatic statement that prepares the reader to find both Boswell’s narcissistic pleasures and his character adjustments in the leaves that follow:

A man cannot know himself better than be attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge “what manner of person he is.” I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal in which I shall set down my various sentiments and my various conduct, which will be not only useful but very agreeable. It will give me a habit of application and improve me in expression; and knowing that I am to record my transactions will make me more careful to do well. Or if I should go wrong, it will assist me in resolutions of doing better. I shall here put down my thoughts on different subjects at different times, the whims that may seize me and the sallies of my luxuriant imagination. I shall mark the anecdotes and stories that I hear, the instructive or amusing conversations that I am present at, and the various adventures that I may have. (London Journal 39)

Boswell’s explanation exhibits the same overdetermining plenitude as his later defense of John Reid; journal-keeping is both utile and dulce because it promotes self-knowledge, is morally both prophylactic and corrective, and provides “a store of entertainment for my after life” (London Journal 40). Fredrick Pottle’s editorial quotation marks also draw attention to a daringly repurposed citation from the book of James. The scripture reads:

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. (James 1:22–25, emphasis added)

Instead of replacing the Plutarchan heroic model, as it will in the Streatham conversation fifteen years later, the diary replaces the word of God itself (James’s “perfect law of liberty”) as the mirror in which the diarist can see “what manner of person” he is.

There is, at first glance, a question-begging circularity here. Without an external standard, a diary cannot provide its own benchmark for self-assessment, much less its own norms of conduct. One thinks of “someone saying ‘But I know how tall I am!’ and laying his hand on top of his head to prove it” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.⁴² Boswell has multiple solutions to the problem of making one’s own writing the source and arbiter of personal identity and value. For one, he bases both life and life records on literary models, judging himself as character and his diary as narrative by their fidelity to generic conventions. “His journal constitutes a kind of source book for stock masculine characters current in mid-eighteenth-century Britain,” as Erin Mackie puts it as she documents Boswell’s self-conscious play-acting of roles ranging from the urbane Mr. Spectator (and his alter egos, Addison’s Cato and the “Christian Hero” Richard Steele) to the violently sexual highwayman Macheath (and his alter ego, the actor West Digges).⁴³ Boswell’s role-playing has received considerable attention from critics interested in theatricality and performance, a tendency increased by the self-contained accessibility of the London Journal, where it is particularly prominent. But the problem of generating personal norms from a self-documenting text admits of several other solutions. Beginning on his arrival in Holland for a year of legal study in August 1763, Boswell divided his diary into two parts, a minatory/hortatory daily memorandum and a (now lost) narrative journal; he then judged himself on his perceived ability to bring practice into alignment with precept. In addition to writing down his resolutions from day to day, Boswell digested them into an “Inviolable Plan” which he in turn frequently exhorts himself to read (Boswell in Holland, 387–90). A year later, Boswell articulates the idea of simply taking himself as norm, with no reference to external standards, while recording his behavior at a wedding he attended while in Berlin on his Grand Tour in 1764: “I was rather too singular. Why not? I am in reality an original character. Let me moderate and cultivate my originality. God would not have formed such a diversity of men if he had intended that they should all come up to a certain standard. That is indeed impossible while black, brown, and fair, serious, lively, and mild, continue direct qualities. Let me then be Boswell and render him as fine a fellow as possible” (Grand Tour of Germany and Switzerland 29). The idea is repeated nearly verbatim three weeks later: “I must be Mr. Boswell of Auchinleck, and no other. Let me make him as perfect as possible.” (ibid. 53).

Though “let me then be Boswell” has a familiar ring to readers located in the moment of post-1960s expressive individualism, it is far from being the telos of Boswell’s experiments with writing as a form of self-fashioning. A decade later, he expresses fear lest this process of writing down a self work too well: “It occurred to me that if I keep in constant remembrance the thoughts of my heart and imaginations of my fancy, there will be a sameness produced, and my mind will not have free scope for alteration; so that I had better lay by my journal and read masses of it at distant intervals” (Ominous Years 219–20).

The preface to the Account of Corsica, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli proposes a rather different model:

A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world, has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having that character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day, is hardly possible; and to aim at it, must put us under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural disposition an easy play, and yet indulge the pride of superiour genius when he considers that by those who know him only as an author, he never ceases to be respected.⁴⁴

The Account is the first of Boswell’s publications to transmute diary material into a published book; in so doing, its preface postulates, Boswell creates a fixed simulacrum that liberates him to range freely, become a Wizard of Oz slipping out from behind the curtain to spend his time drinking, gambling, whoring, or in a depressive paralysis.⁴⁵

Boswell restates this doctrine of the author’s two bodies both in the final essay of The Hypochondriack (“Indeed, there is nothing more delusive than the supposed character of an author, from reading his compositions”) and in the Life, where he reprints the above-quoted paragraph from the Account of Corsica preface in full (Hypochondriack 2:300, Life 2:69). In the Life, it is both fitting and unfitting; the book exploits the distance between author and work to comic effect in its early sections, such as when Bennet Langton, on first meeting Johnson after having read the Rambler, expects “a remarkably decorous philosopher” and instead encounters “a huge uncouth figure” (Life 1:247). And Boswell can present a version of himself in which the candor and pain of the diaries have been edited out. But inasmuch as its monumental purpose is to preserve Johnson entire, the Life seeks to erase the space between person and text; its goal is to depict Johnson so fully that the reader cannot imagine him having an existence that is invisible to, or beyond, Boswell’s tome. The idea of a simulacral Author behind whom the flesh-and-blood Boswell can hide is even more problematic in The Hypochondriack, with its vivid and candid accounts of emotional instability and suffering. Indeed, Boswell was influenced by Steele’s Christian Hero, which Steele claimed to have published with his name on the title page “with the avowed purpose of obliging himself to lead a religious life,” as Boswell puts it—that is, make Author and author the same.⁴⁶

The paradigm of diurnal (or, in the case of The Hypochondriack, monthly) writing as a technology of edification comes to Boswell directly from the Spectator, with a detour through the Rambler. Both Boswell’s London Journal and The Hypochondriack echo Johnson’s fear of uncultivated time and Johnson’s faith in the power of regular autobiographical writing to redeem it: “In this way I shall preserve many things that would otherwise be lost in oblivion”; “Writing such essays therefore may fill up the interstices of [men’s] lives, and occupy moments which would otherwise be lost” (London Journal 40; Hypochondriack 1, 1:103). But Boswell also moves beyond these models in imagining writing not only as a preservative regimen, but as an expressive therapy. As the Horatian epigraph to the first Hypochdriack essay has it, sunt verba et voces quibus hunc lenire dolorem possis—“Words will avail to ease the wretched mind” (Hypochondriack 1:103). Thus Hypochondriack 39 (begun, Boswell’s journal records, “quite in despair”) records the phenomenology of hypochondria—“low and desponding” self-opinion, “indolence and shame,” “extreme degree of irritability,” “corrosive imagination,” etc. (Laird of Auchinleck 276; Hypochondriack 2:40–46). The essay’s final section proposes the palliative of religion, specifically the “habitual exercise of piety” when in good spirits, which reassures the hypochondriac that his “sufferings however severe will be found beneficial in the other world, as having prepared him for the felicity of the saints above.” Boswell ends, however, with the suggestion that writing itself can be therapeutic: “While writing this paper, I have by some gracious influence been insensibly relieved from the distress under which I laboured when I began it” (Hypochondriack 2:46). Diagnosis becomes cure.

A Tale That Is Told

Boswell’s archive thus preserves a wide variety of approaches to writerly self-fashioning—role-playing in the London Journal, schizoid self-discipline in Holland, “being Boswell” on the Grand Tour, hiding behind the fixed mask of authorship in the Account of Corsica, the writing cure in the Hypochondriack, and finally the synthesis of author and man in the hero of the Life of Johnson—that calls to mind once more his multifarious and mutually canceling attempts to save John Reid. As Boswell himself recognized, they cannot be reduced to a single coherent line of thought. His gambits do, however, share the belief that life becomes meaningful only when preserved in text, as in the passage, quoted twice before in this study, where Boswell muses that he “should live no more than [he] can record, as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in” (Ominous Years 265). Selfhood requires text, and text equals preservation. “Boswell” as a role or identity only has meaning when it is moored to the promise of textual lastingness, whatever the precise form of that promise may be. Thus the following diary musing, from February 3, 1777: “I had lately a thought that appeared new to me: that by burning all my journal and all my written traces of former life, I should be like a new being.… Were I just now to go and take up house in any country town in England, it would be just a different existence. Might it not be proper to change one’s residence very frequently, so as to be literally a pilgrim upon earth? For death would not be such a violent circumstance, as one would not be strongly fixed” (In Extremes 84). Here Boswell sees death in its mortalist, final aspect, rather than as a transition to immortality, and holds that the unwritten life is closer to such a death than the written one.

Since Boswell thought of writing as the technology for creating a permanent identity, it is no surprise that he reprises the coordination of textual and theological futurity that drives both the Spectator and Clarissa. This is particularly true, as argued above, in the Life, but it is also implicit in the logic of Boswell’s lifelong diary-keeping. As Boswell himself puts it, seeking to reassure himself of the immortality of the soul in the wake of his traumatic interview with the dying Hume in summer 1776, “My great argument for soul is our consciousness of all sensations and reflections and passions; something different from all and each of our perceptions, of whatever kind and however compounded” (In Extremes 22). The soul, in other words, is that whose objective correlative is a diary.⁴⁷ The Hypochondriack furnishes another instance. Having heard Hugh Blair preach on Psalm 90 (“We spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore and ten” [verses 9b–10a]) on December 22, 1782, Boswell writes two months later to the London publisher of the periodical arranging to extend the essay to seventy numbers, “the years of a man’s life.” The eighteenth-century periodical from Steele onward plays on the ambiguity of a proper name as belonging both to a text and to its narrator: Mr. Spectator is the Spectator, the Rambler is the Rambler, and so on. Boswell extends this line of thought by pointing to the analogy between the “life” of a periodical and the life of its narrator. The Psalmist compares life to a tale that is told; Boswell reverses the simile. He also records in his diary that he wishes to make The Hypochondriack into “a couple of proper volumes,” that is, give it the republished afterlife enjoyed by the Spectator.⁴⁸ Katherine Ellison has argued that Boswell revises his diaries “to convince himself that there is an afterlife”; one might add that he wrote them in the first place and published them in the Account, Journal of a Tour, and Life for the same reason.⁴⁹

Boswell had noted Blair’s lectionary text, on life as “a tale that is told,” in his journal because he summarized the sermon for the dying Lord Kames, on whom he called following the service. As is typical of his interviews with the famous and/or dying, the visit is recorded in Boswell’s diary at some length. At first Kames speaks like his usual earthy self: “Oh, dinna’ ask foolish questions.” But when Boswell returns later on in the evening, Kames is silent: “I regretted that he did not say one word as a dying man. Nothing edifying, nothing pious. His lady told me he had not said a word to her of what he thought of himself at present” (Applause of the Jury 45). Boswell wishes to stage a deathbed scene, a reprise of the end of Conjectures on Original Composition, with Kames as a Scottish Addison. Richard B. Sher has argued that Boswell saw Kames as a second surrogate father figure, offering validation and support in professional Edinburgh just as Johnson did in literary London.⁵⁰ Thus the role of Addison’s stepson Lord Warwick (whom Addison instructs in Young’s account to “see in what peace a Christian can die”) would be all the more natural for Boswell. But the emaciated Kames, who died five days later, does not cooperate. Having just been reminded of the idea that man’s life is a tale that is told, Boswell is offended by the jurist’s all too human silence.⁵¹

Boswell felt a tension between his lifelong fascination with death scenes (both the Youngian tableaux of such dying philosophers as Kames, Hume, and Johnson and the frisson of a Newgate hanging) and his equally enduring interest in self-formation over and through time. Put another way, he was torn between Young’s Addison and Addison’s Addison. A conversation with Johnson during Boswell’s last visit to London before Johnson’s death makes the issue clear:

I stated to him an anxious thought.… Suppose a man who has led a good life for seven years, commits an act of wickedness, and instantly dies; will his former good life have any effect in his favor? JOHNSON. “Sir, if a man has led a good life for seven years, and then is hurried by passion to do what is wrong, depend upon it he will have the reward of his seven years’ good life; God will not take a catch of him.” … BOSWELL. “But does not the text say, ‘As the tree falls, so it must lie’?” JOHNSON. “Yes, Sir; as the tree falls: but,—(after a little pause)—that is meant as to the general state of the tree, not what is the effect of a sudden blast.” (Life 4:225)

The argument of Young’s Conjectures is that the truly immortal work is the poet’s pious death. The Life of Johnson takes the same logic and moral seriousness and applies to it Johnson’s reasoning here about “the general state of the tree.” Thus it narrates not just Johnson’s death but the entire life, anecdote by anecdote, that preceded it. The Conjectures show in what peace a Christian can die, and the Life immortalizes Johnson by showing the mingled fortunes in which a heroic man of letters can live.

Conclusion: “My Dear and Honored Contemporary”

Boswell’s project in the Life of Johnson is thus to preserve and memorialize his mentor in daily time and through documentary anecdote. Reader response to the Life of Johnson over the last two centuries has been articulated, to a striking degree, in terms of Boswell’s ability to bring Johnson to life, to create a conversationalist whom readers feel as uniquely vivid.⁵² I close with two nineteenth-century readers who respond to Boswell’s biography in this way. The first is a well-known landmark in Boswell reception: Thomas Babington Macaulay, writing in 1831, marveled that “Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history,” and proved it by reconstructing him, body and soul, in a list of twenty-five metonyms, from “his coat” and “his wig” through “his midnight disputations” and “his gruntings” to “his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank.” (The passage is cited in full in my introduction.)⁵³ This Rabelaisian/Joycean list adds up to a Johnson whose immortality Macaulay explicitly distinguishes from that provided by his works: “What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! … That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.”⁵⁴

Macaulay mischaracterizes Johnson, who was in fact noncommittal about the long-term prospects of his own writings, though he did see endurance over time as the true test of literary merit. Given that Macaulay is arguing that nobody reads Johnson any more, we should hardly be surprised. But although he is harshly negative about Boswell as a human being, Macaulay has Boswell’s artistic priorities, whose practice as both diarist and author lay in arresting the “transient” and seeking to transform it into the “durable,” dead to rights.

For my second example, the nineteenth-century belletrist and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, the chronological structure of the Life was integral to its animating power. Born in 1809, exactly a century after Johnson, Holmes began in his youth to read the Life every year, encountering Johnson as a companion through life with each reading. Holmes writes in 1884:

I have just lost my dear and honored contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made illustrious in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the great English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in the last century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking and doing, what were his feelings about life; what changes the years had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his reputation. I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years has left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with many of my living friends.⁵⁵

Precisely because Boswell so scrupulously documents Johnson’s progress through secular time from 1709–1784, Johnson comes alive as a “companion and friend” in the nineteenth century. (Indeed, the radical meaning of “secular” as pertaining to a saeculum, or century, is relevant here, since Holmes’s kinship for Johnson is partially rooted in the coincidence of their birthdates.) Holmes imputes to Boswell’s Johnson the same immortality that the club of Oxford students of Spectator 553 offered Mr. Spectator by reading his daily essays aloud in their weekly meetings. Johnson is, in Holmes’s brilliantly paradoxical phrase, his “contemporary of the last century”—both a figure of the past preserved in historical particularity and a current presence. Boswell could have asked for no more.