23

The Last Days

And so Johnson returned to London, and Boswell returned to his home in Edinburgh. This was hardly the end of their relationship, nor did it mark the final time they would be together. They would meet in London on other occasions; Boswell always needed an infusion of the city’s exuberant life, and he wished to continue collecting material for his planned biography. After his father’s death in 1782 and his ascension as laird, he invited Johnson to return to Auchinleck, and Johnson unquestionably would have liked to do so—he would write later of Boswell, “I love to travel with him.” But Johnson’s health was slipping away. He told Boswell, with obvious feeling, “I should like to totter about your place, and live mostly on milk, and be taken care of by Mrs. Boswell…. If I were in distress, there is no man I would come to so soon as you. I should come to you and have a cottage in your park.”

Bozzy was stirred. His writing shows us the powerful feelings between the two men for all their shared experiences: “I got up to part from him. He took me in his arms, and said with a solemn fervour, ‘GOD bless you for Jesus Christ’s sake.’ … I walked away from Dr. Johnson’s door with agitation and a kind of fearful apprehension of what might happen before I returned.” He wrote that in 1783, the year before Johnson’s death.

Johnson suffered an assortment of maladies including worsening gout, asthma, dropsy (heart failure), and kidney stones. He kept a medical journal for a time in which he recorded his specific ailments and treatments. He knew he was failing—“God have mercy,” he wrote despairingly at one point. Mrs. Thrale had remarried, and Johnson’s spirits were low: “I could bear sickness better, if I were relieved from solitude.” In May 1784 Boswell found Johnson somewhat improved, and he accompanied Johnson to Oxford with Johnson’s lifelong friend William Adams, who shared anecdotes about the doctor. Those stories give us a sad picture of Johnson at the end, his melancholia overcoming him as he declared that he was “oppressed by the fear of death” and soon would join “the damned” in hell. When others sought to convince him otherwise Johnson declared that life was more miserable than happy: “I would not lead my life over again through an archangel should request it.”

In June, hearing Johnson’s wistful desire to escape London’s cold winter for the Mediterranean warmth of Italy, Boswell and others hatched a plan to get him there. The centerpiece was a pitch to Lord Thurlow, the lord high chancellor, to speak to the king for an increase in Johnson’s royal pension to enable him to afford the trip. Boswell’s account of breaking the good news in his Life of Johnson sets the powerfully emotional scene quite affectingly:

BOSWELL: “I am very anxious about you, Sir, and particularly that you should go to Italy for the winter, which I believe is your own wish.” JOHNSON: “It is, Sir.” BOSWELL: “You have no objection, I presume, but the money it would require.” JOHNSON: “Why no, Sir!” Upon which I gave him a particular account of what had been done, and read to him the Lord Chancellor’s letter.—He listened with much attention, and then warmly said, “This is taking prodigious pains about a man.”—O!, Sir (said I, with most sincere affection,) your friends would do every thing for you. He paused,—grew more and more agitated,—till tears started into his eyes, and he exclaimed with fervent emotion, “GOD bless you all.” I was so affected that I also shed tears…. We both remained for some time unable to speak.—He rose suddenly and quitted the room, quite melted in tenderness.

The next day Boswell met with Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had helped put the Italy plan into motion, and they drove in Reynolds’s coach for a meal. After dining, Johnson invited Boswell in, but “I declined it from apprehension that my spirits would sink,” Boswell related. “We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the carriage. When he had got down upon the foot-pavement, he called out, ‘Fare you well!’ and without looking back sprung away with a kind of pathetic briskness (if I may use that expression), which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal uneasiness, and it was to me a foreboding of our long, long separation.” That was the end; Boswell and Johnson would never see each other again.

For Johnson the last few months were tragic. The journey to Italy did not happen; the king rejected an increase in the pension. Johnson’s mental and physical suffering increased, and he knew his time was coming. He died on December 13, 1784. Boswell heard of it on December 17. He wrote, “I was stunned and in a kind of amaze.… I did not shed tears. I was not tenderly affected. My feeling was just one large expanse of stupour.” He added that his mind’s “great SUN,” as he had once described Johnson, had set.

He made love to his wife that night and the next morning wrote in his journal a no-doubt heartfelt but typical Boswellian pledge, “My resolution was to honour his memory by doing as much as I could to fulfill his noble precepts of religion and morality.” Boswell’s morality and religion may have wavered here and there in the last years of his life, but he indeed honored Johnson’s memory in two enduring ways: with his account of their journey to the Hebrides and in his Life of Johnson.

Of course not everyone felt kindly toward Johnson when the doctor’s book about the Scottish journey was published, nor was there universal acclaim when Boswell’s book appeared a few years later. Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland came off the press in 1775 and was met with what Boswell called “miserable cavillings” by the critics. In other words disdain for book critics is hardly a new thing, and even before the era of the Internet everybody was a critic. In general English reviewers liked it, and many Scots didn’t. “Everybody finds some reason to be affronted,” wrote Edward Topham in his Letters from Edinburgh, 1774–1775. “A thousand people, who know not a single creature in the Western Isles, interest themselves in their cause, and are offended at the accounts that are given of them.”

While Topham said he preferred to stay above the storm, he couldn’t resist some digs at Johnson, writing that in spite of warm, civil treatment afforded Johnson, the doctor repaid his hosts with “contempt,” adding, “I look upon all his observations in regard to men and manners, to be those of a man totally unacquainted with mankind.” In an effort to give some balance here, I should point out that in book after criticizing Johnson for criticizing the Scots, Topham proceeded to do exactly the same thing, finding “extreme ugliness” in the common people of the countryside, whom he believed worn down and “haggard” because of their hard labor and the terrible weather in their country.

What seems to have upset readers most about Johnson’s Journey may come as a surprise: the author’s passionate insistence that Macpherson’s socalled discovery and translation of the work of the Gaelic bard Ossian was a fraud. Johnson believed the work Fingal was all Macpherson’s, and, as we know, Johnson was correct. But in 1775 there were many believers in Scotland, and they were very unhappy with Johnson. After all, this was the great eminence, the most noted man of letters in England skewering not only the creator of this great work of Scottish literature but also pointing out that, incidentally, the work itself was no good. It was Scotland versus England all over again, and if King Edward had come riding in to slice up William Wallace one more time, a lot of Scots would hardly have wished less for Johnson.

We have already noted the pusillanimous Macpherson’s threat to clobber Johnson, which we know from Johnson’s reply since Macpherson’s letter with the original insult has been lost, the doctor’s strong-spined reply calling his bluff, and Macpherson’s subsequent backing down. What gives this particular story an ironic twist is that, in death, the two men who had no use for each other lie close together, within a few feet of one another in Westminster Abbey. That seems incontrovertible proof that you don’t have to be a king or a queen—or even be right—to get your remains into England’s national cathedral. I think it was a Scotsman who told me that.

The most vituperative attack on Johnson’s book came four years after its publication. It was in the form of a book from the fevered mind of the Rev. Donald MacNicol, an outraged Presbyterian minister on the island of Lismore in Loch Linhe not far from Oban. “The doctor hated Scotland; that was the master-passion, and it scorned all restraints,” he wrote in Remarks on Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Hebrides, which turned out almost as long as Johnson’s volume. MacNicol was something of a Gaelic scholar, and he found fault after fault with Johnson, but his incessant carping amounted to overkill, and he could never deny the fact that Johnson’s conclusions about Ossian’s authenticity were accurate. The preface to his book, quoted in Finlay Macdonald’s Journey to the Western Isles, is almost comically ironic. MacNicol admits his reluctance to take on such a figure as Johnson without consulting “learned friends,” but then he writes that “the distance of those friends made it difficult to procure their opinion; … besides, the Author was not so fond of his work as to be very anxious about its publication.” Poor MacNicol. Finally, with unaccountable acumen he even admitted that it had been so long since Johnson’s book appeared that his own would likely not be noticed. Contemporary scholars are reexamining MacNicol’s book, and a reappraisal of his thoughts may be soon forthcoming.

Not all contemporary Scots disagreed with Johnson’s conclusions, however. Thomas Knox, who completed a tour of Scotland years after Johnson returned, wrote that he had read Johnson’s book many times but had “not been able to correct him in any matter of consequence.” A distinguished Edinburgh educator concluded his review by saying, “It is plain he meant to speak well of Scotland; and he has, in my apprehension, done us great honour.” And in 1927, a period when Scotland was more sensitive to criticism than these days, a Highland historian named W. C. Mackenzie concluded an address to the Gaelic Society of Inverness with the words: “Johnson’s tour was a landmark in the history of the Hebrides which we would not willingly obliterate.” In more recent times critics know Johnson’s Journey as one of the great books of the eighteenth century, and its continued republication attests to its permanent place in English literature.

Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides appeared in print for the first time in 1785, the year after Johnson’s death. That was not a coincidence; Boswell did not wish it to be published while his dear friend and mentor was living and subject to questioning about Boswell’s writings. He had gone to London in the spring of that year to complete the book with the help of his friend Edmond Malone. While there he witnessed several public hangings, drank a lot, got his pockets picked, and enjoyed intercourse with a variety of women including, apparently, a young, married Anglo-Italian miniaturist named Maria Cosway (who would soon have a love entanglement with Thomas Jefferson). And, oh by the way, he did finish writing the book.

It was published on October 1, and the first impression of 1,500 copies was sold out in less than three weeks. A second and third edition were published within the year; people found the book, in the words of one, “compulsively readable.” Extracts appeared in newspapers and journals, and the book was received positively by many reviewers.

As noted earlier Sir Alexander Macdonald was one of the first to howl about what he read, annoyed by Boswell’s mention of his shabby hospitality toward the travelers on Skye. The semicomic exchange of letters between the two somehow managed to uphold the honor of each. Macdonald was so insulting in his initial letter of complaint that Boswell anticipated a duel, and, desiring neither to shoot someone or be shot himself, he arranged with intermediaries to offer apologies and promise to eradicate some of the offending words from subsequent editions. When Macdonald hesitated to accept, Boswell summoned up the nerve to propose a duel, and Macdonald backed off. It all ended rather confusingly, but with no one injured and everyone’s dignity sufficiently propped up.

In Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, the scholars Irma Lustig and Frederick Pottle wrote that critics at the time were puzzled by the book’s minutiae, its baffling pages of intimate detail: “Contemporaries of a great innovative work, they recoiled from its revolutionary feature: familiar and ignoble detail controlled by a presiding impression of magnanimity, goodness, and compassion.”

Johnson’s friends generally approved, though they were surprised by things Boswell recorded Johnson as saying about them. William Windham, a member of the club, believed Boswell had not been “sufficiently warm and hearty” to Johnson. Some shunned Boswell, but Sir Joshua Reynolds was said to be high in praise of the book.

Of course there was shock and laughter from many at Boswell’s selfportrayal. Critics found the intrusions of Boswell’s views upsetting because, in spite of the explicit title, they saw the book as a biography of Johnson. Nonetheless Boswell’s coarseness and occasional behavioral antics generated not-always-good-hearted laughter—Malone had warned him about this and urged him to censor some of the passages—and hardly anyone noticed the travel aspects of the book. But if you accept the theory that as far as book sales go, any publicity is good publicity, Boswell definitely had a hit on his hands.

Eighteenth-century critics didn’t write the way modern reviewers do. There are no references to the book as a “page-turner” or “the best book I’ve read this year”; nor are there statements that tout the author as the equivalent of “the new John Grisham.” You have to peruse the reviews a little more carefully to extract the blurbs that modern publishers adore.

Here’s one fairly typical note of praise for Boswell that appeared October 6, 1785, in the Public Advertiser: “I find in it, as I expected, all the qualities it was recommended to us for.” (There’s a dazzler of an endorsement that would sell a bunch of books today.) Here’s another from October 25, in St. James’s Chronicle: “It determined me to buy the book, and having read it, I am perfectly satisfied that my money was well bestowed.” (A welcome guide for consumers, I suppose; your shillings won’t be wasted.) And finally there is this comparatively generous observation that was printed in Gentlemen’s Magazine in November 1785: “It would be not only uncandid but ungrateful to dwell on a few minute blemishes after the pleasure and profit we have received in the perusal of this work.” (May critics be as kind to me.)

The book’s success pleased Boswell, but the uproar over it in various places upset him. “I am now amidst narrow-minded prejudiced mortals,” he complained as he contemplated revisions for future editions. The revisions improved the book, writes biographer Peter Martin, but they also set off a round of negative commentaries on it. Boswell’s character was attacked, he was criticized for his vanity and impertinence, his history was belittled, and one reviewer even claimed that Johnson had told Boswell the book was not fit to be printed.

That was then. Now we may be forgiven for wondering what the fuss was all about. The anecdotes, even at their most revealing, seem decorous by current standards. The vivid prose pictures of moments on the tour are endearing, hardly shocking. The re-creation of a time long gone is magisterially accomplished, and the historical inaccuracies are wisely submerged into footnotes for the scholar’s attention. Six years after Boswell’s Journal appeared, an even greater book—his Life of Johnson—came to public light, again thanks to the immeasurably valuable and devoted assistance of Malone. It was warmly received and sold well. An author with a better sense of discretion and editorial insight—and what one writer has called “a less wayward and disconnected mind”—might have dodged some of the inevitable complaints by not passing along so many of Johnson’s occasionally unconsidered thoughts on his contemporaries. But Boswell had his unquenchable curiosity about human nature and his “sacred love of truth.” And at the bottom line he also had Johnson’s consent, recalled in the doctor’s words: “Sir, it is of so much more consequence that the truth should be told, than that individuals should not be made uneasy, that it is much better that the law does not restrain writing freely concerning the characters of the dead.”

Boswell’s last four years were spent as a “famous” man. Most friends, legal colleagues, and even strangers treated him with a newfound respect. Widowed, he enjoyed a sense of personal freedom that unfortunately included drinking, which would exact a toll on his health. He had literary acclaim, but as Martin tells it, he still most desired wealth, position, and social prestige. He moved restlessly from Auchinleck to Edinburgh to London, his public behavior occasionally appallingly embarrassing. His hypochondria worsened, and he quarreled with his daughters. A revised second edition of The Life appeared and was an immediate success.

His intellectual life now at a virtual end, Boswell took little pleasure at Auchinleck, where he became less and less involved. Even in London his spirits and both his mental and physical health declined. He was stricken with a fever at a meeting of the club in April 1795, and the pain from progressive kidney failure and uremia forced him to bed. He died there early on the morning of May 19. His death was mourned, and his stature—belatedly—has grown in death.