CLASSICSLONDON JOURNAL 1762–1763
JAMES BOSWELL (1740–95) was born in Edinburgh, the eldest surviving child of the devoutly Calvinistic Euphemia (Erskine) Boswell and Alexander Boswell, Edinburgh advocate, later a judge in the Scottish Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary, and laird of the Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire. Reluctant to follow his father and grandfather in a legal career after studies in arts and law at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, he found more pleasure and excitement in the company of theatre people and authors. He ran away to London for a first escapade in 1760, and on a second visit there, in 1763, he met Samuel Johnson, who would become the subject of his later path-breaking biographical works. Capitulating to his father’s wishes, he set off in August 1763 for law study in Utrecht, where he met Belle de Zuylen (later Madame de Charrière) then took an extended and unorthodox Grand Tour, during which he met Rousseau and Voltaire, among other notables. He made a dangerous detour to the little-visited island of Corsica, at that time fighting for its independence from the Genoese. That struggle, and its leader, General Pasquale Paoli, became the subject of his first major publication, the Account of Corsica (1768). He practised law ably but unhappily in Edinburgh for some twenty years, having married his penniless cousin Margaret Montgomerie in 1769, kept up a prolific miscellaneous journalism for Edinburgh and London periodicals, suffered serious bouts of depression (‘hypochondria’) and drank heavily, often recording his life in a candid, detailed series of diaries. He visited London during court recesses almost annually, relishing life there, and recording (among much else) Johnson’s conversation. He was elected to The Club in 1773, and later that year toured the Scottish Highlands and western isles with Johnson. He succeeded as laird of Auchinleck in 1782, but, though proud of his ancestry and estate, he moved his family to London in 1786, ostensibly to try to transfer to the English Bar but in reality to research and write his long-planned biography of Johnson, who had died in late 1784. He served as recorder of Carlisle 1788–90, under the patronage of the tyrannical James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, but remained disappointed that he rose thereafter to no significant political office. Following his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1785) and The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), he was known for the century and a half after his death in 1795 essentially as Johnson’s biographer. He won a remarkable posthumous renewal of fame in our own time with the recovery of his diaries, letters and other private papers, long thought to have been lost or destroyed, in a sequence of improbable retrievals in the early twentieth century, bringing him new recognition as a gifted and candid recorder of himself and his times.
GORDON TURNBULL graduated with first-class honours at the Australian National University, and, after teaching in the English Department of the University of Newcastle (New South Wales), took his PhD at Yale, and taught at Yale and at Smith College before succeeding as general editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell in 1997.