Until the unexpected twentieth-century recoveries and publication of selections of his personal journals, letters and other private papers, the literary world knew the Edinburgh-born lawyer, journalist, essayist, correspondent and life-writer James Boswell chiefly for his biographical work on Samuel Johnson, his first meeting with whom (on 16 May 1763) is one of the many and varied adventures recorded in this journal. While a lifetime of prolific miscellaneous published writing, including the successful Account of Corsica (1768) which had him known in the press for some years as ‘Corsica Boswell’, receded from the view of all but specialist scholars, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1785), and above all The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (first edition 1791), caused his very patronymic to enter dictionaries as a synonym for biographer – and a biographer of a very particular kind. To ‘Boswellize’ came to mean, essentially, to record the words and deeds of another with a strikingly and almost selflessly devoted and attentive minuteness.
These two biographical works, particularly the Life, have long served to fashion the image of Johnson for countless readers, placing him high in the pantheon of the most recognizably quotable and frequently quoted of literary figures. Not everyone has approved. For their legions of delighted admirers, the Tour remains a highly innovative travel narrative and a bold experiment (which Boswell planned as a trial for the later Life) in closely personal and anecdotal life-writing, and the Life of Johnson, with its artfully reconstructed socio-conversational vignettes, a compelling reading experience and a treasure house of wisdom. Yet certain specialist Johnsonian scholars find the Boswellian Johnson – the burly, self-troubled but commonsensical, thunderously aphoristic and often denunciatory conversationalist – one that does inadequate service to the range and subtlety of Johnson’s intellect, and to his achievements as a pioneering lexicographer and a poet, novelist, literary editor, biographer and moral essayist. Nonetheless, the innovative contributions of Boswell as biographer remain unshakeable, and the Life endures as one of Western literature’s most immovable productions. The Boswellian entry into the Western biographical tradition shifted the genre away from stilted earlier forms of eulogy and panegyric, and decisively pioneered a reliance (now taken for granted and regarded as standard practice) on source-gathering, original correspondence, and first-hand interviews. It brought to the figure of an author, a hero of the pen and the mind, the kinds of attention (innovatively in Boswell’s hands both epic in scale and minutely detailed in its long and gradual exfoliation of character) generally accorded earlier to political and military eminences. Like Boswell himself in his lifetime, the Life has proved tenacious and unsnubbable. Modern biographies of Johnson have redressed Boswell’s imbalances, and, using modern research techniques, have refined and much complemented his depiction. Yet the influence of Boswell, a function of the privil eged position he indeed occupied in Johnson’s life, remains heavy. Johnson knew, at least since their famous journey to the Scottish Highlands and the Hebrides in 1773, that when he spoke to the diary-keeping Boswell he was speaking to the ages.
But the Johnsonian works made Boswell himself in some ways the victim of his own success. He lived his literary immortality, it might be said, in a phrase which (in one of his series of seventy essays for the London Magazine as ‘The Hypocondriack’) he quoted from the Roman poet Lucan: magni nominis umbra – in ‘the shade of a great name’ (Essay XXI, June 1779, ‘On Quotations’). Shade may protect, yet it also obscures. Boswell built into his own reputation a sense of success in secondariness or subordination: Johnson’s foil and stenographer, he became, thus, the figure of the eternal sidekick. One of his own astute and anxious self-characterizations in this regard appears in a letter to his closest friend, the Rev. William Johnson Temple: ‘No man has been more successful in making acquaintance easily than I have been. I even bring people quickly on to a degree of cordiality. I am a quick fire; but I know not if I last sufficiently … With many people I have compared myself to a taper, which can light up a great & lasting fire, though itself is soon extinguished’ (18 March 1775).1
Editions of the Life continued to appear throughout the nineteenth century – usually reprints of the sixth edition of 1811 (the last to be superintended by Boswell’s close friend and editor Edmond Malone), along with variously innovative new ones embodying differing textual principles. John Wilson Croker’s first edition, the product of much fresh research, appeared in 1831, a second in 1835, and a third in 1848. There followed editions by Percy Fitzgerald (1874), Alexander Napier (1884) and George Birkbeck Hill (1887). L. F. Powell’s revision (1934–64) of Hill’s became the standard scholarly version for most of the twentieth century. Boswell thus kept Johnson’s name and fame alive long after a general taste for reading him had faded. Yet Boswell himself remained largely the Boswellizing Boswell of the dictionary definitions, and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famously savage review2 of Croker’s first edition (actually at its core an attack on a lifelong political enemy, Croker) did much to fix in the Victorian imagination a sense of Boswell as a buffoon and sot, who managed to produce a great and enduring work precisely because of his personal limitations and inconsequentiality.
Yet strong countercurrents flowed too, impelled by awareness that Macaulay’s account was wrong and fundamentally illogical, and an interest in Boswell in his own right grew. Rumours had circulated from much earlier in the century (because of Boswell’s references in the Life to his archives at Auchinleck) of the existence of valuable manuscript materials, but enquiries about them (including one from Croker) produced only silence from Boswell’s heirs and descendants, understandably nervous about what we now know to be their startlingly frank personal content. This silence, and other published speculations, led to other rumours: that Boswell’s papers had been lost or destroyed. Not until the late nineteenth century, as the Victorian era waned, did Boswell’s descendants – the Talbots of Malahide, near Dublin – grow interested in the literary and perhaps commercial value of their ancestor’s diaries and other papers. Word and interest spread, and attracted the notice in particular of an American collector, Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham, who soon made a dedicated quest of acquiring these papers from the Talbots. Negotiations, and searches of Malahide Castle and its outbuildings over many years, turned up several caches of papers in a variety of improbable places, until eventually, after arduous effort, Isham acquired the Malahide collections and began a privately printed edition, The Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, in the Collection of Lt.-Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham (18 vols., 1928–34), edited at first by Geoffrey Scott, then, after his sudden death, by Frederick A. Pottle.
In 1930, while that edition was well along, Claude Colleer Abbott, then a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, a scholar pursuing the papers of the Scottish philosopher and poet James Beattie at Fettercairn House, in Aberdeenshire, which had been home to the descendants of Boswell’s executor (and Beattie’s biographer), the banker Sir William Forbes, came unexpectedly upon a second great trove of Boswellian manuscripts and other papers.3 Among them was the present journal, headed by Boswell, ‘Journal from the time of my leaving Scotland 15 Novr. 1762’. After lengthy and complex litigation in the Scottish Court of Session (the Fettercairn Cause), Isham became the owner of the Fettercairn papers too. He sold his collection (since much augmented by other acquisitions) to Yale University in 1949, in which year the Yale Boswell Editions were established.
Boswell’s manuscript of the London portion of his ‘Journal from the time of my leaving Scotland 15 Novr. 1762’ – amounting to 736 manuscript quarto pages (734 in Boswell’s numbering) – is an early part of the lengthy series of journals he wrote, with lapses, for most of his adult life. It is a portion of the youthful diary he kept continuously from 14 September 1762 (when he began a tour of the southern counties of Scotland) until at least 30 January 1765 (while he was in Italy as part of his European travels). The immediate continuation of this London diary, written after he reluctantly left London for law study in Holland, was lost in his own lifetime. The London portion had been sent by Boswell to a good friend in Edinburgh, John Johnston of Grange, usually in weekly instalments, with accompanying letters, several of which show Boswell’s great concern that Johnston attend to the manuscript’s care and preservation.4 ‘You must lay it by carefully in the full Quarto size’ (6 December 1762). ‘Let it be carefully deposited at full quarto size and kept clean and safe. Perhaps at the year’s end, we may think of binding it up’ (21 December 1762).
Retitled by its editor, Pottle, as Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, it made its first published appearance in late 1950, as the first in what would become the thirteen-volume ‘trade’ or ‘reading’ edition of Boswell’s journals produced by the Yale Boswell Editions. (The last volume of that series, Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789–1795, edited by Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady, appeared in 1989. A parallel Research Edition of Boswell’s letters, journals and the manuscript of the Life, for specialist scholars, is ongoing.) Pottle’s edition rapidly became a worldwide bestseller, was translated into several languages, and has remained the most popularly read portion of Boswell’s post-humously recovered papers as published, and the most frequently taught and studied in college and university literature courses.
In the words of the critic Northrop Frye, reviewing Pottle’s edition of Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, ‘Boswell had been composing, with all his usual tact and skill, his letter of introduction to posterity, which has taken much longer to be delivered, but should give him the last word.’5 Apart from their inestimable documentary value as a window on mid- to late-eighteenth-century Britain and Europe, Boswell’s posthumously retrieved papers drew their author out from under the shade of Johnson’s great name, and brought attention to the crowded variety of his own (often wayward and disconsolate) life. Belonging, as literature, uniquely both to the time in which they were written and to the time in which they were retrieved and published, they have established Boswell in his own right as a compellingly confessional diarist and autobiographer.
That Boswell as biographer built in a kind of eternal secondariness or subordination to his subject reinforced, more particularly, a perception of an overall emotional imbalance in his relationship with Johnson, and served to obscure the genuine reciprocity of the friendship. Boswell, a vain but insecure 22-year-old, caught Johnson, aged 53, just as the great man ended his greatest period of literary productivity and was about to enter his pensioned and sociably expansive years – the ones which, as a result of the meeting recorded in this diary and Boswell’s later ambitious pertinacity, Boswell would go on to make Johnson’s best known. But the relationship was not one of needy acolyte and sedate sage. Johnson was lonely, fatigued, emotionally depleted and in troubled health, when Boswell met him. Of a visit in the preceding winter to his native Lichfield, he wrote, ‘My play-fellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect, that I was no longer young.’6 Widowed since 1752, and childless, he valued and felt energized and refreshed by the company of younger people. Of the development of a friendship with another young man, Bennet Langton, whom Johnson first met in the mid-1750s, Boswell gives an account in the Life not, in general outline, unlike that of his own. It ‘commenced soon after the conclusion of [Johnson’s] Rambler; which that gentleman, then a youth, had read with so much admiration, that he came to London chiefly with the view of endeavouring to be introduced to its authour’.7
All this serves to reduce the sense of Boswellian exceptionalism (the charge that he somehow won Johnson’s favour by egregious servility and toadying has clung to him tenaciously), yet also to mark the particularity of the Boswellian friendship. Writing many years later for the Life (under the date of 10 April 1778), Boswell noted that Johnson then ‘was much pleased with my paying so great attention to his recommendation in 1763, the period when our acquaintance began, that I should keep a journal; and I could perceive he was secretly pleased to find so much of the fruit of his mind preserved.’8 Much later, when Johnson was less than five months from his own end, and Boswell had returned to Edinburgh from a visit to London, Johnson did not conceal that, even with the attention of many other and perhaps even closer friends, he missed him keenly. Johnson wrote, ‘very feeble and very dejected’, that ‘I wish your affairs could have permitted a longer and continued exertion of your zeal and kindness. They that have your kindness may want [i.e. lack] your ardour’ (26 July 1784).9 Though Boswell (like any number of others) occasionally found himself on the receiving end of Johnson’s conversational asperity, and had the unusual candour to record it in the Life for all to see, he understood and forgave. ‘There is an insurrection aboard,’ he wrote. ‘His loud explosions are guns of distress.’10 Boswell in later journals remembered Johnson’s emotional neediness and unhappiness in the period covered by this portion of journal, writing of him, while visiting him at Oxford about five years afterwards, ‘Mr. Johnson was excellent company. He laughed a good deal. I really found him more cheerful and gay. His mixing more in society had dissipated much of that gloom which hung upon his mind when he lived much alone, when he brooded in the Temple’ (28 March 1768).11 Boswell entered, by willing invitation, a massively accomplished but troubled life. With his loyalty, affection and inquisitive ebullience, he bettered and brightened it, in no small part by allowing Johnson to know that he was recording it.
Boswell, born 29 October (New Style) 1740, was the second but eldest surviving child of the piously Calvinistic Euphemia (Erskine) Boswell. A sister, born before him, died when he was about three months old, and Euphemia Boswell’s care for her son was loving and intense. According to Boswell in his Ébauche de ma vie (‘Sketch of my Life’, written in late 1764 to introduce himself to Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and its various drafts and outlines, his mother had been raised devoutly, delicately, much out of the world. When she was made to go to the theatre once, she cried, and would never go again.12 (Boswell himself, in this present journal, remembers his ‘Boyish days, when I used to walk down the Cannongate [site of Edinburgh’s theatre], & think of Players with a mixture of narrow-minded horror, & lively-minded pleasure’ – 14 December 1762.) From his mother, and from the presbyterian Scottish Church’s form of worship, Boswell imbibed an austere Calvinism that filled his boyhood mind with the terrors of hellfire and the eternity of punishment – which, according to his Ébauche, was the first great idea he could remember forming. Overall, the Ébauche describes a troubling rhythm in which his mother loved and comforted him at the same time as she distressed him with tales of a determinist deity, the need for divine grace, powerful conversion narratives (some involving very young children), and the ever-present threat of the terrors of hellfire. ‘I shall never forget’, he writes in this London journal, ‘the dismal hours of Apprehension, that I have endured in my youth from narrow notions of Religion while my tender mind was lacerated with infernal horror’ (22 December 1762).
From the age of five to eight he attended a private school, James Mundell’s academy, in Edinburgh’s West Bow, where he was unhappy, and thereafter he was taught at home by a succession of boyhood tutors, or ‘governors’, young men training for the Scottish Church. The first of them, John Dun, later the parish minister of Auchinleck, brightened the troubled and timid boy’s life in two crucial ways. He introduced him to the pleasures of literature – most significantly, for Boswell’s later ambitions and aspirations, the Spectator essays (of Addison, Steele and other contributors) – and he moderated the severe Calvinism of his mother and the Edinburgh Kirk. Some hope, Boswell told Rousseau, now entered his religion. During the four years of Dun’s tutorship, ‘I can say I was happy except on Sundays, when I was made to remember the terrible Being whom those about me called God.’ Dun opened his thoughts to the promise of the possibility of eternal reward in heaven. ‘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.’ Here indeed, in succinct and boyish form, is the Boswellian dream of heaven: the vain but inwardly disturbed, radically vacillating and self-doubting young man in an eternity of amicable friendships, acquiring sublime knowledge and basking in – having been finally rewarded with – the company of the great and famous, the enviably solid, eminent, stable and accomplished, whom he had encountered in the permanence accorded them by literature and history. A longing to enjoy the company of the accomplished and the eminent, and have himself enter the pantheon of literature, would fashion much of the rest of his life.
He attended the University of Edinburgh for six years from 1753, taking the course in arts and then law, and there, for at least the three years he spent studying languages and was held in high regard by his teachers, he felt relatively at ease, while chafing at what he felt to be the confinement of college life and living in his parents’ strict household. There too he formed his life’s two closest friendships: with Johnston, later an Edinburgh legal writer (roughly equivalent to an English solicitor), who was laird of a small estate, Grange, in Dumfriesshire, and with Temple, an Englishman from Berwick-upon-Tweed, who crucially first introduced him (in 1755) to the Church of England form of worship in one of Edinburgh’s ‘qualified’ or ‘Episcopal’ chapels.
Boswell’s sustained religious existential anxieties produced in his late teenage years experiments with various conversions, and an adolescent nervous collapse, to recover from which he was sent to the spa at Moffat. Recovery from this distress abruptly brought with it new and rebellious energies. He began frequenting the Edinburgh theatre in the Canongate and consorting with actors and actresses (who, among other effects, fuelled his already ignited enthusiasm for London with their tales of life at Drury Lane and Covent Garden), and started writing and publishing prose and poetry. He won the significant encouragement of James, Lord Somerville, patron and protector of the theatre in Edinburgh (which was technically illegal, and disapproved of by presbyterian authority). Boswell wrote later, in a footnote in the Life, of his ‘grateful remembrance’ of Lord Somerville’s kindness. ‘He was the first person of high rank that took particular notice of me in the way most flattering to a young man, fondly ambitious of being distinguished for his literary talents.’13
Though Boswell prized his eminent Scottish ancestry on both parental sides, the course of life laid out for him by his birth, upbringing and social station in Edinburgh seemed to him an irksome confinement. His father, Alexander Boswell, a successful Edinburgh advocate and 8th Laird of the handsome Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire, became in 1754 a judge of the Scottish Court of Session, Scotland’s highest court for civil cases, and in the following year was appointed one of the five judges of the High Court of Justiciary, the supreme court for criminal cases, with the judicial (non-hereditary) style of Lord Auchinleck. Boswell regularly characterizes him as an able and a worthy man. He was strict, sober, hardworking and dour, though given to wry and sometimes withering flashes of sarcastic humour. He disdained his son’s ‘scribbling’. His thoughts about James were governed from the start by an iron expectation that his son and heir would follow him (and his own father before him) into an eminent Scots legal career, and take his place as a worthy and competent heir of Auchinleck, where at the time of the present journal he was expanding the estate by acquiring new lands, and having an attractive new mansion house completed.
Lord Auchinleck’s unswerving expectation, prescribing the pattern of his son’s life, emerges as a kind of secular equivalent of the determinist Calvinistic deity. But Boswell was by temperament ill-suited to such determinations. Though fiercely proud of the ancient family estate, and charmed by its scenic beauties, he had a fundamentally urban sensibility, developed a rooted aversion to country life, and showed little aptitude for the details of estate management. His dread of an insignificant career in what he called ‘drudging’ at the law in Edinburgh, while pining for a life of social and literary celebrity, set the stage for what would become a lifelong and debilitating clash of wills. ‘Wept,’ Boswell wrote starkly in his journal for 29 August 1782, the day of his father’s death, ‘for, alas! there was not affection between us.’14
In late 1759, Lord Auchinleck, alarmed at his son’s activities in Edinburgh, and his growing and dangerous interest in Roman Catholicism (to which Boswell had evidently been drawn by an actress with whom he was in love, a Mrs Cowper, and conversion to which, because of official attitudes towards that religion, would have marred his professional prospects), informed his son that he was now to be sent to the University of Glasgow.15 Though initially impressed there by the character and teaching in rhetoric and belles lettres of Adam Smith (now best remembered as the economic theorist of The Wealth of Nations), Boswell abruptly terminated his studies in Glasgow on 1 March 1760 by fleeing to London, covering nearly the whole distance on horseback. His intention was to become a Roman Catholic monk or priest, and in fact while in London at this time he made his submission to the Roman Church. Yet his enthusiasms were to swerve in quite other directions too. He fell into the company of an Irish man of letters, Samuel Derrick, who, in Boswell’s decorous wording in the Life of Johnson, introduced him to London ‘in all its variety of departments, both literary and sportive’.16 He thus consorted for the first time with ‘ladies of the town’, and in consequence suffered the first of what would be his life’s many venereal infections. Although he did not manage to meet Johnson, for whom he had developed an awed admiration and an intense desire to know, he enjoyed some significant introductions, among them to the great actor-manager David Garrick and to the actor and bookseller Thomas Davies, both of whom were in Johnson’s circle of friendship.
Boswell (who had let his father know where he was soon after arrival) was taken up by Alexander Montgomerie, the 10th Earl of Eglinton, an aristocratic Ayrshire neighbour, and one of the sixteen Scottish representative peers in the House of Lords. An able politician and one of the ‘improving’ Scottish Lowland lairds (introducing modernized agricultural and economic practices to their estates), Eglinton, then at his London residence in fashionable Mayfair, moved in rakish high-born circles, frequented the Newmarket racecourse, was a patron of music and musicians, loved singing catches and glees, and brought Boswell into a London world that answered his dreams of felicity and threw him into a delirium of joy. In Boswell’s account, written later, Lord Eglinton freed him ‘from the gloom of superstition, although it led me to the other extreme’ (journal, 2 June 1764).17 Boswell’s attraction to Roman Catholicism remained a lifelong one, but he was now set on his life’s course: a grinding clash between his father’s adamantine wish that he repeat his own life and Boswell’s longing to shine among the London authors, wits, and people of achievement and fashion. Lord Auchinleck allowed his son at this time to stay on for about three months, then travelled south himself to haul him home.
The next two and a half years in Edinburgh were spent in almost constant wrangling. Boswell studied law, reluctantly, under his father’s personal direction, yet continued his social roistering, diary-keeping and publishing (chiefly poetry), consorted with actors and other theatre people, carried on various clandestine sexual affairs, and demanded to be allowed to return to London. He wrote in a letter to his friend Temple:
I grant you, that my behaviour has not been entirely what it ought to be. But, consider my particular situation. A young fellow whose happiness was allways centered in London. Who had at last got there; and had begun to taste it’s delights — Who had got his mind filled with the most gay ideas — getting into the Guards[,] being about Court — enjoying the happiness of the Beau Monde & the company of men of Genius; in short, every thing that he could wish. Consider this poor fellow hauled away to the Town of Edinburgh — obliged to conform to every Scotch custom, or be laugh’d at … His flighty imagination quite cramp’d and he obliged to study Corpus Iuris Civilis. And live in his Father’s strict family: — is there any wonder, Sir, that the unlucky Dog should be somewhat fretful? Yoke a Newmarket Courser to a Dung-cart, & I’ll lay my life on’t, he’ll either caper and kick most confoundedly; or be as stupid and restif as an old batter’d Post-Horse. (1 May 1761)18
To another companion, Andrew Erskine, he wrote a year later, ‘I must inform you, that there is a city called London, for which I have as violent an affection, as the most romantic lover ever had for his mistress … Every agreeable whim may be freely indulged without censure’ (4 May 1762).19
In March 1762 an exasperated Lord Auchinleck drew up a document, which he compelled his son to sign, allowing him to vest the family estate in trustees of his own choice, in return for which he granted Boswell a degree of his much sought-for independence by providing him with an annual allowance. Boswell’s bargaining power increased when on 30 July of the same year he took and passed the Faculty of Advocates’ examination in civil law. His father was pleased. And so to London, with his parents’ grudging permission, Boswell came a second time, in November 1762.
Having taken to heart a suggestion first made by his rakish patron and mentor, the Earl of Eglinton, Boswell had fixed on the idea of becoming an officer in one of the elite regiments of Guards, imagining that he might lead the life of a glamorous peacetime military officer based in or near London. (As will be seen often in this journal, tales of the actual life of war and soldiering in fact greatly disturbed him.) Lord Auchinleck, who (correctly) thought the plan foolish, and unworthy of his son and heir, declined to purchase a commission for him (the usual procedure, with the profits going to the proprietary colonels of the regiments), but agreed to allow him some time in London to try to seek one through the influence of powerful patrons, chief among them the Duke of Queensberry and the Countess of Northumberland, prominent in the social circles of the court of the new young king, George III, and his prime minister, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute.
The battle of wills continued in epistolary form. Letters from his father arrived in London very soon after Boswell himself did, urging him to turn his time there to good account, and to avoid ‘low’ company, strangers and (something the young Boswell had a fondness for) mimicry (27 November 1762; Yale C 211)*. Boswell’s answers (which have not survived) left Lord Auchinleck deeply displeased, and convinced that Boswell was not heeding his admonitions to set up ‘upon a sensible prudent and discreet plan’ (24 December 1762; Yale C 212). In February 1763 Lord Auchinleck simply stopped answering his son, and soon afterwards his threats to sell off the estate were being heard. Members of the wider family and social circle repeated and amplified the paternal anger. Boswell’s affectionate great-uncle, Basil Cochrane, a Commissioner of Excise in Edinburgh, wrote:
my Dear Jamie alow me to beg of you to be much upon your Guard. Doe your utmost to please your Father and if So take my Word for it all will come about again. Every thing will goe as you would have it. Tho’ he is angry yett I know he Loves you … There is nothing that you would aske of him to make you easie and happy that he would Refuse you but Don’t lett Such Silly expressions drop from your Pen that you would rather be a Seargent in the Guards than have five hundred pounds in any other part of the World. (20 December 1762)20
The bombardment of advice continued as winter gave way to spring. His mother wrote on 7 March 1763:
[Y]ou need not doubt but it woud have given me Pleasure to have heard that you was Layving of London & thincking of Comeing home & Setling to Busness hear[.] I supos you have no Expectations new [i.e. now] of a Comision in the Gaurds & as you are folowing no other Busness I belive no Body woud thinck it reasonable or advise your Father after your year is out to Continou your Alouance to live idely at London[.] I know no young gentelman of this Country that lives ther in that way[.] [Y]our poor Father is stil in great distress about you[.] [Y]our showing A dislike at this Country is a thing very disagreeabl to him[;] however I hope you will Come to See that it is both your duty & intrest to Setel hear befor the End of this year. (Yale C 332)
Boswell’s admired friend William McQuhae, who had been tutor to him and his younger brothers, when asked his opinion, opposed the army scheme on several detailed counts, with the ‘chief cause of my being apprehensive about the Consequences of your going into the Army’ being that
Lord Auchinleck would be highly provoked at it. He is very earnest to have all his Schemes for improving and ornamenting his Estate carried fully into Execution. To find his heir altogether inattentive to matters of that kind gives him great uneasiness, and he well knows that the Army or even living at London is not the way to acquire a different taste. It would be perhaps too severe to your own Sensibility of temper and filial Affection to hear the manner in which he talks upon that Subject … Absence is at present of great use, but if long continued may have a bad Effect. It may disoblige him so far as to put in execution the threatenings which you well know he has often made. (26 April 1763)21
This sustained bombardment succeeded. On 17 May 1763, Boswell wrote to Johnston, ‘My Father’s displeasure hangs over me; the airy forms of gayety and pleasure that glittered before my fancy are vanished or hid in clouds of discontent … I have written a most warm letter to my Father and told him that if he can have no peace of mind unless I return to Scotland that I will make that sacrifice, but have beg’d him to allow me some years in my own way, and then I may more effectualy settle.’ Boswell’s letters to his father that month were written, in Lord Auchinleck’s words, ‘in a strain that gives hopes of amendment’. He describes the shame he had been caused by Boswell’s ‘mimicry, journals and publications’, and reveals that he had (before receiving Boswell’s conciliatory letters) come, he told his son, to a resolution to sell off the Auchinleck estate, ‘from the principle that it is better to snuff a candle out than leave it to stink in a socket’ (30 May 1763; Yale C 214).
In his memorandum for 19 June 1763, Boswell urged himself to ‘Attain self-government & please father.’ In his lengthiest memorandum to himself, written on his final day in London before departure for Harwich and the boat to Holland for law study, he urged himself to ‘Set out for Harwich like Father grave & comfortable … Be in earnest to improve. It is not you alone concerned — but your worthy Father’ (4 August 1763).
If Boswell’s friend Johnston was this portion of the diary’s first reader, its second was an older, maturer and in some ways wiser Boswell, who looked back on this period as one of risible weakness, depression and vacillation. Arriving in London for a visit in 1772, some nine years later, now married and established in his Edinburgh law career, he recorded in his London journal of that year, ‘I looked back on former parts of my life, and my present firmness and cheerfulness of mind had full value by comparison with the weakness and gloominess which I recollected’ (19 March 1772).22 Dining, later in this 1772 London visit, at Dolly’s beefsteak house, he found himself ‘meditating on old times when I used to dine there frequently and was in a most dissipated and sickly state of mind, without any fixed rational purpose and being hardly able to observe common decency of conduct’ (21 March 1772).23 The lost Holland journal, a continuation of this journal in London, ‘really contained a full state of my mind when in a deep melancholy’ (11 April 1773).24
Like many a reader since the 1762–3 journal’s recovery and first publication, the older Boswell himself found it an absorbing reading experience, but the young author/diarist somewhat disconcerting. (The popularity of this portion of the diary has, for many, fixed Boswell as a perpetual twenty-two-year-old.) In Edinburgh, on Thursday 3 February 1780, he noted:
I sat in all the forenoon. I had resolved to employ it in making notes of a dull proof for drawing a Memorial which I had delayed too long. But I thought I would look into my journal in London in 1762[–3], that I might console myself in Edinburgh by being reminded that I had been as weary and melancholy in London as here. And I was so engaged by my own life that I read on all the time that I had appropriated to the Memorial. This was wrong. I was sickened in mind by reviewing my own sickly weakness.25
Again, on Sunday 30 July 1780: ‘Read a good deal of my London journal in 1762 and 3, and was humbled by my weakness.’26 In September of that same year he visited the home of the Auchinleck estate overseer, James Bruce, and felt ‘there a fit of raving as when in my younger days. Got from him a parcel of my letters to him at the most foolish time of my life; viz., when I was from twenty-one to twenty-three. Was sunk by viewing myself with contempt, though then a genius in my own eyes. Burnt all but one or two of the best. Was consoled to think that I was now so much more solid’ (1 September 1780).27
When he exuberantly set out from Edinburgh on 15 November 1762, a commission in the Guards was Boswell’s ostensible aim. But at deeper levels he sought in London an autobiographical self-renewal, to shake off the oppressive scrutiny of the ‘narrow’ and the ‘familiar’ – two key and recurrent terms of complaint in this London journal. Crippled and (in his own word) lacerated by his Calvinist boyhood, wounded by a caustic father who ridiculed his social style and his theatrical and literary aspirations, Boswell sought a self-validation in the applause of the great British metropolis. Its thriving culture of publication and its limitless supply of literary, social and political eminences offered the young man a redemptive hope of a new sense of self-worth. Boswell longed, as he expressed the thought in a much later journal (23 June 1786), ‘to live so that it may tell’.28
He had, from the age of 18, been keeping sporadic diary records – usually spare and concise, sometimes cryptic (as when he conceals the names of his sexual partners), and occasionally written in cipher. His first journal in fully written prose came as the record of a trip through the border counties of Scotland and England during two of the months in which he waited impatiently for his next escape to London, ‘Journal of my Jaunt, Harvest 1762’. This journal was undertaken as a self-consciously preparatory exercise for the journal he was already planning to keep in London. In these fully written-out journals, Boswell is both subject and observer, centrally involved yet strangely detached. Though in his London journal he is selective in the details of his life he chooses to record (the daily private memoranda are often revealing in this regard), he is disconcertingly candid and seldom morally judgemental, offering a self-record that is unironized, devoid of didacticism, and impelled by no satiric or other impulse to reform or correct a reader. This portion was sent to Johnston, but not precisely written for him (he is mentioned in it several times in the third person); rather, Johnston was to read it, then preserve it for a futurity at best only hazily conceived.
Vain and thrusting, driven by an insecure and agitated egotism, Boswell was actuated equally by a generous and eclectic fascination with the mystery of the other, by women and men in all walks and stations of life. He incorporated into his self-record not only the eminent and accomplished – aristocrats, politicians, soldiers, bankers, actors and authors – but the likes of day labourers, sentries, washerwomen, prostitutes, devotees of cock-fighting, a trio of Algerians bewildered and lost in London, and a young Thames waterman. He caught and recorded selfhood in the act of social self-articulation, writing down the clever or striking things that people said. In a draft of a letter of July 1764, seeking a meeting with no less than Frederick the Great of Prussia, he declared himself to be ‘like the ancient philosopher [Socrates] who said, “Speak, so that I can see you.” ’29 With the imposing conversational prowess of Johnson, of course, he struck the motherlode. However much his existence had been pre-inscribed by a deterministic version of the Deity, and by its secular equivalents in the heavy social and parental expectation for him, he aimed now to achieve a self-reinscription, and the incorporation of life around him into his own record.
London was to be his locus of autobiographical self-renovation, and, as it had been in 1760, of religious renewal. In St Paul’s Cathedral on Christmas Day, in his own version of religious rebirth, he ‘fervently adored the God of Goodness & Mercy’ (journal, 25 December 1762) – notably not the deity of his mother’s Calvinism and the punitive hellfire of the Edinburgh Church. Boswell would rise again from the ashes of his boyhood hellfire, just as London’s churches and chapels themselves rose from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666: the day after Christmas he notes that ‘I took a whim to go through all the Churches and Chapels in London, taking one each Sunday’ (journal, 26 December 1762). He adheres fairly closely to his plan, and carries it well into the spring: ‘This being Good friday, I endeavoured to excite in my mind a devout & solemn frame. In my opinion the annual return of such holy seasons is of great use. Men are thus kept in mind of Religion, and their affections are improved. The Churches of Rome & England in this particular have a great advantage over the Presbyterians. Regularity & Ceremony are of much advantage’ (1 April 1763).
He reports next month that he stepped into ‘a Romish Chapel, & was filled with most romantic ideas’ (journal, 8 May 1763). Notably, his first Easter in London brings about an important concurrently religious and secular resurrection: that of his friendship with Temple, with whom he had been out of touch for some years, and who, as mentioned, had in 1755 in Edinburgh first introduced him to the Anglican form of worship (and who would in fact later give up law study and take orders in the Church of England). ‘We were so happy & so pleasingly forgetfull of every thing but the immediate participation of cordial friendly discourse, that we did not go to church, altho’ it was Easter day[,] that splendid Festival’ (journal, 3 April 1763).
Temple, after the friendship is renewed, is soon established by Boswell as his grave moral counsellor, an affectionate but forgiving social monitor to whom he confesses his dissipations, his vacillations and his sexual escapades. After ‘a very agreable congress’ with a streetwalker (journal, 17 May 1763), he soon regrets the risk of disease he has run, and urges himself in one of his (frequently self-admonitory) private memoranda, ‘Tell Temple your risque & make him lay restrictions upon you, never to have any connection without a permission from him as you realy may get into sad scrapes’ (18 May 1763); and ‘learn command of self, & give promise to Temp[le] about never touch Girl in Street’ (memorandum, 19 May 1763). A month later: ‘When I got home, I was shocked to think that I had been intimately united with a low abandoned perjured pilfering creature’ (journal, 18 June 1763), followed by his memorandum for the next day: ‘Take Temp[le] privately by himself & own your depravity, & how vexed you are & promise never more to indulge low venery’ (19 June 1763). For London in 1760 had also been the scene of Boswell’s introduction into the sensual life – at first in the company of Derrick, who brought him into its ‘sportive’ world and introduced him to ladies of the town. He then ‘first experienced the melting and transporting rites of Love’ (journal, 13 March 1763).
Having since then had several ‘intrigues’ in Edinburgh, he now seeks to demonstrate what he takes to be his prowess with a newer and wider circle of women. His chief adventure in this regard is the brief but flamboyantly narrated siege and conquest of a Covent Garden actress, referred to in the journal as ‘Louisa’. But thereafter (following that affair’s unexpected consequence and abrupt termination) his main sexual activities take the form of quick and furtive encounters with streetwalkers. His image of himself as a neo-Restoration rake-hero, and ‘one of the Wits in King Charles the Second’s time’ (journal, 13 January 1763), does not sustain itself for long, as his hopes to avoid prostitutes and pursue intrigues with ladies of quality come to nothing. About sex with streetwalkers, he more often than not feels a post-coital self-revulsion: ‘When it was done she slunk off. I had a low opinion of this gross practice & resolved to do it no more’ (journal, 31 March 1763); ‘Yet after the brutish appetite was sated I could not but despise myself for being so closely united with such a low Wretch’ (journal, 10 May 1763).
The risks of venereal disease he runs with prostitutes in nocturnal London’s unlit streets and parks are both a thrillingly rebellious pleasure, a kind of proto-Romantic triumphant defiance, and a self-punishment, a capitulation to the impulses of his sinful carnality. In the starkest example of the way in which his London feelings of sensual release take the form of rebellion against the religion of his boyhood, he takes a coldly deliberate pleasure in walking the Rev. Hugh Blair, the noted Edinburgh minister and celebrated sermonist, past the house of the woman with whom he had in 1760 his first sexual experience. ‘I was diverted at walking the streets of London with Doctor Blair. I marched him down Southampton Street in the Strand, from the whimsical idea of passing under the Windows of my first London Lady of the Town, with an Edinburgh Minister whom I had so often heard preach in the New-church’ (journal, 9 April 1763). Much is comprehended in the word ‘romantic’, which he used to describe his feelings when he stepped into the Romish chapel, for the journal discloses the religious and the sensual in direct overlap: ‘I then went to St. George’s Church where I heard a good sermon on the Prophets testifying of Jesus Christ. I was upon honour much disposed to be a Christian … The Dutchess of Grafton attracted my eyes rather too much’ (journal, 5 December 1762). In an earlier instance, he himself sought to make out a ‘consistency’ in this conflation of the religious and the erotic:
I went to St. James’s Church & heard service & a good sermon on By what means shall a young man learn to order his ways, in which the advantages of early piety were well displayed. What a curious inconsistent thing is the mind of Man! In the midst of divine service I was laying plans for having women, & yet I had the most sincere feelings of Religion. I imagine that my want of beleif is the occasion of this: So that I can have all the feelings. I would try to make out a little consistency, this way. I have a warm heart & a vivacious fancy. I am therefore given to love, and also to Piety or gratitude to God, and to the most brilliant and showy method of public Worship. (journal, 28 November 1762)
Boswell had, after all, been first attracted to the idea of conversion to Catholicism while he was in love with an actress in Edinburgh, Mrs Cowper. And he has the pleasure of discussing religion in a revealing exchange with his lover, the actress ‘Louisa’:
We talked of Religion; Said She[:] People who deny that, show a want of sense. For my own part, Madam, I look upon the Adoration of the Supreme being as one of the greatest Enjoyments we have. I would not chuse to get rid of my religious notions. I have read books that staggered me: But I was glad to find myself regain my former opinions. Nay, Sir what do you think of the Scriptures having stood the test of Ages. — Are you a Roman Catholic Madam? — No Sir[,] tho’ I like some parts of their Religion; in particular, Confession, not that I think the Priest can remit sins, but because the notion that we are to confess to a decent Clergyman, may make us cautious what we do. (journal, 22 December 1762)
All this – a confused quest to reconcile his drive for sexual pleasure with notions of it as a gross and sinful carnality – comes as he conscientiously reads his way through the Bible as part of an ambitious programme of serious reading in his private London hours. What Boswell seeks in his God of goodness and mercy is what he required often enough from those around him, and what his confessional journal often enough challenges a reader to provide: permission to be himself, and forgiveness.
Thus the rhythms of the great Christian narrative of fall and redemption govern and are repeated in the rhythms of Boswell’s behaviour as recorded in the journal, but in repetition without resolution. He descends initially from the heights of Edinburgh’s steep Old Town – scene of his primal fall, consciousness of Calvinist sinfulness, and boyhood wounding by his mother’s education – then rises again with his exhilarated vision of a redemptive London from Highgate Hill: ‘When we came upon Highgate hill, & had a view of London I was all life & Joy.’ He quotes (probably to the bewilderment of his fellow coach passenger, Mr Stewart) the soliloquy from Addison’s tragedy Cato on the immortality of the soul, ‘and my Soul bounded forth to a certain prospect of happy futurity.’ In the very next sentence, he reports that he ‘sung all manner of Songs & began to make one about an amorous meeting with a pretty girl’ (journal, 19 November 1762). He thereafter in London falls, recurrently, from the exhilarated heights of Highgate Hill into his own sinful carnality. Not even the acquisition of Johnson – whom he summarizes in his Ébauche for Rousseau as a ‘famous scholar who proved to me the truth of the Christian religion’ – can redeem him from the demands of his body: ‘Since my being honoured with the friendship of Mr. Johnson, I have more seriously considered the dutys of Morality and Religion, and the dignity of Human Nature. I have considered that promiscous concubinage is certainly wrong … Notwithstanding of these Reflections, I have stooped to mean profligacy even yesterday’ (journal, 16 July 1763). Young Boswell’s London is both his redemptive New Jerusalem and his Sodom/Gomorrah, a Babylon at the same time as it is the Shining City beneath Highgate Hill.
Writing a quarter of a century later in a lengthy paragraph in the Life of Johnson’s own love for London, Boswell plainly had at least as much himself as Johnson in mind with this sentence: ‘The freedom from remark and petty censure, with which life may be passed there, is a circumstance which a man who knows the teazing restraint of a narrow circle must relish highly’ (1 April 1779).30 In London, Boswell wanted to shake free of the familiar and escape the negative gaze of a narrow world of punitive, censorious, deflating scrutiny. In his quest to renew himself and acquire ‘polite reserved behaviour’, he is disconcerted by the arrival in London soon after him of his Scottish friends the Erskines of Kellie, for ‘I am hurt with the taunts of ridicule’ (journal, 1 December 1762). London, he writes a few days later, is
undoubtedly a Place where Men & Manners may be seen to the greatest advantage. The liberty & the whim that reigns there occasions a variety of perfect & curious characters. Then the immense crowd & hurry and bustle of business & diversion, the great number of public places of entertainment, the noble churches and the superb buildings of different kinds agitate[,] amuse and elevate the mind. Besides[,] the satisfaction of pursuing whatever plan is most agreable, without being known or look’d at, is very great. (journal, 5 December 1762)
Paradoxically, his ambitions of personal distinction need to be pursued ‘without being known or look’d at’, for he can indulge liberty and whim only in the bustling and crowded nonparticularity of London’s urban gaze.
Of his affection for the actor West Digges, who dazzled him on the Edinburgh stage, especially in the role of the dashing bandit-hero Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, he notes, ‘Indeed he & I never came to familiarity which is justly said to beget contempt’ (journal, 1 December 1762). Of Temple’s younger brother, Robert, he writes, ‘I wish I had kept him all along at a due distance; for too much familiarity especialy with those much younger than ourselves is allways attended with dissagreable circumstances. I realy find this is what I am most apt to fall into; & as it often makes me look little & so gives me pain, I must guard against it’ (journal, 9 July 1763). These feelings recur even in the company of eminent Scots whom he in certain ways genuinely admires: ‘I should have mentioned yesterday that Erskine and I past a very good morning at Dempster’s, where we met with Doctor Robertson and Mr. Fordyce. I was in an excellent moderate lively humour, so that Robertson observed afterwards that I was “a pleasant man.” Altho’ our conversation that morning was admirable, yet I was hurt with a mixture of the Edinburgh familiarity & raillery’ (journal, 2 July 1763).
Much of Boswell’s thinking in this regard comes to a point in the journal entry in which he reports his introduction by Temple to one of his Cambridge friends, Norton Nicholls:
I never saw any body who engaged me more at the very first than this Gentleman. He discovered an amiable disposition[,] a sweetness of manners & an easy politeness that pleased me much. We went to Tom’s & had a Pot of Coffee & sat there for two hours. Our conversation took a literary turn. We talked of Helvetius[,] Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume. Mr. Nichols I found to be sensible & elegantly learned[;] with an agreable moderation of sentiment intermixed his character was finely compleated. I talked realy very well. I have not past so much rational time I dont know when. The degree of distance due to a stranger restrained me from my effusions of ludicrous nonsence, & intemperate mirth. I was rational & composed, yet lively & entertaining. I had a good opinion of myself, & I could perceive my friend Temple much satisfyed with me. Could I but fix myself in such a character & preserve it uniformly, I should be exceedingly happy. I hope to do so, and to attain constancy & dignity, without which I can never be satisfied, as I have these ideas strong, and pride myself in thinking that my natural character is that of dignity. My friend Temple is very good in consoling me by saying that I may be such a Man, and that People will say — ‘Mr. Boswell is quite altered from the dissipated inconstant fellow that he was. He is now a reserved grave sort of a Man. But indeed that was his real character, & he only deviated into these eccentric paths for a while.’ Well then let me see if I have resolution enough to bring that about. (journal, 13 May 1763)
In what is close to Boswell’s idealized image of himself are echoes, in Temple’s proleptic ‘consoling’, of the lengthy ‘ingenious dissertation’ on Hamlet given by the main early older male mentor of the journal, the Irish actor and theorist of elocution Thomas Sheridan, who ‘made it clear to us that Hamlet notwithstanding of his seeming incongruities, is a perfectly consistent character’. Hamlet’s ‘timidity being once admitted[,] all the strange fluctuations which we perceive in him, may be easily traced to that source’ (journal, 6 April 1763). Earlier, on 10 January 1763, Boswell had been moved to tears by Garrick’s performance as the dying King in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, in which the formerly youthfully roistering Prince Hal arrives at maturity and monarchy, and becomes the glorious Henry V. He is made lachrymose again by Garrick in King Lear: ‘I was fully moved & I shed abundance of tears’ (journal, 12 May 1763), as he had been while reading in the Bible the ‘History of Joseph and his Brethren, which melted my heart, and drew tears from my eyes’ (journal, 20 February 1763). These tales struck deep autobiographical chords, treating as they do of problematic filiation and family disharmony (finally allayed). Nicholls, like Temple, would later be ordained a Church of England minister, and acts, when Boswell first meets him, as behavioural restraint. In the idealized vision which this meeting elicits, the restraint would be not that of the withering disapproval of his father, or the taunting ridicule of his familiars, or the fear of the Calvinist deity’s eternity of hellfire, but genial, tolerant and – secular equivalents of the God of goodness and mercy – forgiving. Overall, Boswell aspires to revise himself into the values of mid-eighteenth-century English bourgeois Anglican masculinity: self-discipline, regularity in habits, lack of flightiness or self-display, with the conversational properties of urbanity, understatement, moderation, politeness and gentility, summarized in his own particular word retenu (a French word which he spells in various different ways and sometimes with an accent), used mostly in his daily private memoranda, and meaning, essentially, self-disciplined and restrained. But less than a month after meeting Nicholls, he laments, ‘I am allways resolving to study propriety of conduct. But I never persist with any steadiness’ (journal, 3 June 1763). By this point Boswell has come to pin his hopes for self-renovation on the wish that travel in Europe will eventually solidify him and ‘confirm me in proper habits’ (ibid.). He tells his companions, Erskine and George Dempster, of these hopes for cosmopolitan improvement with future travels in Europe: ‘I said I wanted to get rid of folly & to acquire sensible habits. They laughed’ (journal, 23 June 1763).
Boswell’s second visit to London coincided with the great British political crisis of the winter of 1762–3. The young George III and his politically inexperienced prime minister, the highly unpopular Scots-born John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, were eager to bring to an end the costly Seven Years War (part of which is known as the French and Indian War in North America). Bute had negotiated preliminary treaties with France, signed on 3 November 1762, with the Peace of Paris coming on 10 February 1763. Opponents were claiming vociferously that Bute had made a host of unnecessary and pusillanimous compromises and concessions to the French in the treaty’s terms. William Pitt the elder, whom Bute had succeeded, and who had exercised great executive power in the conduct of the war and oversaw many of its successes, was among those who led a vocal opposition to Bute’s Peace, regarding it as inadequate and in all probability soon to be broken. Political opportunists like the satirist Charles Churchill and the radical politician John Wilkes (both of whom Boswell, in his eclectic way, is pleased to meet) were – chiefly in their virulently anti-Scots North Briton – mounting savage attacks on Bute, his administration and the Peace, amid a general atmosphere of hostile allegation that Bute had opened up government to inordinate numbers of Scottish place-seekers. A French visitor to London and journal-keeper at this time, the astronomer Jérôme Le François Lalande, witnessed the celebratory illuminations near Whitehall on the night of 22 March to mark the Peace, and noted of the crowds there, ‘Mais fort mesquins, les Anglais disaient dans leurs imprécations: “Tu es bête comme la paix” ’ (‘But the very mean-spirited English were saying in their curses, “You’re stupid, like the peace” ’).31 Bute himself did not survive, and his brief and embattled prime-ministership ended with his resignation on 8 April 1763.
War is a time of uncertain outcomes, and so was Boswell’s time in London, and so was the Earl of Bute’s Peace. Bute’s supporters rejoiced at the end to the pain and cost in money and taxes, blood and death, but opponents feared that its terms settled nothing fundamentally, compromised too far, and left open opportunities for renewed flare-ups. By the time Boswell writes his final London diary entry and his last and lengthiest prescriptive memorandum to himself (on 4 August 1763), he too has bargained and compromised – with his father and the densely arrayed forces of conventional social expectation. His uneasy peace with his father stands as the micropolitical correlative of the Earl of Bute’s. Neither peace treaty amounts to a definitive narrative turning point, and Boswell ends this portion of his writing with a new beginning, at a richly (as well as literally) liminal moment. As the packet boat for Holland puts out from the shores of England at Harwich, he fixes his gaze back on the figure of Johnson. ‘As the Vessel put out to sea I kept my eyes upon him, for a considerable time while he remained rowling his majestic frame in his usual manner. At last I perceived him walk back into the town, and he disappeared’ (6 August 1763). But it remains, of course, the winds of his father’s eventually determinant wishes that waft him across the Channel into law study.
In his journal entry for 10 July, Boswell reports a remarkable fondness for the tales and poems of the simple chapbooks that formed a central part of his boyhood reading. A few days before, he had gone to the Dicey publishing house. ‘There, are ushered into the World of Literature, Jack and the Giants, The seven wise men of Gotham and other Storybooks which in my dawning years amused me as much as Rasselas does now. I saw the whole Scheme with a kind of pleasing romantic feeling to find myself realy where all my old darlings were printed. I bought two dozen of the Story-books, and had them bound up with this Title “Curious Productions.” ’ Boswell’s own curious production, his London journal, is the story of James and the Giants, collecting eminent figures across the entire social and intellectual and political range, and incorporating them into the Boswellian self-record. When (after his rather bruising first encounter in the back parlour of Thomas Davies’s bookshop) Boswell summons the courage to visit Johnson at his home, he notes in his journal that Johnson has ‘chambers in the Inner Temple where he lives in Literary state, very solemn and very slovenly’ (journal, 24 May 1763). He expands this in the Life: ‘His Chambers were on the first floor of No. 1, Inner-Temple-lane, and I entered them with an impression given me by the Reverend Dr. Blair, of Edinburgh, who had been introduced to him not long before, and described his having “found the Giant in his den;” an expression, which, when I came to be pretty well acquainted with Johnson, I repeated to him, and he was diverted at this picturesque account of himself.’32 In more than just a fantasy form, and however much Boswell’s earnest and sincere campaign for a programmatic moral and behavioural self-renovation faltered, the young Scot descended on the enemy capital and captured its literary chief, author of the Dictionary of the English Language. The magisterial Word of Johnson comes to dominate the journal records of June, July and the first few days of August, and fills the lengthiest entries for these times.
Yet this acquisition of Johnson affords no easy or radically transformative triumphalism. The journal in its formal properties approaches, resembles, trembles on the brink of, but ultimately resists conforming too directly to the easy comforts of the discursive forms to which it generically alludes: religious conversion narrative, repentant-rogue criminal histories, the stock revelation or discovery scenes of contemporary patent-theatre comedy, a novelistic definitive peripeteia, the simplicities of chapbook folk-tale resolution. The diary record registers instead the compellingly energetic irresolution of Boswell as he tries to negotiate the tensions between earlier formative determinants and his struggles to live within them and to jettison them. Life and the diaristic registration of it do not allow fulfilment of the fantasy of wholesale autobiographical self-renovation, affording only fluid and complex compromises – like the Earl of Bute’s Peace. Boswell (who in his journal entry for 18 July 1763 offers Eglinton an elaborate allegory of the Fall of Bute) finds a redemption in failure, and recovery in loss. Bute sacrificed his prime-ministership, but the initially unpopular Peace that ended the Seven Years War ushered in a long age of unprecedented British imperial domination and global mercantile prosperity. (The numerous other calamities that ensued would carry this point beyond its historical moment.) Boswell bargained with his father for travel in (a now peaceful) Europe and consented to drudge afterwards at the law in Edinburgh, but not before the planting of the first seedlings – his first records of Johnson’s character and conversation – of what would become his unparalleled biographical achievement.
More important, the fallen Boswell would rise again in the journal’s pages themselves, long buried with his other private papers, resurrecting himself from under the shade of Johnson’s great name in a more liberal twentieth-century literary atmosphere. In one reading, Boswell surrendered his dreams, denied his actual nature and aspirations, capitulated to his parents’ wishes, and yielded his ambitions to the suppressive and disabling forces of conventional expectation. In another, he indeed sacrificed much, but brought off a very different achievement. Deeper within himself, as he fixed his gaze on Johnson on the shore at Harwich and simultaneously dreamed of a future attachment to him and glumly contemplated law study in Utrecht to please his worthy father, he must have intuited that in the loyal and affectionate care of John Johnston in Edinburgh he had left documents available to a future not yet known or imagined, but which might be more receptive to his candour. He had recorded his London experience in a youthful diary which, innovatively in world literature, imparted to the written record of daily lived experience the kinds of ebbs and flows that the more emotionally supple naturalistic acting style of David Garrick had brought to the period’s tragedies and comedies, the kinds of ethical and religious self-interrogation fostered by the period’s philosophical debates and Christian doctrinal and sectarian controversies, and the kinds of literary burnish that the Restoration and eighteenth-century playwrights of manners and sentiment and sex and wit had brought the patent-theatre drama, and that novelists were bringing to the emerging forms of prose fiction (the deep structural patternings and recurrences of Henry Fielding’s comic epic in prose Tom Jones, and the experiential immediacy of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary masterpieces Pamela and Clarissa).
This diary, along with many of his earlier and later personal and other papers, he would in time bequeath to his descendants through his heirs of entail. Among these documents were many of the letters (quoted selectively in this edition’s notes) written and received at this time, and his daily private memoranda, together amounting to a revealing meta-diary. The journal-keeping is mentioned often in the letters to Johnston and others and in the memoranda, where it is revealed as itself part of Boswell’s self-renovating agenda. He repeatedly urges himself to stick to the self-imposed task of writing the journal, implicitly asking himself the question every diarist must ask: is this a profitable and disciplined use of time, or in fact the opposite – a waste of it, a distraction from what the writer really ought to be doing? Out of his historical and personal particularities – a young and awkwardly rebellious post-Union Scot negotiating a London crackling still with Anglo-Scottish tensions, but full of the excitement of the arrival of a new, young king and of the Earl of Bute’s controversial ending of the painful but triumphant Seven Years War, and of the promise offered by the culture of literary celebrity – emerged a more universally engaging narrative. At the transition from adolescence into young adulthood, all must, like Johnson’s Rasselas, face The Choice of Life, as life must widen into the perennial questions of the tension between self-determination and the limits imposed by obedience and authority – obedience not merely to the authority of parents, but to the wider religious and secular ideologies of the culture that produced us. Boswell’s account, belonging uniquely to the literature both of the time in which it was written and the time in which it was recovered and published, joins such stories as those of the two Shakespearean sons, Princes Hal and Hamlet, and the biblical Joseph and his brethren, and even the folk-heroic Jack the Giant-Killer, whose tales of filial and dynastic anxiety and struggle for self-achievement so deeply engage Boswell in his London stay. Like the Life of Johnson of 1791, Boswell’s journal in London of 1762–3 has had (since its first publication) legions of delighted admirers. Yet the journal, ‘fair and undisguised’ (16 July 1763), has at the same time left many readers, like the older Boswell himself when he reread it, more than a little disconcerted. If in its rhythms of confession and demands for forgiveness young Boswell has not always won the latter, he did indeed ‘live so that it may tell’.
1. The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson Temple, 1756–1795, vol. 1: 1756–1777, ed. Thomas Crawford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 358.
2. Edinburgh Review, October 1831. His views on Boswell were influentially repeated in his essay on Johnson for the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1856).
3. For detailed accounts of the recoveries of Boswell’s papers, see David Buchanan, The Treasure of Auchinleck: The Story of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), and Frederick A. Pottle, Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982). For the discovery of this 1762–3 London journal and other Boswell papers at Fettercairn by Claude Colleer Abbott, see the ‘Introduction’ to his A Catalogue of Papers … Found at Fettercairn House … (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). The story is summarized in Buchanan, Ch. IV, ‘ “Operation Hush” ’.
4. For the surviving correspondence between Boswell and Johnston, see The Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange, ed. Ralph S. Walker (London: Heinemann; New York: McGraw Hill, 1966).
5. Northrop Frye, ‘The Young Boswell’, Hudson Review 4 (1951–2), p. 146.
6. To Giuseppe Baretti, 20 July 1762; The Letters of Samuel Johnson, The Hyde Edition, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992–4), vol. 1, p. 206.
7. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 134.
8. Ibid., p. 664.
9. Ibid., p. 955.
10. Journal, 5 June 1784; Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Heinemann, 1981).
11. Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956, p. 155; London: Heinemann, 1956, p. 166).
12. The full text in Boswell’s original French of the Ébauche de ma vie for Rousseau, along with his (occasionally more informationally revealing) drafts, outlines and accompanying correspondence, appears in James Boswell: The Journal of his German and Swiss Travels, 1764, ed. Marlies K. Danziger (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008), Appendix II, ‘Rousseau’, pp. 350–69. An English translation (here quoted) of the Ébauche itself appears as Chapter 1 of Pottle’s James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966, repr. 1985), pp. 1–6.
13. The Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 790, note a.
14. Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782, ed. Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Heinemann, 1977; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 477.
15. For Pottle’s speculative reconstruction of the sequence of events leading up to Boswell’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, and Mrs Cowper’s role in it, see Earlier Years, pp. 45–54, and Appendix, pp. 569–74.
16. The Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 239.
17. Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952, p. 267; London: Heinemann, 1952, p. 260).
18. Boswell–Temple Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 33.
19. The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763, ed. David Hankins and James J. Caudle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 237.
20. Ibid., p. 340.
21. Ibid., p. 406.
22. Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt, Jr, and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959, p. 33; London: Heinemann, 1959, p. 34).
23. Ibid., McGraw-Hill p. 44, Heinemann p. 46.
24. Ibid., McGraw-Hill p. 175, Heinemann p. 183.
25. Laird of Auchinleck, pp. 176–7.
26. Ibid., p. 223.
27. Ibid., p. 237.
28. Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785–1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 74.
29. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953, p. 43; London: Heinemann, 1953, p. 42).
30. The Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 727.
31. Jérôme Lalande, Journal d’un voyage en Angleterre, 1763, ed. Hélène Monod-Cassidy (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 184; Oxford: the Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1980).
32. The Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 210.