JAMES BOSWELL: ROMANTIC HERO

The Young James Boswell

Only rarely does a man lay himself completely bare, so that we can understand him in all his moods, share in his occasional triumphs and sympathise with his frequent setbacks and disappointments. Such a man was James Boswell (1740-1795) whose revealing Journals were discovered from 1911 onwards, were collected for and transferred to Yale University in 1946 and published in 13 Volumes from 1950. Long world- famous as Johnson’s biographer, Boswell was a personality of extraordinary contrasts with great merits, candid faults and an enormously rich legacy. His life is not only his own, in all its heart-rending vulnerability, but illustrates in so many ways the obstacle course we call the Human Condition.

Boswell’s Background and Life

The events of Boswell’s life need to be briefly summarised. He was the eldest son of Alexander Boswell, a prudent Scots judicial Lord (not a peer) as a judge in the Court of Session, known as Lord Auchinleck (pronounced “Affleck”), who was Laird of Auchinleck, a landed estate in Ayrshire. Boswell was educated by private tutors in Edinburgh and later at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities. His father wanted him to pursue a career in the Law but Boswell had wild ideas, later abandoned, of converting to Catholicism. In 1762 his father allowed him to spend a year in London and his brilliant London Journal (1762-3) chronicles this trip when he hits the town, meets Garrick, enjoys the patronage of Lord Eglinton and crucially first meets revered Dr Samuel Johnson. He has a hare-brained scheme to obtain a commission in the Foot-Guards which comes to nothing and agrees with his father to study Law in Holland. 

A rather dismal year in Utrecht, is followed by a tour of the lively German princely Courts leading to a successful visit to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to Voltaire, lions of the Enlightenment, on the Swiss-French borders.  Boswell then diverts to Italy, to Turin, Naples and Rome, cavorting with his new friend, cultivated if rakish John Wilkes, joining a touring group with Lord Mountstuart, son of erstwhile Prime Minister Lord Bute; he returns via Corsica, where he befriends the local leader Pascal Paoli fighting the occupying Genoese, allied to the French. He returns to London (in Paris learning in a newspaper of the death of his mother), seduces Rousseau’s mistress, briefly sees a welcoming Johnson and his circle and hurries home to comfort his grieving father.

Boswell enters the Scots Bar without much enthusiasm, marries a long-suffering cousin Elizabeth (“Peggie”) Montgomerie and tries to settle as a Scots lawyer in Edinburgh defending poor criminals coupled with riotous annual trips to his beloved London. He earns some recognition with his Tour to Corsica in 1768 and he attends Garrick’s Shakespeare celebration in ostentatious Corsican costume.

He revels in his visits to his friends and to ladies of the town in London, takes Johnson on a Tour of the Highlands and Islands in 1773, joins Johnson on trips to Oxford, Lichfield and Ashbourne and fathers two sons and three daughters. His father dies in 1782 and Boswell becomes proud Laird of Auchinleck. His mentor and father-figure Johnson dies in 1784 and Boswell starts writing his Life after publishing his entertaining Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. He moves unsuccessfully to the English Bar in 1786 and tries to boost his career by allying himself to rough and bullying North of England grandee Lord Lonsdale. He becomes Recorder of Carlisle in 1788 but resigns in 1790. His wife dies in 1789. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is published in 1791 to general acclaim. Depressed and drinking too much, but supported by his loving family, Boswell dies in London in 1795, aged 55, and is buried at Auchinleck.

A caricature of Johnson and Boswell stepping out

Macaulay’s Verdict

If only this outline is used, it might be said that Boswell’s early promise later fizzled out and it is surprising that such a figure should write such a great biography. This essentially was the view of the great critic and Whig historian Lord Macaulay in his magisterial 1831 review of J W Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life.

After flaying High Tory Croker for editorial shortcomings, he pays handsome tribute to Boswell as a biographer; 

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worthwhile to place them.

Macaulay then turns his vituperation to Boswell as a man:

Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself, at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. 

Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know everybody who was talked about, that, Tory and high Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish distinctions, that when he had been to court, he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword; such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. 

What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayer-book and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.

There is plenty more in similar vein; Macaulay’s verdict stuck for 100 years and thus the character of James Boswell was belittled and disparaged. We can now say, on reading the Journals, that Macaulay, in his cocksureness, totally failed to take the measure of Boswell the man.

The Journals and the Re-appraisal

Boswell left, for posterity to discover, some 8,000 sheets of manuscript and hordes of letters. His manuscripts are sometimes just his brief notes, recorded every day from the age of about 16, of the events of the day or often a fully written-up diary produced a week or two later. His self-analysis was almost obsessive, making sensible resolutions only to break them soon afterwards. He dreamt of a great career as a judge in Edinburgh, as a literary figure in London, as a landed gentleman at Auchinleck. In an age of Rationalism he was a Romantic, a dreamer. He had a Scotsman’s classic conflict between religion and sexuality, devoutly Episcopalian with Johnson, that master of the expressive prayer, attending services piously then engaging, when “feverish”, in the grossest carnality. He loved his wife but betrayed her constantly. Peggie Boswell was no doormat –her crack about Boswell’s reverence of Johnson was well-aimed; “I have often seen a bear led by a man, but never a man led by a bear!” possibly brought on by Johnson’s tactless comment on her hospitality; “A tolerable dinner, but not one to which to invite a man.”

Boswell hid nothing. He ardently woos an actress and finally possesses her – only to catch the pox – he was said to have caught gonorrhoea 17 times, excessive even by 18^th century standards. He is often hard up but delights in walking down both sides of Cheapside and buying at each shop a traditional iced Twelfth-cake on Twelfth Night in 1763. He quarrels with landlords about rents and displays great vanity about his sword or his new buttons. He berates Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat in Skye for the low standard of hospitality shown to him and Johnson in 1773 and fears he has provoked a duel. He plots wild schemes to cut down his hanged sheep-stealing client and revive him at Edinburgh’s medical school. 

A Sketch of the mature Boswell

Good-natured and convivial, Boswell possessed the gift of friendship to a high degree. Loyal all his life to his school-friends William Temple and John Johnston of Grange, he won over Dr Johnson, who on their fifth encounter, took his hand and said “My dear Boswell, I do love you very much” and years later ”Boswell, I think I am easier with you than with almost anybody.” Rousseau, who was notoriously unsociable, soon melted before Boswell’s candour and frankness and tried to take him in hand. Voltaire too unbent and talked to Boswell with wonderful animation. The suspicious and clannish Corsicans took him to their hearts – he played his flute for them - and Paoli was for years another father-figure in his London exile. He even insinuated himself to the serene deathbed of his friend the great philosopher David Hume. Boswell had more in common with Wilkes and engineered a meeting between arch-Tory Johnson and Radical Wilkes which was a great success.

Famously Boswell recorded in his Journals, mined for his Life, the sparkling conversation of Johnson and his circle. Johnson’s conversation was highly competitive and if a rapier stroke did not penetrate he would pick up a cudgel. Boswell’s Life is hugely enlivened by Johnson’s pronouncements on literature, on religion, on manners or on the personalities of celebrated Londoners. If he is in danger of losing the argument, his shafts at Scotsmen or at “blockheads” bring joyful hilarity. Boswell mixed and held his own with the best, Johnson himself, Reynolds, Garrick, Beauclerk and Goldsmith et al and only disliked Gibbon and Baretti.

James Boswell: Romantic Hero

But there were darker moments. Boswell was afflicted all his life by bouts of melancholy and his world turned black: he failed to find advancement: he was never a powerful or important figure: his legal talents were mediocre: he was humiliated and insulted by his patron Lonsdale; his descent into alcoholism brought the horrors of hang-overs and the memory of foolish escapades.

Yet with all these foibles, we are left after 218 years with a vivid picture of the pathos and courage of a human being with whom we can closely identify. I declare that I am Boswell and I venture to say that we all possess a piece of Boswell. I call him a Romantic Hero and he has surely through his Journals and his Life achieved an heroic immortality.

SMD

14.08.13

Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2013

Sources

(1) Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) Oxford edition

                  (2) The Journals of James Boswell, Yale edition, edited by Frederick Pottle and Frank Brady.1950-89

Boswell’s London Journal 1762-3, Boswell in Holland 1763-4, Boswell on the Grand Tour (1)  1764-5, Boswell on the Grand Tour (2) 1765-6, Boswell in Search of a Wife 1766-69, Boswell for the Defence 1769-74, Boswell; The Ominous Years 1774-76, Boswell in Extremes 1776-78, Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck 1778-82, Boswell; The Applause of the Jury 1782-85, Boswell: The English Experiment 1785-89, Boswell: The Great Biographer 1789-95

-                  Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides 1773

(3) The Journals of James Boswell 1762-95. Selected and introduced by John Wain 1991. The best handy one-volume edition with a penetrating introduction.

(4)    Four Portraits by Peter Quennell (Boswell, Gibbon, Sterne and Wilkes) 1946, reissued 1965. The essay on Boswell sparkles and the others are an excellent evocation of 18^th century Britain.

(5)    The Treasure of Auchinleck by David Buchanan 1975 describes the extraordinary provenance of the Boswell papers from a Boulogne shop to Malahide Castle near Dublin to Fettercairn House in Kincardineshire to their destination at Yale.

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