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Boswell, a self-described “gentleman of ancient blood,” was a lawyer and a writer who knew Johnson well for more than 20 years. He was also a kind of genius. His biography of his friend and...
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (/ ˈbɒzwɛl, - wəl /; 29 October 1740 (N.S.) [1] – 19 May 1795), was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh.
Dec 18, 2017 · Boswell, the Edinburgh-born lawyer, diarist, and writer most well known for his biography of Samuel Johnson, has connections to two towering figures of the Enlightenment: David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
May 16, 2013 · The Boswell Book Festival takes place at Auchinleck House in Ayrshire from 17 to 19 May. A meeting 250 years ago led to Scottish author James Boswell completely re-inventing how biography is...
- Overview
- Scottish lawyer and laird
- Life of Johnson and London
Back in Scotland, Boswell was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates on July 26, 1766, and for 17 years practiced law at Edinburgh with complete regularity and a fair degree of assiduity. His cherished trips to London were by no means annual and until 1784 were always made during the vacations. He was an able courtroom lawyer, especially in criminal cases, but in Scotland neither fortune nor fame could be won in the criminal court.
In February 1768 Boswell published An Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to That Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli and stepped into fame. France had unmasked its intention of annexing the island, and people were greedy for information about Corsica and Paoli. Motives of propaganda caused him to present himself in the book as completely naive and to cut the tour to a mere frame for the memoirs of Paoli, but the result is still pleasing. Paoli, probably wisely, is presented in a manner reminiscent of that which the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch employed in his lives of great men.
Between 1766 and 1769 Boswell amused himself with various well-hedged schemes of marriage, maintaining meantime a liaison with a young Mrs. Dodds. Their daughter, Sally, like Charles, seems to have died in infancy. Boswell ended by marrying (November 1769) his first cousin, Margaret Montgomerie.
During the first few years of his marriage, Boswell was on the whole happy, hard-working, faithful to his wife, and confident of getting a seat in Parliament, a good post in the government, or at the very least a Scots judgeship. Paoli visited him in Scotland in 1771; in 1773 he was elected to The Club, the brilliant circle that Sir Joshua Reynolds had formed around Dr. Johnson; and later in the year Johnson made with him the famous tour of the Hebrides. He ultimately had five healthy and promising children. He was made an examiner of the Faculty of Advocates and one of the curators of the Advocates’ Library; he served twice as master of the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge of Masons and declined nomination for the grand mastership of Scotland. But by 1776 he began to feel strong intimations of failure. A headlong entry into Ayrshire politics had ranged him in opposition to Henry Dundas, who was then emerging as a political despot in the management of the Scottish elections. His practice was not becoming more notable. He began to drink heavily to replenish his spirits, not, as formerly, to give them vent. He returned to his old traffic with women of the town when separated from his wife by distance, by her pregnancy, or by her frequent complaints. As early as 1778 it was obvious that she was critically ill with tuberculosis.
Back in Scotland, Boswell was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates on July 26, 1766, and for 17 years practiced law at Edinburgh with complete regularity and a fair degree of assiduity. His cherished trips to London were by no means annual and until 1784 were always made during the vacations. He was an able courtroom lawyer, especially in criminal cases, but in Scotland neither fortune nor fame could be won in the criminal court.
In February 1768 Boswell published An Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to That Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli and stepped into fame. France had unmasked its intention of annexing the island, and people were greedy for information about Corsica and Paoli. Motives of propaganda caused him to present himself in the book as completely naive and to cut the tour to a mere frame for the memoirs of Paoli, but the result is still pleasing. Paoli, probably wisely, is presented in a manner reminiscent of that which the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch employed in his lives of great men.
Between 1766 and 1769 Boswell amused himself with various well-hedged schemes of marriage, maintaining meantime a liaison with a young Mrs. Dodds. Their daughter, Sally, like Charles, seems to have died in infancy. Boswell ended by marrying (November 1769) his first cousin, Margaret Montgomerie.
During the first few years of his marriage, Boswell was on the whole happy, hard-working, faithful to his wife, and confident of getting a seat in Parliament, a good post in the government, or at the very least a Scots judgeship. Paoli visited him in Scotland in 1771; in 1773 he was elected to The Club, the brilliant circle that Sir Joshua Reynolds had formed around Dr. Johnson; and later in the year Johnson made with him the famous tour of the Hebrides. He ultimately had five healthy and promising children. He was made an examiner of the Faculty of Advocates and one of the curators of the Advocates’ Library; he served twice as master of the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge of Masons and declined nomination for the grand mastership of Scotland. But by 1776 he began to feel strong intimations of failure. A headlong entry into Ayrshire politics had ranged him in opposition to Henry Dundas, who was then emerging as a political despot in the management of the Scottish elections. His practice was not becoming more notable. He began to drink heavily to replenish his spirits, not, as formerly, to give them vent. He returned to his old traffic with women of the town when separated from his wife by distance, by her pregnancy, or by her frequent complaints. As early as 1778 it was obvious that she was critically ill with tuberculosis.
Johnson died on December 13, 1784. Boswell decided to take his time in writing the Life but to publish his journal of the Hebridean tour as a first installment. In the spring of 1785 he went to London to prepare the work for the press. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785) tops all the others published later. It comes from the soundest and happiest period of Boswell’s life, the narrative of the tour is interesting in itself, and it provides us with 101 consecutive days with Johnson. The book was a best-seller, but it provoked the scornful charge of personal fatuity that has dogged Boswell’s name ever since. His intelligence was not really in question. But he deliberately defied the basic literary rule that no author who wishes respect as a man may publish his own follies without suggesting compensatory strengths of character. Boswell analyzed and recorded his own vanity and weakness with the objectivity of a historian, and in his Johnsonian scenes he ruthlessly subordinated his own personality, reporting the blows that Johnson occasionally gave him without constantly reassuring the reader that he understood the implications of what he had written.
In 1786 Boswell was called to the English bar from the Inner Temple and moved his family to London. Thereafter he had almost no legal practice. His principal business was the writing of the Life of Johnson, which he worked at irregularly but with anxious attention.
Though straitened in income, Boswell gave his children expensive educations. He visited Edinburgh only once after his emigration and then almost surreptitiously. His wife pined for Auchinleck and insisted on being taken there when her health grew desperate. Boswell felt that he had to be in London in order to finish the Life and to be at the call of the earl of Lonsdale, who had given him unexpected encouragement and caused him to be elected recorder of Carlisle. When his wife died (June 4, 1789), he was not at her side; and when he tried to detach himself from Lonsdale, he was treated with shocking brutality.
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. was published in two volumes on May 16, 1791. Contemporary criticism set the pattern of acclaim for the work and derision for its author. Boswell took intense pleasure in his literary fame but felt himself to be a failure. His later years were prevailingly unhappy. His eccentricities of manner seemed merely self-indulgent in a man of 50 or more: people were afraid to talk freely in his presence, fearing that their talk would be reported, and his habit of getting drunk and noisy at other people’s tables (he was never a solitary drinker) made him a difficult guest in any case. His five children, however, loved him deeply, and he never lost the solicitous affection of a few friends, including the great Shakespeare editor Edmund Malone, who had encouraged him in his writing of the Life of Johnson. Boswell saw the second edition of the Life through the press (July 1793) and was at work on the third when he died in 1795.
JAMES BOSWELL (1740-1795), Scottish man of letters, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was born at Edinburgh on the 29th of October 1740.
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James Boswell, ninth laird of Auchinleck, is best known as the biographer of his friend, the writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson. Boswell’s account of Johnson’s life has often been regarded as one of the most influential biographies ever written.
