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Boswell's Journals #13
Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789–1795
The last years in the life of the great eighteenth-century biographer are chronicled, including his struggle after his wife's death to raise five children alone, his feelings of failure about his work, and his joys in his later years
371 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1989
22 people want to read
About the author
James Boswell
1,607 books106 followersJames Boswell, 10th Laird of Auchinleck and 1st Baronet was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the eldest son of a judge, Alexander Boswell, 8th Laird of Auchinleck and his wife Euphemia Erskine, Lady Auchinleck. Boswell's mother was a strict Calvinist, and he felt that his father was cold to him. Boswell, who is best known as Samuel Johnson’s biographer, inherited his father’s estate Auchinleck in Ayrshire. His name has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer.
Boswell is also known for the detailed and frank journals that he wrote for long periods of his life, which remained undiscovered until the 1920s. These included voluminous notes on the grand tour of Europe that he took as a young nobleman and, subsequently, of his tour of Scotland with Johnson. His journals also record meetings and conversations with eminent individuals belonging to The Club, including Lord Monboddo, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith. His written works focus chiefly on others, but he was admitted as a good companion and accomplished conversationalist in his own right.
Boswell is also known for the detailed and frank journals that he wrote for long periods of his life, which remained undiscovered until the 1920s. These included voluminous notes on the grand tour of Europe that he took as a young nobleman and, subsequently, of his tour of Scotland with Johnson. His journals also record meetings and conversations with eminent individuals belonging to The Club, including Lord Monboddo, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith. His written works focus chiefly on others, but he was admitted as a good companion and accomplished conversationalist in his own right.
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March 6, 2021
This is the thirteenth and final volume of Boswell's collected journals. Previously I had only read the very first volume – his London journal of 1762–3, which is I think the only one available in a mass-market paperback. Skipping, then, some thirty years, what's most surprising here is how similar his mood, voice, and daily activities are to those early years, when he was fresh in the city and about to meet his lifelong hero.
Now, five years after Samuel Johnson's death, we find Boswell about to turn fifty and still as caught up in London's social life, and in his own anxieties, as he ever was. Rarely does he dine at home more than once a week: his life is a constant whirl of activity, not least connected with finalising his biography of Johnson. Even by the standards of the day, though, he was starting to indulge himself a little too much. Some of the records of his drinking make you wonder how he managed to function:
This often meant that his mornings were pretty much a write-off. ‘Rose about one,’ is a representative comment, though sometimes it was worse: ‘I had been very much intoxicated and was so ill that I did not get up till half past three,’ he says on one occasion, ‘just in time to take a brisk walk and sit down to dinner’ – where of course he could start drinking again.
Every now and then it caught up with him. In the summer of 1793, he got so drunk one night that he was knocked down and robbed on his way home, leading to another bout of intense Boswellian self-loathing. ‘I trust I shall henceforth be a sober, regular man,’ he resolved. Spoiler: he wasn't. And if it wasn't the drink, it was the ill-advised liaisons. Despite desperately missing his wife, who died just before the start of this journal, he can't resist picking girls up when he's ‘heated’ from drinking, sometimes going out for streetwalkers three times in a single day. There ensued the inevitable STDs and further self-recriminations.
he writes, while laid up in bed with the clap. As always, there were issues that lay behind this behaviour. In a sense it was a manifestation of Boswell's lifelong depression – what he calls his ‘constitutional melancholy’. The casual sex was just ‘a temporary feverish relief from gloom’, as he puts it at one point. There was no joy in it; even the clandestine thrill that he used to record with guilty relish as a young man has disappeared, to be replaced by coded allusions and private symbols. He must have been terrible company for these women; though in society, we know from contemporary letters and diaries that he hid his moods pretty well, and still seemed to be regarded as the life and soul of every party.
Privately, though, he was ‘in a woeful state of depression in every respect’. ‘I had no hope of happiness in this world, yet shrunk from the thought of death’ is his comment on one particularly bad period. And he gradually becomes aware that the bustle of London socialising is not cheering him up the way it used to. ‘I was vexed,’ he says after one disappointing dinner party, ‘to compare my present indifferent sensations from London scenes with that warm glow with which they formerly affected me.’ ‘Dined at the Literary Club,’ he says on another occasion. ‘It was not as in the days of Johnson. I drank liberally.’
It's sad to see him like this, especially since this is the period of his greatest literary triumph. The Life of Johnson came out in 1791 and was a smash success: he is so widely fêted and so much in demand that for a while the diary simply stops, unable to keep up. Afterwards, though, there is a sense of anticlimax. What on earth will he do with himself now? For a while he plays at being a lawyer, but his heart clearly isn't in it; he goes back to Auchinleck and acts the laird, but is bored in the country; he entertains fantasies about marrying again, which everyone but him can see is patently unrealistic. ‘My life at present,’ he confesses, ‘ is surely as idly spent as can almost be imagined.’
Overall, you get the impression of a man desperately trying to blot out what he sees as the futility of his existence. There is something tragic in it, because to his friends he was such a joyful companion. As a consequence, this final volume almost has the shape of a suicide story, although it isn't quite (Boswell would have been too scared to kill himself, I think). Yet in a sense, his death at only fifty-four did have something self-inflicted to it: the final illness that carried him off is reckoned to have owed quite a lot to the complications of his recurrent gonorrhoea, and the rampant alcoholism can't have helped. His literary fame, at least, was secure thanks to the Life of Johnson – though to me it's the telling of his own life that is the more incredible, and more revealing, achievement.
Now, five years after Samuel Johnson's death, we find Boswell about to turn fifty and still as caught up in London's social life, and in his own anxieties, as he ever was. Rarely does he dine at home more than once a week: his life is a constant whirl of activity, not least connected with finalising his biography of Johnson. Even by the standards of the day, though, he was starting to indulge himself a little too much. Some of the records of his drinking make you wonder how he managed to function:
It was an excellent dinner, as usual, and I drank all of the liquors: cold drink, small beer, ale, porter, cider, madeira, sherry, old hock, port, claret. I was in good spirits…
This often meant that his mornings were pretty much a write-off. ‘Rose about one,’ is a representative comment, though sometimes it was worse: ‘I had been very much intoxicated and was so ill that I did not get up till half past three,’ he says on one occasion, ‘just in time to take a brisk walk and sit down to dinner’ – where of course he could start drinking again.
Every now and then it caught up with him. In the summer of 1793, he got so drunk one night that he was knocked down and robbed on his way home, leading to another bout of intense Boswellian self-loathing. ‘I trust I shall henceforth be a sober, regular man,’ he resolved. Spoiler: he wasn't. And if it wasn't the drink, it was the ill-advised liaisons. Despite desperately missing his wife, who died just before the start of this journal, he can't resist picking girls up when he's ‘heated’ from drinking, sometimes going out for streetwalkers three times in a single day. There ensued the inevitable STDs and further self-recriminations.
I was sensible that I deserved that part of my unhappiness occasioned by my complaint, for what can be more culpable at my time of life, and in my situation as the head of a family, than the wild conduct of a licentious youth?
he writes, while laid up in bed with the clap. As always, there were issues that lay behind this behaviour. In a sense it was a manifestation of Boswell's lifelong depression – what he calls his ‘constitutional melancholy’. The casual sex was just ‘a temporary feverish relief from gloom’, as he puts it at one point. There was no joy in it; even the clandestine thrill that he used to record with guilty relish as a young man has disappeared, to be replaced by coded allusions and private symbols. He must have been terrible company for these women; though in society, we know from contemporary letters and diaries that he hid his moods pretty well, and still seemed to be regarded as the life and soul of every party.
Privately, though, he was ‘in a woeful state of depression in every respect’. ‘I had no hope of happiness in this world, yet shrunk from the thought of death’ is his comment on one particularly bad period. And he gradually becomes aware that the bustle of London socialising is not cheering him up the way it used to. ‘I was vexed,’ he says after one disappointing dinner party, ‘to compare my present indifferent sensations from London scenes with that warm glow with which they formerly affected me.’ ‘Dined at the Literary Club,’ he says on another occasion. ‘It was not as in the days of Johnson. I drank liberally.’
It's sad to see him like this, especially since this is the period of his greatest literary triumph. The Life of Johnson came out in 1791 and was a smash success: he is so widely fêted and so much in demand that for a while the diary simply stops, unable to keep up. Afterwards, though, there is a sense of anticlimax. What on earth will he do with himself now? For a while he plays at being a lawyer, but his heart clearly isn't in it; he goes back to Auchinleck and acts the laird, but is bored in the country; he entertains fantasies about marrying again, which everyone but him can see is patently unrealistic. ‘My life at present,’ he confesses, ‘ is surely as idly spent as can almost be imagined.’
Overall, you get the impression of a man desperately trying to blot out what he sees as the futility of his existence. There is something tragic in it, because to his friends he was such a joyful companion. As a consequence, this final volume almost has the shape of a suicide story, although it isn't quite (Boswell would have been too scared to kill himself, I think). Yet in a sense, his death at only fifty-four did have something self-inflicted to it: the final illness that carried him off is reckoned to have owed quite a lot to the complications of his recurrent gonorrhoea, and the rampant alcoholism can't have helped. His literary fame, at least, was secure thanks to the Life of Johnson – though to me it's the telling of his own life that is the more incredible, and more revealing, achievement.
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