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A Life of James Boswell
This moving biography reassesses James Boswell's achievements and uncovers the breadth of his world. Peter Martin dispels the notion that Boswell's masterly Life of Johnson was an accidental work of genius, and shows that Boswell was a writer of the highest order and a complex, troubled, but ultimately appealing man.
636 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
106 people want to read
About the author
Peter Martin
11 books7 followersPeter Martin is a graduate of and current Professor of English at Principia College, and a former garden historian for Colonial Williamsburg. He has written several books on historical and biographical topics, including: Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmond Malone, and gardens and gardening in Williamsburg since 1600.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 12, 2018
James Boswell was an arrogant twerp :
Rousseau : Goodbye. You are a fine fellow.
Boswell: You have shown me great goodness. But I deserved it.
And a dedicated follower of foppish fashion
I was dressed in a coat and waistcoat, scarlet with gold lace, buckskin breeches, and boots. Above all I wore a greatcoat of green camlet lined with fox-skin fur, with the collar and cuffs of the same fur.
Boswell was an arch Tory but an ardent supporter of the American revolution. (Doctor Johnson hated the American rebels. Because he was a raging monarchist? No, because the Americans legalised slavery.)
Boswell loved his wife but was obsessed with prostitutes. He was an idiot and a buffoon and a falling down drunk but nobody could resist him, everybody liked him, everybody invited him back, time and again. He celebrated the intensely ordinary joys of life, conversation, friendship, fatherhood, whilst dogged by intense continual bouts of depression, which he called hypochondria. He was heir to 27,000 acres of Ayrshire, a bona fide Scottish laird, but he was always strapped for cash and had to slave away as a lawyer all his working life, which he hated. (For that he blamed his father and his evil stepmother. )
Man alive, he was a psychological catastrophe on two wobbly legs.
Also, he had a great idea – that his own life deserved to be recorded in the minutest detail, omitting no shameful failures. So year after year he wrote thousands of pages of journals including all his trysts with streetwalkers, all his doses of gonorrhoea. I’m not aware of any other man who has written in so much detail about his own paid-for sex, apart from Chester Brown’s graphic novel Paying for It.
Here he is at the age of 22 in 1762 contemplating what’s on offer in London:
I am surrounded with numbers of free-hearted ladies of all kinds: from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph with white-thread stockings who tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling
A year later he is thinking maybe he should get married. By then he is studying in Utrecht, Holland. Feminists may wish to find some brittle object to smash at this point in the review :
There are two Ladies here, a young, handsome, amiable Widow with £4000 a year & Mademoiselle de Zuylen who has only a fortune of £20,000. She is a charming creature. But she is a savant & a bel esprit & has published some things. She is much my superior. One does not like that. One does not like a widow neither.
The guileless 18th century sexism bubbles away like a merry glass of champagne. By now he is married but naturally he also has a girlfriend too (remember Henry Hill played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas : "Saturday night was for wives, but Friday nights at the Copa was for girlfriends." Not so different in 18th century Edinburgh. )
And here is Bozzy contemplating his girlfriend’s sexual past:
How am I tormented because my charmer has formerly loved others? I am disgusted to think of it. My lively imagination often represents her former lovers in actual enjoyment of her. My desire fails, I am unfit for love. Besides, she is illbred, quite a rompish girl. She debases my dignity. She has no refinement. But she is very handsome, very lively and admirably formed for amorous dalliance.
(Which reminds me of Dante’s increasing horror in Clerks when he realises the extent of his girlfriend Veronica’s experience:
DANTE
This is different. This is important.
How many?!
She counts silently, using fingers as marks. DANTE waits on
a customer in the interim. VERONICA stops counting.
DANTE
Well...?
VERONICA
(half-mumbled)
Something like thirty-six.
DANTE
WHAT? SOMETHING LIKE THIRTY-SIX?
VERONICA
Lower your voice!
DANTE
What the hell is that anyway,
"something like thirty-six?" Does
that include me?
VERONICA
Um. Thirty-seven.
DANTE
I'M THIRTY-SEVEN?
VERONICA
(walking away)
I'm going to class.
DANTE
Thirty-seven?!
)
But anyway, after this conflicted panegyric to his current paramour Boswell the next day got drunk and hired a prostitute “and like a brute I lay all night with her”. Peter Martin, with customary dryness, remarks :
The next morning he already showed signs of his sixth infection, though the suddenness suggested not gonorrhoea but either a recrudescence of an old infection or more likely a mild nonspecific form of urethritis. Okay, not so bad then!
The girlfriends were one thing, the hookers another, but then Bozzy was one of those Weinstein types who are compelled to grope any female within arm’s length:
He managed to fondle a few chambermaids at inns en route p388
But wait. Let’s have a female point of view on all this cheating and whoring. One of his female friends in London stated her opinion of marital etiquette. (That was because he asked – he always asked people the most embarrassing questions. Go Bozzy.) She talked candidly to him of the harmlessness of “an occasional infidelity in her husband, as she did not think it at all connected with affection”. A special mistress or frequent infidelity was one thing, [Liz Lemon in ep 7 of season 4 of 30 Rock would have called it a dealbreaker, as in, “that’s a dealbreaker, ladies”]
but a “transient fancy for a girl, or being led by one’s companions after drinking to an improper place, was not to be considered as inconsistent with true affection”.
Bozzy well and truly put this into practise when he got married. Either he up and confessed to sex with a prostitute the day after, or he left his journal around for his wife to read. She always forgave him. But, you know, she had other pressing concerns, like, well, she was always pregnant, and , oh yes, she had TUBERCOLOSIS. Coughed up blood for a few weeks, then it went away, then it came back, and finally she died of it. In many ways, this biography is tacit indictment of what women had to put up with.
Margaret Boswell gave birth to their fourth child, David, on 15 November 1776.… but the baby was sickly and given that one third of all infants died within fourteen days of birth, the prospects for his survival looked bleak. And die he did. Dr Johnson wrote to him that the survival of three our of four of his children was “more than your share”. And look at Mrs Thrale, their friend, said Dr J – she’d had eleven children, and only four survived.
So maybe the constant hookers and the constant two-month trips to London to see Doctor Johnson was minor static. What a life, huh?
Bozzy may have been something of a bastard but in many ways you can kind of sympathise with him, which makes reading his bio a queasy experience. For one thing, he lived in Edinburgh and hated it – it was 400 miles away from the ACTION, which was London. Actually, anywhere but Edinburgh was better than Edinburgh. When he went on a trip to Lichfield in 1776 he met Sampson Lloyd, founder of Lloyd’s Bank, and James Watt, famous inventor. Then back in London, he met Captain Cook and also Theandenaigen, Chief of the Mohawks, a year or so before the Cherry Valley massacre. You know, pretty interesting times.
Boswell wrote the brilliant Life of Doctor Johnson and was famous for being the great Doctor’s number one groupie. This led to several persons making this kind of fun with him:
Whenever Johnson spoke “the attention which it excited in Mr Boswell amounted almost to pain. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shouder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropped open to catch every syllable that might be uttered.”
Well… what a wretched human being. A wretched human being who everybody liked a lot. Apart from the almost-raped chambermaids, of course. They probably weren’t fans. #METOOinthe 18thCENTURY.
If this review swerves tastelessly between comedy and horror, that's what Boswell's life was like. Maybe because that's what all human life is like.
Rousseau : Goodbye. You are a fine fellow.
Boswell: You have shown me great goodness. But I deserved it.
And a dedicated follower of foppish fashion
I was dressed in a coat and waistcoat, scarlet with gold lace, buckskin breeches, and boots. Above all I wore a greatcoat of green camlet lined with fox-skin fur, with the collar and cuffs of the same fur.
Boswell was an arch Tory but an ardent supporter of the American revolution. (Doctor Johnson hated the American rebels. Because he was a raging monarchist? No, because the Americans legalised slavery.)
Boswell loved his wife but was obsessed with prostitutes. He was an idiot and a buffoon and a falling down drunk but nobody could resist him, everybody liked him, everybody invited him back, time and again. He celebrated the intensely ordinary joys of life, conversation, friendship, fatherhood, whilst dogged by intense continual bouts of depression, which he called hypochondria. He was heir to 27,000 acres of Ayrshire, a bona fide Scottish laird, but he was always strapped for cash and had to slave away as a lawyer all his working life, which he hated. (For that he blamed his father and his evil stepmother. )
Man alive, he was a psychological catastrophe on two wobbly legs.
Also, he had a great idea – that his own life deserved to be recorded in the minutest detail, omitting no shameful failures. So year after year he wrote thousands of pages of journals including all his trysts with streetwalkers, all his doses of gonorrhoea. I’m not aware of any other man who has written in so much detail about his own paid-for sex, apart from Chester Brown’s graphic novel Paying for It.
Here he is at the age of 22 in 1762 contemplating what’s on offer in London:
I am surrounded with numbers of free-hearted ladies of all kinds: from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph with white-thread stockings who tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling
A year later he is thinking maybe he should get married. By then he is studying in Utrecht, Holland. Feminists may wish to find some brittle object to smash at this point in the review :
There are two Ladies here, a young, handsome, amiable Widow with £4000 a year & Mademoiselle de Zuylen who has only a fortune of £20,000. She is a charming creature. But she is a savant & a bel esprit & has published some things. She is much my superior. One does not like that. One does not like a widow neither.
The guileless 18th century sexism bubbles away like a merry glass of champagne. By now he is married but naturally he also has a girlfriend too (remember Henry Hill played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas : "Saturday night was for wives, but Friday nights at the Copa was for girlfriends." Not so different in 18th century Edinburgh. )
And here is Bozzy contemplating his girlfriend’s sexual past:
How am I tormented because my charmer has formerly loved others? I am disgusted to think of it. My lively imagination often represents her former lovers in actual enjoyment of her. My desire fails, I am unfit for love. Besides, she is illbred, quite a rompish girl. She debases my dignity. She has no refinement. But she is very handsome, very lively and admirably formed for amorous dalliance.
(Which reminds me of Dante’s increasing horror in Clerks when he realises the extent of his girlfriend Veronica’s experience:
DANTE
This is different. This is important.
How many?!
She counts silently, using fingers as marks. DANTE waits on
a customer in the interim. VERONICA stops counting.
DANTE
Well...?
VERONICA
(half-mumbled)
Something like thirty-six.
DANTE
WHAT? SOMETHING LIKE THIRTY-SIX?
VERONICA
Lower your voice!
DANTE
What the hell is that anyway,
"something like thirty-six?" Does
that include me?
VERONICA
Um. Thirty-seven.
DANTE
I'M THIRTY-SEVEN?
VERONICA
(walking away)
I'm going to class.
DANTE
Thirty-seven?!
)
But anyway, after this conflicted panegyric to his current paramour Boswell the next day got drunk and hired a prostitute “and like a brute I lay all night with her”. Peter Martin, with customary dryness, remarks :
The next morning he already showed signs of his sixth infection, though the suddenness suggested not gonorrhoea but either a recrudescence of an old infection or more likely a mild nonspecific form of urethritis. Okay, not so bad then!
The girlfriends were one thing, the hookers another, but then Bozzy was one of those Weinstein types who are compelled to grope any female within arm’s length:
He managed to fondle a few chambermaids at inns en route p388
But wait. Let’s have a female point of view on all this cheating and whoring. One of his female friends in London stated her opinion of marital etiquette. (That was because he asked – he always asked people the most embarrassing questions. Go Bozzy.) She talked candidly to him of the harmlessness of “an occasional infidelity in her husband, as she did not think it at all connected with affection”. A special mistress or frequent infidelity was one thing, [Liz Lemon in ep 7 of season 4 of 30 Rock would have called it a dealbreaker, as in, “that’s a dealbreaker, ladies”]
but a “transient fancy for a girl, or being led by one’s companions after drinking to an improper place, was not to be considered as inconsistent with true affection”.
Bozzy well and truly put this into practise when he got married. Either he up and confessed to sex with a prostitute the day after, or he left his journal around for his wife to read. She always forgave him. But, you know, she had other pressing concerns, like, well, she was always pregnant, and , oh yes, she had TUBERCOLOSIS. Coughed up blood for a few weeks, then it went away, then it came back, and finally she died of it. In many ways, this biography is tacit indictment of what women had to put up with.
Margaret Boswell gave birth to their fourth child, David, on 15 November 1776.… but the baby was sickly and given that one third of all infants died within fourteen days of birth, the prospects for his survival looked bleak. And die he did. Dr Johnson wrote to him that the survival of three our of four of his children was “more than your share”. And look at Mrs Thrale, their friend, said Dr J – she’d had eleven children, and only four survived.
So maybe the constant hookers and the constant two-month trips to London to see Doctor Johnson was minor static. What a life, huh?
Bozzy may have been something of a bastard but in many ways you can kind of sympathise with him, which makes reading his bio a queasy experience. For one thing, he lived in Edinburgh and hated it – it was 400 miles away from the ACTION, which was London. Actually, anywhere but Edinburgh was better than Edinburgh. When he went on a trip to Lichfield in 1776 he met Sampson Lloyd, founder of Lloyd’s Bank, and James Watt, famous inventor. Then back in London, he met Captain Cook and also Theandenaigen, Chief of the Mohawks, a year or so before the Cherry Valley massacre. You know, pretty interesting times.
Boswell wrote the brilliant Life of Doctor Johnson and was famous for being the great Doctor’s number one groupie. This led to several persons making this kind of fun with him:
Whenever Johnson spoke “the attention which it excited in Mr Boswell amounted almost to pain. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shouder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropped open to catch every syllable that might be uttered.”
Well… what a wretched human being. A wretched human being who everybody liked a lot. Apart from the almost-raped chambermaids, of course. They probably weren’t fans. #METOOinthe 18thCENTURY.
If this review swerves tastelessly between comedy and horror, that's what Boswell's life was like. Maybe because that's what all human life is like.
March 18, 2020
If you've read Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON, you ought to read this biography of his biographer. (If you haven't read it, you're living wrong. Read it. Now.).
Peter Martin manages to keep things moving engagingly, in a chronological treatment based on the extensive journals, correspondence and publications of Boswell and his circle (thousands and thousands of letters, which were of course the emails and DMs of the 18th century). Especially interesting is the explanation, at the very start of the book, of the 20th century discovery, and battles over, all the Boswelliana that sat undisturbed at Boswell's family estate, Auchinleck, for more than a century (some of it just sitting in burlap sacks in a hay loft).
The recitations of Boswell's STDs gets a bit tiresome, but the treatment of his legal career, relations with his father, his wife Margaret and his children, and most of all, with Johnson himself are more than enough to make this interesting. And we get a glimpse of Boswell's unique talent for inserting himself into the midst of conversations with illustrious authors artists and philosophers - a kind of Zelig of 18th century Europe.
On a final note, a surprise hero of Boswell's achievements turns out to be Edmond Malone, the Irish editor who almost single-handedly kept Boswell working on the LIFE when chronic depression made it almost impossible for him to write.
All in all, readable and worthwhile.
Peter Martin manages to keep things moving engagingly, in a chronological treatment based on the extensive journals, correspondence and publications of Boswell and his circle (thousands and thousands of letters, which were of course the emails and DMs of the 18th century). Especially interesting is the explanation, at the very start of the book, of the 20th century discovery, and battles over, all the Boswelliana that sat undisturbed at Boswell's family estate, Auchinleck, for more than a century (some of it just sitting in burlap sacks in a hay loft).
The recitations of Boswell's STDs gets a bit tiresome, but the treatment of his legal career, relations with his father, his wife Margaret and his children, and most of all, with Johnson himself are more than enough to make this interesting. And we get a glimpse of Boswell's unique talent for inserting himself into the midst of conversations with illustrious authors artists and philosophers - a kind of Zelig of 18th century Europe.
On a final note, a surprise hero of Boswell's achievements turns out to be Edmond Malone, the Irish editor who almost single-handedly kept Boswell working on the LIFE when chronic depression made it almost impossible for him to write.
All in all, readable and worthwhile.
December 6, 2014
I've been hearing about Boswell's biography "A Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D" forever, as the original biography, by the best biographer ever. So now that I'm on an Enlightenment thinkers grand tour, I figured this is a great time to include Johnson & Boswell. I wasn't disappointed. Boswell was a bit of a savant, a bit of a nut, an oversexed drunk who never quite grew up. But his empathy with with his friends, combined with his artistic writing skills, gave him unparalled insights into his times and his subjects. And now I'm ready to get into the masterpiece itself...
July 10, 2015
This was well-researched, excellently written, and very lively; as well as further proof that I could never tolerate Boswell as a friend. He would drive me insane!
August 27, 2018
Such hopes - such zinging spirits - such sadness - a book I never wanted to end
January 28, 2011
Fascinating introduction to the man, but...uh
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews