James Boswell

James Boswell (b. 1740–d. 1795), 9th Laird of Auchinleck from 1782, was one of the founders of modern biographical and autobiographical technique. By profession, he was initially a Scottish advocate (1766–1785) and later an English barrister (1786–95), as well as an independent country gentleman (1782–1795) in the last years of his life when a landowner (Sc. “laird”) after inheriting the Auchinleck estate in rural Ayrshire. By avocation, he was a diarist, anecdote collector, letter-writer, periodical journalist, pamphleteer, poet, wit, and bon viveur. He was born in Edinburgh in 1740 and educated at the Universities of Edinburgh (1753–1759), Glasgow (1759–1760), and Utrecht (1763–1764). He first traveled to London in 1760, but his famous visits to London documented in his journals began in 1762–1763. He followed his year of legal education in the Netherlands with a Grand Tour of Europe (1764–1766). His middle years (1766–1785) began with his career as an advocate at the Scottish bar (from 1766), his marriage to Margaret Montgomerie (in 1769), and the publication of his first famous book, the Account of Corsica (1768), a work based on part of his Grand Tour journals. A proud Scot, Boswell spent most of his year in Edinburgh or Auchinleck, though he adored the cultural and literary vibrancy of London. He made a total of thirteen holiday trips to London in 1768–1785, before he moved his household to that city. During this middle period, he convinced Samuel Johnson to go with him on a tour of the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland in 1773. He published a series of periodical essays called the “Rampager” papers (1770–1782) and TheHypochondriack papers (1777–1783). He also published five zealous and sometimes intemperate political pamphlets in 1772–1785 designed to present his “independent” spirit. The death of Samuel Johnson in 1784 created an informal race among many of those who had known him to get into print with a biography; Boswell could exploit his trove of journals and letters for his books. Boswell’s “Prelude” to a Johnson biography was The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), which he followed belatedly with the Life of Johnson (1791), both books aided by Edmond Malone. The final years of Boswell’s life in London (1786–1795) were, despite these successes, years of struggle to gain English legal clients and failure to get into Parliament as a M.P. The reasons why Boswell is considered important have shifted over the past century. From 1785 well into the Victorian Age, he was seen as a careful recorder of Samuel Johnson’s conversations. But as his surviving private documents came to light, beginning with the Boswell-Temple Letters and Boswelliana in the 1850s, the focus shifted to Boswell as a fascinating if controversial personality in his own right, a writer at the center of a vast social network of some of the most interesting people of his era. After 1925 came a deluge of new Boswell manuscripts from Malahide and Fettercairn, leading to the establishment of editorial projects to publish these documents in annotated form. These finds led to a focus on Boswell as a creative and innovative writer rather than as a mere faithful stenographer or voice-recorder. Boswell is now generally recognized as a pioneer in the evolving genre of biography, whose reshaping and placement of evidence in his depiction of Johnson or Paoli guided the reading public’s perception of these men. He is also seen as an author of varying skills in journalism, social verse, and political pamphleteering, his celebrated Johnsonian studies being only part of his writing agenda. The gradual (and as yet uncompleted) publication of the Boswell correspondence since the 1960s has shown the wide variety of his close friends and professional acquaintances. Indeed, the Boswell Correspondence is one of the better sources for social life in the eighteenth century, especially with regard to Scotland, but also in a broader European and Atlantic World context.