The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  During the whole seventy-five years of Johnson’s life, Boswell had a direct experience of his subject for parts of only twenty-one. “Nobody can write the life of a man,” Johnson said, “but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” After Boswell’s marriage to his Scots cousin in 1769 he spent almost all the rest of his life in Scotland as a practicing lawyer. Apart from his tour of Scotland and the Hebrides with Johnson (August to November 1773) Boswell was in Johnson’s presence altogether for parts of some three hundred days. This left him with only a fragmentary secondhand knowledge of two-thirds of Johnson’s life and a patchy if minute knowledge of the third of Johnson’s life when he knew him.

  With only this limited firsthand contact with his subject, Boswell needed the steady industry of the scholar to collect his facts. For this, too, his passion for strong drink and weak women would seem to have left him ill qualified. In his book he would make up for his lack of personal knowledge by copiously reprinting Johnson’s letters. But even to collect these, along with notes of Johnson’s life and utterances, was a laborious, exacting, and miscellaneous task. “Were I to detail the books which I have consulted, and the inquiries which I have found it necessary to make by various channels, I should probably be thought ridiculously ostentatious,” Boswell boasted in his advertisement to the first edition. “Let me only observe, as a specimen of my trouble, that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly.”

  If ever there was an unnecessary book when Boswell set about his work, it was surely another life of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Although Johnson was buried in Westminster Abbey, at his death in December 1784 he was no national hero. Still, within the next two years three lives of Dr. Johnson appeared. The first, by the scholarly William Shaw (1749–1831), a member of Johnson’s literary circle, a noted Gaelic lexicographer, and unmasker of James Macpherson’s Ossian, appeared in 1785. Then Johnson’s intimate friend and comfort, Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (1741–1821), who on remarriage had become Mrs. Piozzi, published her warm and personal Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson in 1786. These she followed in 1788 by publishing her letters to and from Johnson. Most notable was the Life of Samuel Johnson, by Sir John Hawkins, also a member of the Literary Club, who had known Johnson well enough to be asked to draft his will. Hawkins’s Life, appearing in March 1787, had a second edition in June. Was the market for lives of this dyspeptic icon of English letters inexhaustible? It seemed so.

  Boswell’s friend, and a fellow member of the Literary Club, Edmond (or Edmund) Malone (1741–1812), the Irish scholar who pioneered in dating the plays and purifying the texts of Shakespeare, prodded Boswell to do a more ample life. Without the selfless Malone’s confidence and persuasion the Life might never have been written.

  At Johnson’s death, Boswell had been asked to put together a book of Johnson’s sayings for immediate publication. But he did not seize the auspicious moment. Instead he postponed publication until he could produce his more copious work. With painful deliberation, though depressed by the death of his wife, he publicly committed himself to excel the other lives. After Hawkins’s Life appeared, Boswell inserted this advertisement in the Gentleman’s Magazine:

  The Publick are respectfully informed that Mr. Boswell’s LIFE of Dr. Johnson is in great Forwardness. The Reason its having been delayed is, that some other Publications on that Subject were promised, from which he expected to obtain much Information, in Addition to the large Store of Materials which he had already accumulated. These Works have now made their Appearance; and, though disappointed in that Expectation, he does not regret the Deliberation with which he has proceeded, as very few Circumstances relative to the History of Dr. Johnson’s private Life, Writings, or Conversation, have been told with that authentic Precision which alone can render Biography valuable.

  Malone’s relentless persuasion now led Boswell to overcome his fits of indolence and melancholy to produce the voluminous finished work in May 1791. Even the patient and faithful Malone could not suppress his doubts of the public’s readiness for so vast a book on a subject already so much written about. Near the end, in January 1790, when Boswell told Malone that the work had grown beyond two quarto volumes, Malone responded, “I might as well throw it into the Thames, for a folio would not now be read.”

  Still Boswell took his chances. He gambled that there would be buyers willing to pay two guineas for his two large quartos. Instead of selling the copyright, he produced the work at his own expense. With the help of a loan of two hundred pounds from a printer and another two hundred from a distributor, he printed 1,750 copies, which appeared on May 16, 1791. Boswell’s hopes were promptly justified, for within two years the first edition had sold out, and Boswell had cleared the sum of six hundred pounds. A second edition, in July 1793, appeared in three quarto volumes. In his preface to the second edition, pursuing a report from Burke that the king had called his work “the most entertaining book he had ever read,” Boswell had boldly styled himself “By Appointment to His Majesty, Biographer of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.” But Malone saved Boswell from this embarrassing conceit by removing the page from print at the last minute. Unfortunately ill health prevented Boswell from doing any substantial revision, but Malone himself provided a revised standard text for the third edition in 1799 after Boswell’s death.

  …

  The alchemy by which the persons of James Boswell and of Samuel Johnson combined into the classic English biography and a model for modern biography is hard to fathom. Somehow, it seems, Boswell needed Johnson, and was fulfilled by him. In 1790, when Johnson’s Life, and Boswell’s own life, were nearly finished, Boswell pronounced the writing of that life “the most important, perhaps now the only concern of any consequence that I ever shall have in this world.”

  James Boswell was fortunate to be born, in 1740, into the family of Alexander Boswell, eminent and prosperous laird of Auchinleck in southwestern Scotland. The estate had been founded by a royal grant from James IV of Scotland in 1504 to a Boswell ancestor who had been killed at the battle of Flodden Field (1513). In young Boswell’s time the lands of the laird of Auchinleck reached out a full ten miles from the “sullen dignity” of the ruined ancestral castle and its neighboring elegant Palladian manor. Six hundred tenants deferred to him as overlord. Alexander Boswell attained distinction in his own right as an advocate in the Scottish courts and, elevated to the bench, became Lord Auchinleck. James’s ambitious father foresaw for him a bright career at the bar.

  The boy Boswell, not robust, suffered every sort of pressure. His passive mother had a taste for the mystical. But his father subjected him to the rigors of Calvinism, with the torturing ambiguities of predestination and the terrors of hellfire. From eight to thirteen he was educated at home by tutors. At twelve he seems to have suffered a psychological crisis. Entering the University of Edinburgh at thirteen, he completed the course in liberal arts. Somehow the metaphysics he studied reinforced his fears of hellfire and plunged him into a depression, which would recur all the rest of his life. He returned to the university in 1758 for the study of law. When his father heard rumors of his attending a “Romish chapel” and consorting with a Roman Catholic actress, he promptly separated James from the seductions of Edinburgh by enrolling him at the University of Glasgow. There Adam Smith was the professor of moral philosophy and rhetoric.

  After two years in Glasgow, Boswell took off to London, where he became converted to the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, under the misguidance of Samuel Derrick (1724–1769), a disreputable minor man of letters, Boswell developed a taste for sexual lowlife that he never lost and never fully satisfied. He also discovered his lifelong passion for London, both for its lowlife, from which he contracted gonorrhea, and for its literary high life. A commission in the foot guards would justify his staying in London. When he came of age his father agreed to let him join the guards and even to support him with an allowance provided he first passed his examinations for t
he Scottish bar. With this incentive, young Boswell passed the examinations and went to London hoping that his family connections would procure him the needed commission. As part of the bargain with his father he signed away most of his rights in the estate of Auchinleck for a paltry annuity of one hundred pounds a year. When he went to London his father increased his allowance to two hundred pounds.

  His plunge back into London in 1762 with his father’s acquiescence failed to produce the commission, and set a lifelong pattern of professional frustration. He also set the pattern of his appealing conviviality, the “good humour and perpetual cheerfulness,” which would be interrupted by patches of deep melancholy and self-doubt. At the age of twenty-two he learned of the birth of the son he had recklessly fathered back in Scotland and made provision for the infant’s baptism. At the same time he pursued and won an actress on the London stage.

  Boswell’s first meeting with his subject was wonderfully casual. What he had heard from his friend Thomas Davies, who kept a bookseller’s shop in Russell Street, “of Johnson’s remarkable sayings … increased my impatience more and more to see the extraordinary man whose works I highly valued, and whose conversation was reported to be so peculiarly excellent.”

  At last, on Monday the 16th of May [1763], when I was sitting in Mr. Davies’s back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,—he announced his awful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, ‘Look, my Lord, it comes.’ I found that I had a very perfect idea of Johnson’s figure, from the portrait of him painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after he had published his Dictionary.… Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’—‘From Scotland,’ cried Davies roguishly. ‘Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’ … this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression, ‘come from Scotland,’ which I used in the sense of being of that country, and, as if I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, ‘That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.’

  From this inauspicious beginning Boswell developed the friendship that produced his Life.

  Boswell cherished a special feeling for that shop on Russell Street, “No. 8—the very place where I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the illustrious subject of this work … I never pass by it without feeling reverence and regret.” Boswell “boldly” called on Johnson at his chambers in Inner-Temple Lane on Tuesday of the next week. “He received me very courteously; but it must be confessed, that his apartment, and furniture, and morning dress, were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of cloaths looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head.… But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk.” Johnson favored him with a miscellaneous discourse—on the madness of a poet who prayed on his knees in the street, on the evidences of Christianity, and the superb conversational talents of David Garrick. Twice when he rose to leave, Johnson urged him to remain, and to come visit him more often. “Come to me as often as you can.” Boswell followed up. And within a month after one of these casual meetings “he called to me with warmth. ‘Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.’ ”

  The intimacy and mutual affection grew. When Boswell could not find a place in the foot guards, he deferred to his father’s determination to make him a Scottish lawyer, and to round out his training in the civil law he agreed to go to the University of Utrecht. After that he would complete his liberal education by a grand tour of cultural capitals of the Continent. On August 5, 1763, when Boswell left London for Harwich en route to Holland, Johnson had already conceived such affection for his young disciple that he spent four days traveling by carriage to see Boswell off on the Channel boat. The distance in age (Boswell was twenty-two and Johnson fifty-three) and in social position, between a landed Scots laird and an impoverished Grub Street writer, seems only to have whetted their appetite for each other.

  Boswell reported their parting at the port of Harwich.

  My revered friend walked down with me to the beach, where we embraced and parted with tenderness, and engaged to correspond by letters. I said, ‘I hope, Sir, you will not forget me in my absence.’ Johnson. ‘Nay, Sir, it is more likely you should forget me, than that I should forget you.’ As the vessel put out to sea, I kept my eyes upon him for a considerable time, while he remained rolling his majestick frame in his usual manner; and at last I perceived him walk back into town, and he disappeared.

  At Utrecht Boswell diligently pursued his studies and enjoyed the sophisticated Dutch society. He began an affair with the vivacious daughter of one of the richest noblemen in the province, and he spent vacations touring the rest of Holland. At the end of a year he was impatient for his grand tour. People interested him far more than places or buildings. Despite his friendship with a favorite of Frederick the Great, George Keith, earl marischal of Scotland, he never managed a meeting with Frederick. But with this exception there is no other record of his failure to wangle an interview with anyone he wanted to meet.

  When Boswell announced his intention to meet Rousseau on his way through Switzerland, he was told the French philosopher had become a recluse and was seeing no one. This only encouraged him to write a letter that was a masterpiece of sycophancy and cajolery. “Trust a unique foreigner,” Boswell wrote. “You will never regret it. But, I beg of you, be alone.” He secured the interview and developed a friendship based at first on their common interest in music, then on his flattering requests for advice. When Boswell confessed to recurrent fits of melancholia, Rousseau declared that there were points at which their two souls joined. Boswell rashly asked permission to write Rousseau’s mistress, Thérèse le Vasseur, at the same time swearing that he had no intention of carrying her off. “I sometimes form romantic plans, never impossible plans.” A year later, when Rousseau traveled to England with his friend David Hume, he entrusted Mlle. le Vasseur to Boswell, who escorted her, too, to England, with consequences veiled by the family’s censorship of Boswell’s papers.

  Then by an unknown stratagem he bagged Voltaire for an hour’s interview at his retreat on Lake Geneva, where he explored the sage’s notions on religion. Asking Voltaire what happens to our ideas that we have forgotten but can later recall, he received the elegant response from Thomson’s “Seasons”—“Aye, Where sleep the winds when it is calm?”

  Then Boswell learned that John Wilkes (1727–1797), the notorious English champion of political liberty, happened to be in Turin. On January 10, 1765, Boswell wrote Wilkes his desire to discuss with him “the immateriality of the soul”:

  John Wilkes the fiery Whig would despise this sentiment. John Wilkes the gay profligate would laugh at it. But John Wilkes the philosopher will feel it and will love it.

  You have no objection to sitting up a little late. Perhaps you may come to me tonight. I hope at any rate you will dine with me tomorrow.

  Wilkes could not resist and they rendezvoused in Naples, from where they joined in the risky climb of Mount Vesuvius.

  Before he returned home, Boswell would add still another, and even more unlikely, character to his bouquet of captive celebrities. His Scots love of independence made him admire the romantic Corsican patriot Pasquale di Paoli (1725–1807) for his efforts to free his home island from the rule of Genoa in 1755, and then from France, to whom the Genoese had ceded the island. Rousseau gladly gave him an introduction to Paoli. To dispel suspicions that he was a spy or an assassin, he announced on his arrival from Rome, “I am come from seeing the ruins
of one brave and free people: I now see the rise of another.” Paoli embraced him and treasured him as a friend. When Paoli took refuge in England, Boswell helped secure him a handsome pension from the British government. Out of this trip, Boswell wrote An Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to that Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, published in London in 1768, soon after his return. The book was widely translated and brought fame to Boswell at the age of twenty-eight.

  In 1766 the Edinburgh life he returned to was a drab contrast to the world of Rousseau and Voltaire. Again he gratified his father by securing admission to the Faculty of Advocates, the Scots bar, preparing for a respectable legal career. For the next twenty years he would carry on a better-than-average law practice, which kept him in Edinburgh. Though his marriage to his cousin Margaret Montgomerie in 1769 disappointed his father by not adding substantially to the family estates, it provided him with a happy family life for a few years. Still the convivial Boswell interrupted the Edinburgh routine with occasional trips to London. After 1773, when he was elected to the Literary Club, he had a reason for regular visits. There Sir Joshua Reynolds presided and Samuel Johnson held court among figures like actor David Garrick, the philosopher-economist Adam Smith, the statesmen Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone, and the historian Edward Gibbon. The group dined together at a London tavern once a fortnight during meetings of Parliament. Boswell would come to town during the vacations of the Scots courts, but sometimes a whole year would pass without a London visit. In 1785, after his father, the laird of Auchinleck, had died and Boswell became his own man, he moved to London.

  There at the age of forty-five he tried to establish himself as an English barrister while pursuing his ambition for a seat in the House of Commons. Frustrated in both these efforts, he had to satisfy himself with the writing that would make him immortal but would not make him happy. He seemed never to realize the proportions of his achievement, and finally considered himself a failure. His last years in London found him seeking the solace of drink. In June 1793 he was mugged and robbed while he was drunk. This mishap, with the effects of lifelong dissipation in bed and with the bottle, brought on his death in 1795.