133. Boswell’s Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides, ed. F. A. Pottle and C. H. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1936), p. 300. The Life of Johnson was not Boswell’s sole biographical project even after 1773. In 1778 he expressed to Lord Kames his ‘determination’ to write Kames’s life, and to assume the literary character of Plutarch (The Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, ed. Geoffrey Scott et al., 18 vols. (Mount Vernon, NY: W. E. Rudge, 1928–34), XV, 267). Biography was to some extent therapy for Boswell, as his essay ‘On Hypochondria’ suggests: ‘I have generally found the reading of lives do me most good, by withdrawing my attention from myself to others, and entertaining me in the most satisfactory manner with real incidents in the varied course of human existence. I look upon the Biographia Britannica with that kind of grateful regard with which one who has been recovered from painful indisposition by their medicinal springs beholds Bath, Bristol, or Tunbridge’ (Bailey, ed., Boswell’s Column, p. 51).
134. Boswell’s Journal of A Tour, p. 300, n. 8.
135. Piozzi, Anecdotes, pp. 31-3.
136. Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), p. 525.
137. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 358.
138. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 222–3. Note the Johnsonian principle, as expressed in a letter of 27 June 1758 to Bennet Langton: ‘It is a rule never to be forgotten, that whatever strikes strongly, should be described while thefirst impression remains fresh upon the mind’ (ibid., p. 180). However, note that when Johnson tested Boswell’s ‘way of taking notes’ by reading ‘slowly and distinctly’ a passage from Robertson’s History of America, it emerged that Boswell had recorded the passage ‘very imperfectly’ (ibid., pp. 668–9). On Boswell’s method, see Geoffrey Scott, ‘The Making of the Life of Johnson as Shown in Boswell’s First Notes’, in James L. Clifford, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 27–39.
139. Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 3 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1832), II, 194.
140. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 115, n. 5. To this Boswell replied that Johnson ‘was at all times flattered by my preserving what fell from his mind when shaken by conversation’ – a metaphor also present in the passage in the Life where Boswell records Johnson’s pleasure, on looking at Boswell’s journal, at finding there ‘so much of the fruit of his mind preserved’ (ibid., p. 114; Life of Johnson, below, p. 664).
141. Boswell for the Defence, p. 179.
142. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 373–4.
143. A recurrent subject in the Life is that of literary forgery: cf. ibid., pp. 87, 192–3. As well as reflecting light on the process which produced the Life itself, literary forgery brings together the eighteenth-century fondness for imposture and the contemporary patchiness of solid knowledge which gave that imposture scope to operate – on both of which Johnson comments in the Life (ibid., p. 220 (fondness for imposture) and 307 (patchiness of knowledge)). On the general subject of literary forgery in the eighteenth century, see Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
144. On the embroidery of memory in Boswell, consider F. A. Pottle’s judgement: ‘One also frequently finds Boswell adding sentences and paragraphs to portions of fully written journal. Some of these additions seem to be authentic but undated recollections for which he had to find plausible points of attachment; others, I have no doubt, are a second crop of memory, gathered as he relived the matter he had copied’ (F. A. Pottle, ‘The Life of Johnson: Art and Authenticity’, in James L. Clifford, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 69.
145. Life of Johnson, below, p. 244.
146. Ibid., p. 539.
147. Ibid., pp. 346–7.
148. Ibid., p. 5.
149. Ibid., p. 9.
150. Ibid., p. 892. Compare also the inclusion of Steevens’s reminiscences: ibid., pp. 942–3.
151. Ibid., pp. 763–81, 320–31. For the influx of new material into the Life after the publication of the first edition, see Malone’s comments at the beginning of the ‘Advertisement’ to the third edition: ibid., p. 9.
152. ‘… there is here an accumulation of intelligence from various points, by which his character is more fully understood and illustrated’ (ibid., p. 21).
153. Ibid., p. 818.
154. For an example of how densely juxtaposed these different forms of writing can be in the Life, see ibid., p. 268. The best account of Boswell’s artistry of incorporation, particularly in respect of the inclusion of letters, which has provoked some scholarly and critical controversy, is to be found in Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 113–36.
155. ‘Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved. As it is, I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 21).
156. Ibid., p. 19.
157. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest occurrence of the word ‘autobiography’ in the Monthly Review for 1797.
158. Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. Jackson Bate et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 262. Rambler 60 (1750), Johnson’s other important statement about the principles and practice of biography, concludes with compatible thoughts about the temptation to falsehood in lives written by someone other than the subject. Contrast, however, another of Johnson’s opinions about who might best write a man’s life, delivered in conversation with Thomas Warton in 1776: ‘It [biography] is rarely well executed. They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 502).
159. The subject of ghosts is an important and recurrent one in the Life: cf. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 712–13 (the ghost of Ford), 683-4 and 736 (a ghost at Newcastle), 216 and 667 (the Cock-Lane Ghost). Boswell attributed Johnson’s preparedness to entertain the possibility of ghosts to his ‘opposition to the groveling belief of materialism’ which ‘led him to a love of such mysterious dispositions’ (ibid., p. 340). But biography itself makes a revenant of its subject.
160. The Poems of Mr. Gray, with Memoirs Prefixed, ed. William Mason (1775). For the misleadingness of this Boswellian identification of his model, see Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 115–16. Nevertheless, Boswell praised Mason to his friend Temple in February 1788: ‘Mason’s Life of Gray is excellent, because it is interspersed with Letters which shew us the Man’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 208).
161. Life of Johnson, below, p. 21. The quotation is taken from Alexander Pope’s ‘Prologue’ to Addison’s Cato (1713). The notion of writing Johnson’s life ‘in scenes’ seems first to have occurred to Boswell in 1780, and to have been touched on again in a letter to Thomas Percy of 1788: see Redford, Designing the Life, p. 84. The theatrical template for the Life shows the preferences of the biographer triumphing over those of the subject. Johnson’s distaste for the theatre is evident in his remark to Daniel Astle that ‘it would afford him more entertainment to sit up to the chin in water for an hour than be obliged to listen to the whining, daggle-tail Cibber, during the tedious representation of a fulsome tragedy’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 143). Boswell’s contrasting enthusiasm for the theatre is clear from his journal, and also from the three essays ‘On the Profession of a Player’ which he contributed to the London Magazine in 1770 (On the Profession of a Player: Three Essays by James Boswell, Reprinted from ‘The London Magazine’ for August, September, October, 1770 (London: Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1929)).
162. Life of Johnson, below, p. 23.
163. ‘Si j’etais ecrivain, et mort, comme j’aimerais que ma vie se reduisit, par les soins d’un biographe amical et desinvolte, à quelques details, à quelques gouts, à quelqu
es inflexions, disons: des “biographemes”…’ Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Tel Quel, 1971), p. 14.
164. Life of Johnson, below, p. 25.
165. Ibid., p. 230. This Johnsonian enthusiasm for chemistry was noted also by William Bowles (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 195).
166. Life of Johnson, below, p. 269.
167. Ibid., pp. 439, 876. Might he have used it to light fires (a purpose for which dried orange peel is well suited)?
168. Ibid., p. 530. Note, in this connection, William Adams’s recollection that Johnson at one stage in his life considered ‘becoming an Advocate in Doctor’s Commons’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 136).
169. Life of Johnson, below, p. 657.
170. Ibid., pp. 986-8.
171. Ibid., pp. 628, 617, 784, 892, 872, 994, 976-9, 992.
172. Ibid., p. 29.
Appendix 2
1. For the discovery of the manuscript, see David Buchanan, The Treasure of Auchinleck: The Story of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974) and Frederick Pottle, Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).
2. James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript. In Four Volumes. Volume I: 1709—1765, ed. Marshall Waingrow (Edinburgh, New Haven and London: Edinburgh University Press and Yale University Press, 1994). James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript. In Four Volumes. Volume II: 1766–1776, ed. Bruce Redford with Elizabeth Goldring (Edinburgh, New Haven and London: Edinburgh University Press and Yale University Press, 1998).
Notes to Text
Shakespeare references are to the Oxford/Norton edition.
1. noctes ccenceque Deum: ‘Nights and suppers of the gods’ – Horace, Satires, II.vii.85.
2. finibus Atticis… Sic te Diva potens Cypri: ‘To the Attic shore’… ‘So guide thee the goddess queen of Cyprus’ (i.e. Venus) – Horace, Odes, I.iii.5, 1.
3. Quid virtus… Ulyssen: ‘Of the power of virtue and of wisdom he has given us a profitable example in Ulysses’ – Horace, Epistles, I.ii.17.
4. out of the abundance of the heart: Matthew 12:34; and cf. Luke 6:45.
5. An honourable and reverend friend: Probably William Stuart.
6. crotchets: Square brackets.
7. the Militia Bill: The initial success of the Jacobite forces in 1745 and the need to employ Hessian and Hanoverian mercenaries in 1756 had resulted in popular agitation for a militia. On 12 March 1756 a bill to establish a militia was introduced into and passed the Commons, but on 24 May it was rejected by the Lords after an impressive speech by Lord Hardwicke. In 1757, when a French invasion was seriously apprehended, a militia was established, and it remained in existence until 23 December 1762.
8. Treaties with… the Landgrave of Hesse Cassel: The evident inadequacy of British ground troops had resulted in a series of agreements with Russia and Hesse for the supply of troops. On 11 December 1742 a treaty of mutual assistance had been agreed with Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia, whereby Russia agreed to supply 12,000 troops for the protection of Hanover; on 18 June 1755 the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel had agreed to supply 8,000 troops in return for a payment of £54,000; and in September 1755 a new treaty had been signed with Russia, whereby 40,000 Russian troops were to be held in readiness to protect Hanover, in return for a payment of £100,000. These measures were violently attacked in the House of Commons by Pitt, and in the House of Lords by his ally, and brother-in-law, Richard Grenville, Lord Temple.
9. Admiral Byng: John Byng (1704–57), Admiral of the Red, was court-martialled and executed by firing squad on 14 March for not doing his utmost to relieve the besieged British garrison in Port Mahon in Minorca. His trial and its revelations dominated public opinion in the closing weeks of 1756 and the early months of 1757. In Candide (1759) Voltaire famously said that Byng had been executed ‘pour encourager les autres’ (‘to put heart in the others’) (ch. 23).
10. Expedition to Rochefort: In September 1757 Sir Edward Hawke had led an expedition against the important French arms depot of Rochefort, on the western coast. The nearby island of Aix was temporarily occupied, but the expedition returned home without having made an attempt on its principal target, to be greeted with derision and indignation.
11. Blackfriars Bridge: The project for the construction of a bridge at Black-friars had been discussed for many years by the City of London, a plan finally being accepted in 1760 (Nicolas Tindal, The Continuation of Mr. Rapin’s History of England, vol. XXI (1759), p. 581; Tobias Smollett, Continuation of the Complete History of England, vol. III (1765), p. 387). Construction of the first pier beganinJune 1761, thefirst stonehavingbeen laid by Sir Robert Ladbrooke on 23 May (General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, xii (1764), 682). The stonework of the sixth pier was completed inSeptember 1765(TheAnnual Register for the Year1765(1766), p.127), and the great arch was finally openedon1October 1765 (Thomas Salmon, A New Geographical and Historical Grammar (1766), p. 356).
12. the French Prisoners: These French soldiers had been taken prisoner in the course of the Seven Years War (1756–63), and were being held at Knowle, near Bristol, where their plight had stimulated widespread concern. The common people made generous contributions of money and clothing to relieve them.
13. the Cock-Lane Ghost: A celebrated imposture which in 1762 was widely believed in London. A man named Parsons had persuaded his daughter to act the part of a ghost in order to persecute a man who had sued him for debt. See the London Magazine, xxxi (1762), 50–52, 103, 112, 151– 3, 258–9, 395 and xxxii (1763), 102 and 164. Johnson’s detection of the fraud was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxii (1762), 81; cf. also xxxii, 43 and xxxiii (1763), 144.
14. Falkland’s Islands: In June 1770 the Falkland Islands, a small archipelago off the south-eastern coast of Argentina, were seized by the Spanish, in retaliation for British operations against their settlements in Havana and Manila during the Seven Years War. After firm diplomatic representations from Britain the Spanish eventually withdrew. Johnson wrote in support of the diplomatic line taken by Lord North, and against those who clamoured for a military response, whom he bitterly reproached as men without honour hoping to profit from the dangers and hardships suffered by others.
15. Resolutions… of the American Congress: The first session of the American Continental Congress had convened in Philadelphia on 5 September 1774, and had set itself to formulate the principles on which the thirteen colonies would take their stand against the measures for their government proposed by George III and his prime minister Lord North. It was to these so-called ‘Declarations of Rights’ that Johnson was invited by Lord North’s ministry to compose a reply, published in 1775 as Taxation No Tyranny.
16. After my death… Griffith: Henry VIII, IV.ii.69–72.
17. a lady… with him: Mrs Thrale.
18. a superannuated lord and lady: William, 3rd Earl of Jersey, and his wife.
19. N.S., 1709: N.S. stands for ‘New Style’, and refers to the consequences of the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. In England and Scotland the Gregorian calendar was established by the Act 24 Geo. II. c. 23 (1751), which provided that the year 1752 and all future years should begin on 1 January instead of 25 March, that the day after 2 September 1752 should be reckoned as 14 September, and that the reformed rule for leap year should in future be adopted. Ireland followed in 1788.
20. the unfortunate house of Stuart: The Stuarts were ‘unfortunate’ because James II had either abdicated or (depending on your point of view) been driven from the throne in 1688.
21. kennel: The surface drain of a street; a gutter (OED).
22. scrophula, or king’s evil: Scrophula, or scrofula, is a constitutional disease characterized by chronic enlargement and degeneration of the lymphatic glands. In England and France it was formerly supposed to be curable by the king’s (or queen’s) touch. The practice of touching for the ‘king’s evil’ (as it was also known) continued from the time of Ed
ward the Confessor to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. The office for the ceremony has not been printed in the Prayer Book since 1719 (OED).
23. Rod… thy duty: Cf. 2 Henry VI, IV.ix.64: ‘Sword, I will hallow thee for this thy deed.’
24. Pastoral I: Virgil, Eclogues, i (Virgil’s Eclogues were commonly referred to as ‘Pastorals’ in the eighteenth century).
25. The Distressed Mother: The Distressed Mother (1712), by Ambrose Philips, is modelled very closely on Racine’s Andromaque. It was a great success when first performed, and was lavishly praised by Steele in The Spectator, 290 (1 February 1712).
26. that gentleman: Probably Andrew Corbet.
27. Ex alieno… versificator: ‘A poet by another’s genius, merely a versifier by his own’ – J. C. Scaliger, Poetices, bk VI, ch. 4 (1561), p. 308.
28. the tuneful Nine: The nine Muses, in Greek mythology the daughters of Mnemosyne, and goddesses of literature and the arts.
29. one of the chapters of his Rasselas: Chapter 44, ‘The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination’.
30. Igneus… origo: ‘To these seeds a flame-like vigour belongs, and a divine origin’ – Virgil, Aeneid, vi.730.
31. ‘The Whole Duty of Man’: Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man (1658), an enormously popular work of practical morality and religion, many times reprinted for over a century after its first publication.
32. De veritate Religionis: ‘Of the Truth of Religion’; books so entitled were composed by Hugo Grotius (Leyden, 1627), Philip van Limborch (Gouda, 1687), and Philippe du Plessis Mornay (Antwerp, 1583).
33. Stet pro ratione voluntas: ‘Let my desires be reason enough’ – Juvenal, Satires, vi.223.
34. what… to be saved: Cf. Acts 16:30.
35. somebody: Possibly William Vyse.
36. res angusta domi: ‘Financial constraint at home’ – Juvenal, Satires, iii.164.
37. petites morales: Minor social conventions or morals; the ethics of everyday life (OED).
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