A short life of the author
James Boswell wrote the greatest biography in the English language — the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), a book that created the modern art of biography and that has been read continuously for over two centuries as both a monument to its subject and a masterpiece of English prose. But Boswell was not merely Johnson’s faithful recorder: his private journals, discovered a century and a half after his death, revealed him as a diarist of extraordinary candour and a personality of irresistible complexity — a man who combined intellectual brilliance with emotional chaos, social ambition with sexual compulsion, and profound self-awareness with an absolute inability to reform.
The Laird’s Son
James Boswell was born in Edinburgh in 1740, the eldest son of Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, a judge of the Court of Session and a formidable representative of the Scottish Enlightenment’s austere rationalism. Boswell’s relationship with his father — cold, disapproving, and frequently hostile — was the central drama of his emotional life. He studied law at Edinburgh and Glasgow, was called to the bar, and practised as an advocate, but his real ambitions were literary and social.
He was ambitious, sociable, vain, warm-hearted, melancholic, and sexually incontinent to a degree that astonished even his contemporaries. His journals record an almost compulsive pursuit of women — prostitutes, actresses, married women, servants — combined with agonies of guilt, resolutions of reform, and immediate relapse. He drank too much, suffered from recurrent venereal disease, and was haunted by the fear of madness and death. He was also brilliant, observant, genuinely kind, and possessed of a social talent that gave him access to almost everyone of importance in eighteenth-century Europe.
The Meeting with Johnson
On 16 May 1763, in the back parlour of Thomas Davies’s bookshop in Covent Garden, Boswell met Samuel Johnson. The meeting — one of the most famous in literary history — was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Johnson’s death in 1784 and that produced the greatest biography in the language. Boswell was twenty-two; Johnson was fifty-three. The younger man’s adoration of the older, and Johnson’s gruff but genuine affection for “Bozzy,” is one of the great literary relationships.
The Grand Tour and Corsica
Before devoting himself to Johnson, Boswell embarked on a Grand Tour (1763–1766) that included an audience with Rousseau, a friendship with Voltaire, and a visit to Corsica, where he befriended the independence leader Pasquale Paoli. An Account of Corsica (1768) was Boswell’s first book and an immediate success — he was briefly famous as “Corsica Boswell.”
The Life of Johnson
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) is 1,500 pages long and covers Johnson’s life from birth to death with a thoroughness and a vividness that had no precedent in English biography. Boswell’s method was revolutionary: he recorded Johnson’s conversation as close to verbatim as his memory and his notes allowed, preserving the texture of Johnson’s talk — his wit, his prejudices, his sudden gentleness, his devastating put-downs — with a fidelity that makes the reader feel present in the room.
The book is not merely a record of conversation. Boswell was a skilled narrative artist who shaped his material with care, arranging scenes for dramatic effect, building to climaxes, and creating a portrait that is at once monumental and intimate. His Johnson is the most fully realised character in English nonfiction — a figure of Shakespearean complexity who is simultaneously a great moralist and a deeply troubled human being.
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785) records the famous journey that Boswell and Johnson made through Scotland in 1773. It is the liveliest and most readable of Boswell’s published works — a travel book, a comedy of manners (the metropolitan Johnson confronting Highland hospitality), and a rehearsal for the Life.
The Journals
The discovery of Boswell’s private journals at Malahide Castle, near Dublin, beginning in 1920 (with further finds in the 1930s and 1940s), was one of the great literary discoveries of the twentieth century. The journals, published by Yale University Press in multiple volumes beginning with Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763 (1950, edited by Frederick Pottle), revealed a diarist of extraordinary psychological insight and unflinching self-examination.
Collecting Boswell
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Henry Baldwin for Charles Dilly, London, 1791, 2 volumes, quarto) in first edition is one of the most important English books of the eighteenth century. The first edition exists in several states; bibliographical details are complex. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (Dilly, 1785) in first edition is also highly collected. The Yale editions of the journals are the standard scholarly texts.