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Reading Boswell
Sep. 19th, 2006 10:35 amAnother thing I aquired on my tour through England and Scotland was yet another volume of James Boswell’s journals. Which gave me all kind of crazy ideas (for example, Boswell meeting the Pirates of the Caribean characters would be a riot, and it might even fit with the very vague hints we get as to when the hell PotC is supposed to take place), and most of all made me want to do what things we’re enthusiastic about always do to us: spread the enthusiasm.
So, Boswell, James Boswell.. Who is he, and why should you bother reading his diaries? For starters and most obviously because they’re great fun and offer a look at the 18th century sans hindsight, 21st century glasses or censorship. Boswell was and is most famous because he wrote what is probably the most famous biography in the English language, the Life of Samuel Johnson; said biography had already managed to eclipse its subject’s work in the 19th century. People quoting Johnson were quoting him from the aphorisms he spouts in the Life, not from his own works. Johnson went from being one of the most famous writers of his day to being A Character; meanwhile, Boswell went from being Johnson’s Disreputable Sidekick (Macauly in the 19th century write a particularly vicious diatribe about what an unworthy, disgusting toadying fellow Boswell was and how the greatness of the Life came by sheer accident and certainly not due to any skill of Boswell’s) to The Literary Discovery (when his journals began to be edited, which started in the 1950s and ended in the 1990s; Boswell really wrote a lot of journals).
A lot of the charm of Boswell and his diaries lies in the contradictions. He was very observant (well, duh) and yet introspective; he could be enthusiastic as hell one minute and depressed in the next; he was a passionate Tory with a sneaking fondness for revolutions and rebels (hence was rooting for the Americans, saw Rousseau and Voltaire when he was visiting the Continent, which from the pov of both his father and Dr. Johnson, i.e. the men he revered most, was like visiting the devil), a lawyer who was never that successful because he invariably chose the cases no one else cared about, clients who hardly had any money – horse thieves, sheep thieves, drunken and unemployed veterans, conscripts who made it back to England from Australia and got caught – and yet was pro-slavery because he couldn’t see anything wrong with the system; a Scotsman proud of his heritage and simultaneously ashamed because everyone ridiculed Sots in those days; a man who wanted to be respected desperately and yet when things got boring invariably clowned around (once he imitated a cow in a theatre where the audience waited and waited for the curtain to rise); deeply in love with his wife and yet, the first three years of their marriage aside, unable to remain faithful to her; and so on, and so forth. Boswell describes figures of world history with the same detail and intensity he gives to descriptions of people we’d never heard about otherwise and who are insignificant to history, like his client John Reid (whom he saved from being hanged for stealing sheep the first time around but could not save the second time) or his children. (Boswell, who had a rather severe father, was himself a very enthusiastic one, and it amused but didn’t surprise me to find out in the Edinburgh journals that when his little daughter Veronica shocked him by declaring God didn’t exist, he did what one associates more with parents of the 20th than the 18th century – he consulted a guidebook. In vain, btw; it didn’t cover religious doubts. Boswell then didn’t reprimand Veronica but talked to her to find out how she got the idea.) Oh, and his sexual encounters and/or romances. One reason we’re lucky the journals didn’t get published before the 20th century – they would have been hopelessly cut otherwise, because of Boswell’s sex life.
And now I’m going to let the man speak for himself – and for some of his contemporaries:
( Of patriotism, sex, love, Shakespeare, polygamy, marriage and death )
So, Boswell, James Boswell.. Who is he, and why should you bother reading his diaries? For starters and most obviously because they’re great fun and offer a look at the 18th century sans hindsight, 21st century glasses or censorship. Boswell was and is most famous because he wrote what is probably the most famous biography in the English language, the Life of Samuel Johnson; said biography had already managed to eclipse its subject’s work in the 19th century. People quoting Johnson were quoting him from the aphorisms he spouts in the Life, not from his own works. Johnson went from being one of the most famous writers of his day to being A Character; meanwhile, Boswell went from being Johnson’s Disreputable Sidekick (Macauly in the 19th century write a particularly vicious diatribe about what an unworthy, disgusting toadying fellow Boswell was and how the greatness of the Life came by sheer accident and certainly not due to any skill of Boswell’s) to The Literary Discovery (when his journals began to be edited, which started in the 1950s and ended in the 1990s; Boswell really wrote a lot of journals).
A lot of the charm of Boswell and his diaries lies in the contradictions. He was very observant (well, duh) and yet introspective; he could be enthusiastic as hell one minute and depressed in the next; he was a passionate Tory with a sneaking fondness for revolutions and rebels (hence was rooting for the Americans, saw Rousseau and Voltaire when he was visiting the Continent, which from the pov of both his father and Dr. Johnson, i.e. the men he revered most, was like visiting the devil), a lawyer who was never that successful because he invariably chose the cases no one else cared about, clients who hardly had any money – horse thieves, sheep thieves, drunken and unemployed veterans, conscripts who made it back to England from Australia and got caught – and yet was pro-slavery because he couldn’t see anything wrong with the system; a Scotsman proud of his heritage and simultaneously ashamed because everyone ridiculed Sots in those days; a man who wanted to be respected desperately and yet when things got boring invariably clowned around (once he imitated a cow in a theatre where the audience waited and waited for the curtain to rise); deeply in love with his wife and yet, the first three years of their marriage aside, unable to remain faithful to her; and so on, and so forth. Boswell describes figures of world history with the same detail and intensity he gives to descriptions of people we’d never heard about otherwise and who are insignificant to history, like his client John Reid (whom he saved from being hanged for stealing sheep the first time around but could not save the second time) or his children. (Boswell, who had a rather severe father, was himself a very enthusiastic one, and it amused but didn’t surprise me to find out in the Edinburgh journals that when his little daughter Veronica shocked him by declaring God didn’t exist, he did what one associates more with parents of the 20th than the 18th century – he consulted a guidebook. In vain, btw; it didn’t cover religious doubts. Boswell then didn’t reprimand Veronica but talked to her to find out how she got the idea.) Oh, and his sexual encounters and/or romances. One reason we’re lucky the journals didn’t get published before the 20th century – they would have been hopelessly cut otherwise, because of Boswell’s sex life.
And now I’m going to let the man speak for himself – and for some of his contemporaries:
( Of patriotism, sex, love, Shakespeare, polygamy, marriage and death )
