MDDM: Boswell

[Doug Millison]

" Johnson died on Dec. 13, 1784. Boswell decided to
take his time in writing the Life but to publish his
journal of the Hebridean tour as a first installment.
In the spring of 1785 he went to London to prepare the
work for the press. The Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785) tops all
the others published later. It comes from the soundest
and happiest period of Boswell's life, the narrative
of the tour is interesting in itself, and it provides
us with 101 consecutive days with Johnson. The book
was a best-seller, but it provoked the scornful charge
of personal fatuity that has dogged Boswell's name
ever since. His intelligence was not really in
question. But he deliberately defied the basic
literary rule that no author who wishes respect as a
man may publish his own follies without suggesting
compensatory strengths of character. Boswell analyzed
and recorded his own vanity and weakness with the
objectivity of a historian, and in his Johnsonian
scenes he ruthlessly subordinated his own personality,
reporting the blows that Johnson occasionally gave him
without constantly reassuring the reader that he
understood the implications of what he had written. 

[...] The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. was published
in two volumes on May 16, 1791. Contemporary criticism
set the pattern of acclaim for the work and derision
for its author. Boswell took intense pleasure in his
literary fame but felt himself to be a failure. His
later years were prevailingly unhappy. His
eccentricities of manner seemed merely self-indulgent
in a man of 50 or more: people were afraid to talk
freely in his presence, fearing that their talk would
be reported, and his habit of getting drunk and noisy
at other people's tables (he was never a solitary
drinker) made him a difficult guest in any case. His
five children, however, loved him deeply, and he never
lost the solicitous affection of a few friends,
including his editor, Edmond Malone, who recognized
his worth and his need. He saw the second edition of
the Life through the press (July 1793) and was at work
on the third when he died in 1795. "

To cite this page:
"Boswell, James" Encyclopædia Britannica
<http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=16060>
[Accessed September 1, 2002]. 






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