Birthday: James Boswell was literature's first great groupie

James Boswell (1740-1795)

Author, diarist, lawyer

Born to a chilly Scots judge and his equally distant wife, Jamie Boswell was torn, all his life, between the Calvinist rectitude expected of him and an unquenchable desire to be The Enlightenment’s first great fanboy.

He was very bright, but his intelligence tended to be canceled out by an unrelenting silly streak; the tension expressed itself, in his youth, through odd nervous disorders that cleared up once he got to university and- at least a little- out from under his father’s icy thumb.

He entered Edinburgh University at thirteen, and studied five years before transferring to the university at Glasgow. Already having discovered he was catnip to women, Boswell seems to have decided, at Glasgow, the thing to keep him on the straight and narrow was to convert to Catholicism and take holy orders. Emulating St. Augustine (“Lord make me chaste, but not yet”), Boswell hied himself to London for a last fling that was great fun until his funds ran out. Yanked back to Edinburgh by the Laird of Auchinleck, he was forced to sign away most of his inheritance in return for an annual allowance of a hundred pounds.

He passed his first set of law exams, and cut such a mark of distinction that his father doubled his allowance and let him return to London. Boswell, who had set his cap to meet and befriend all the great men of his time, contrived an introduction to Samuel Johnson on May 16, 1763, at a bookshop. Though finding Boswell- thirty years his junior- bumptious at first, Johnson warmed to the young man, and they corresponded frequently after Boswell sailed for Utrecht. There he continued his legal studies and amorous affairs with equal vigor, and there, he conjured his plan for a Grand Tour of Europe:

I shall make the tour of The Netherlands, from thence proceed to Germany, where I shall visit the Courts of Brunswick and Lüneburg, and about the end of August arrive at Berlin. I shall pass a month there. In the end of September I shall go to the Court of Baden- Durlach, from thence through Switzerland to Geneva. I shall visit Rousseau and Voltaire, and about the middle of November shall cross the Alps and get fairly into Italy. I shall there pass a delicious winter, and in April shall pass the Pyrenees and get into Spain, remain there a couple of months, and at last come to Paris.

The trip took him two years, including a lengthy side adventure to Corsica, where he became enamored of the cause of Corsican independence and became a lifelong friend of the rebel chief, General Paoli. But his main aim was collecting literary scalps, and he set his sights on the two French radicals, Rousseau and Voltaire.

Rousseau received the young man with all the courtesies, then found himself trapped in lengthy interviews with Boswell, who, fancying himself an intimate, increasingly treated Rousseau as a therapist, sending him a list of topics they would discuss in future meetings, and confessing his problems with his father, and an affair with a married woman in Scotland. Rousseau was, at times, oracular:

ROUSSEAU. ‘Do you like cats?’

BOSWELL. ‘No.’

ROUSSEAU. ‘I was sure of that. It is my test of character. There you have the despotic instinct of men. They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do.’

From his up-close and personal with Rousseau, Boswell next laid siege to Voltaire, then seventy. “Monsieur de Voltaire was sick and out of spirits this evening, yet I made him talk some time,” he wrote of one session. He moved on to further conquests, writing Rousseau to ask permission to correspond with the latter’s mistress, twenty years his elder: ‘I assure you that I have formed no scheme of abducting your housekeeper. I often form romantic plans, but never impossible ones.’

Thirteen months later, Boswell was in bed with Therese in a Paris roadhouse, beginning a two-week fling that ended when he delivered her to the Scottish philosopher David Hume- who had given Rousseau refuge earlier- in London.

Out of Boswell’s Excellent European Adventures came a book, An Account of Corsica: one of the first Grand Tour memoirs in English. It sold well; in London again, Boswell was reunited with Johnson. Over the coming decade he spent a month or so a year with Johnson, who called him “Bozzy” and overlooked his habit of invading Johnson’s private papers and copying things for the biography he was already planning (all told, Boswell and Johnson spent about 240 days together over a twenty-one year period; the American detective fiction novelist Lillian de la Tour managed to turn them into the 18th century Holmes and Watson in no less than thirty-three crime chronicles in her Dr Sam: Johnson, Detector series).

Back in Scotland, “Corsica” Boswell, as he fancied himself, passed his final exams and set up as a lawyer. He married a cousin in 1769 and had seven children with her in between his innumerable affairs, after each of which he would promise her he would never stray again.

Boswell’s legal career was a critical rather than a financial success; he tried moving his practice to London, with no success, He sought a seat in Parliament, but no one would back him.

Pulling himself together, in 1785 he published a well-received account of a trip to the Hebrides with Johnson. In 1791 came his Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, and the acclaim he had long sought. The Life was a new form of biography, filled with personal detail and keen psychological insight- not something his critics thought possible from a pudgy, jumped-up twit from Scotland. But once his great work was finished, he had nothing left to do. His last years were marked by a slow decline, exacerbated his his endless drinking and priapism (he was treated for venereal disease seventeen times), dying at the age of 55.

Fate seemed to have needed Boswell for one great task, and he performed it so well he lives on to this day: his surname has passed into the English language as a neologism (Boswell, Boswellia, Boswellic) for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes affectionately says of Dr. Watson, who narrates the tales, "I am lost without my Boswell."

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