Index
Introduction
Boyhood (1740 - 1753)
University Life(1753 - 1759)
The Lure of London (1760 - 1763)
Bibliography
The Boswell papers
Unlike his father, or son, Alexander was very successful in his field and whilst still in his forties (1754/55), was appointed to the highest civil and criminal courts in Scotland, whence he acquired the right to be addressed as 'My Lord', although he was never actually part of the nobility. He was excessively proud of his status, and in 1762 built the fine, neo-classical Auchinleck House, from where he presided over and significantly improved the family estate.
James' mother, Euphemia Erskine, could not have been more different. Her ancestors were descendents of the sixteenth century Earl of Mar enabling James to delightedly claim kinship with both Bonnie Prince Charlie and George III, as well as Robert the Bruce. (Indeed, as Tinker points out, it was Johnson who acquired social distinction from Boswell, not the other way round!) She was born when her father was nearly sixty, and her mother died when she was two. She was very delicate and might almost be described as 'fey'. James loved her dearly in his childhood, turning to her for comfort when the strictness of his father and his upbringing depressed or frightened him.
James was born, almost certainly in the family house in Blair's Land, Parliament Close, in Edinburgh on 29 October 1740.
When he was five, Boswell went to James Mundell's private school in the West Bow. Although this was, for its time, an advanced school, teaching English, writing and arithmetic as well as the customary Latin, Boswell disliked his time there. He began to exhibit those signs of depression and lassitude which had affected generations of his family (and in two of his uncles and his younger brother came close to lunacy) and were to blight parts of his life so devastatingly. He also developed alarming physical symptoms, associated with night fears and extreme timidity.
From the age of eight, therefore, until he went to University he was taken out of school and privately tutored; first by Mr. John Dunn and later, and less successfully, by Mr. Fergusson. The former introduced him to the delights of literature, including the Spectator essays, and encouraged him to believe that religion could be a pleasant, rather than a terrifying, experience. The latter was present during, if he did not actually contribute to, the serious psychosomatic and physical illness which affected Boswell in 1752.
To help combat the symptoms, he was sent to the little village of Moffat, in the beautiful Border country of northern Dumfriesshire. This was his first real experience of 'society' and the company and amusements, more than the waters, effected a complete and permanent physical cure as well as alleviating his melancholia. It may not have been best for his future prospects that he learned so early that travel and entertainment were his best medicine.
The course in Logic was really one in what we would now call comparative philosophy, and was taken by John Stephenson, who had an excellent reputation. "No man", said one of his pupils, "ever held a Professor's chair in the University of Edinburgh who had the honour of training up so many young men to the love of letters." This included the best of the modern English and French critics but on the debit side, his teachings in metaphysics later shook the naive, though sincere, foundations of Boswell's faith and started those 'doubts' which later were to haunt him so desperately during his bouts of melancholy, and on occasion caused exasperation in even the closest of his friends.
This early acquaintance with such writers as Addison and Locke, coupled with his extraordinarily retentive memory, meant that, from his first letters home in 1754, he had an easy way with writing the literary English which many of his famous countrymen found so difficult. It shows, too, when he writes, from 1758 onwards, to the two close friends he made at University in 1755.
He probably met both John Johnston, the Scots Laird of Grange, and the Englishman from Berwick-on-Tweed, William Johnson Temple, in Robert Hunter's Greek class, where none of them learned much Greek. Johnston, of whom virtually nothing is known, was probably at least ten years older than Boswell, shared his love of Scottish history and his almost Jacobite Toryism, and proved over the years a loyal and affectionate friend.
Temple, himself later a clergyman, was the grandfather and great-grandfather of Archbishops of Canterbury and nearly the same age as Boswell. Later they drew apart both physically and temperamentally but they continued to correspond frequently and with great intimacy for the rest of their lives. Indeed it was the chance discovery in Boulogne in the 1850s of some of Boswell's letters to Temple which began to open a window onto the real man hidden behind the writer of the great 'Life of Johnson', a man who is now, to many of us, and thanks to the extraordinary efforts of his champions at Yale University, at least as fascinating as his august subject.
When they first met, however, they were very close, and spent hours together roaming through Edinburgh and its environs, and sharing their ambitions and love of literature. It was at this time, too, that Temple, who was a member of the Church of England, introduced his friend to that order's benevolent and optimistic view of Christianity, far from the hellfire and foreboding of his childhood Presbyterianism.
This frank and highly self-aware assessment was given by Boswell to Sir David Dalrymple, one of two important men he met around 1758. Sir David was thirty-two and a lawyer, but had been to Eton and was well-connected with London literary circles. The other was Lord Somerville, nearly sixty, of ancient lineage. He had held a commission in the Dragoons, had known Pope and Allan Ramsay and at this time was, through his direct efforts, enabling a thriving theatre troup to work in Edinburgh in spite of the stringent legal and moral opposition to 'players' and other beggars and vagabonds.
Once again, as with John Johnston, we see Boswell attracted, and attractive, to older men, and this had also been the case in the summer of the previous year when he had again gone to Moffat suffering from melancholy and depression. As already mentioned, this had been brought on in part by his studies in logic and metaphysics with John Stevenson. These produced in him a horror and fear of his inevitable dissolution, and a confusion as to his freedom of action, which is hard for us to understand but was a theme of his conversations with nearly all his acquaintances for the rest of his life.
He became interested in Methodism but in Moffat came under the influence of an extraordinary character called John Williamson, who had been a sheep farmer but was now wandering the countryside looking for valuable minerals and preaching the virtues of the transmigration of souls and vegetarianism. Boswell seems to have joined him for a period and whether as a result of this or simply through the passing of time his mood and health improved.
The other side of his character had been at the fore in 1755 when he came close - how close is not known - to running away with the Highland troops who were going to fight in America, and was prevalent in the summer of 1758, assisted by the fact that for the first time his family had left him in Edinburgh when they returned to Auchinleck. He fell in love with an 18-year old heiress who rejected him as she had already rejected Dalrymple; he began writing in earnest and had his first verses, entitled An Evening Walk in the Abbey-Church of Holyroodhouse, published in the Scots Magazine; and he began to associate with actors and actresses, including the celebrated West Digges, handsome, profligate, of good family and probably the first of many men upon whom Boswell consciously tried to model himself; for, as Tinker points out, it was from this time on that he developed the confident, bustling public persona which is reflected in his published writings and the accounts written about him by others, and which contrasts so interestingly with the very different person revealed in his private journals and correspondence.
On Saturday 22 March 1760 Temple wrote from Trinity Hall Cambridge
What did happen? In October 1758 he had settled down to his law studies and judging from his account of his time to Temple in December 1759 was working hard.
But in the spring of 1759, when once again he was left alone in town, he became more thoroughly involved than ever with society in general and the theatrical milieu in particular. He fell in love with a widowed actress called Mrs. Cowper, a fact which quickly became known to both Johnston and Temple, and in August was admitted to the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge of Freemasons, probably under the sponsorship of his uncle Dr. John Boswell. Mrs. Cowper was a Catholic and Boswell began to read widely on Catholicism. As a result of one or possibly all of these developments his father abruptly informed him just before the new term began in September 1759 that he would not be returning to Edinburgh but going to Glasgow.
In academic terms this was a change for the better. Unlike Edinburgh, the university in Glasgow was situated in a proper set of handsome buildings with accommodation and refectory which were used by many of the professors and students. More importantly many of the teaching staff were superior, the jewel in the crown being Adam Smith who had recently been appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy and whose lectures during Boswell's first year formed the basis of both The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published the same year and The Wealth of Nations which came out in 1776.
Whatever Boswell's faults, he knew a great mind when he came across it.
For his part, Smith referred to Boswell in a letter now lost as having a "happy facility of manners", a remark which the recipient treasured and often repeated.
Socially, however, things were very different, as Glasgow was almost entirely a commercial town and, crucially, didn't have a theatre. Possibly as a way of keeping his obsessions in this field fresh, therefore, Boswell had published in February 1760 his first known book, a fifty page pamphlet entitled A View of the Edinburgh Theatre during the Summer Season, 1759 which collected together the reviews and articles which had appeared in The Edinburgh Chronicle during June and July the previous year, many of which praised Mrs. Cowper extravagantly and damned other actors and actresses with equal enthusiasm.
All this time a crisis was building in his life of which, uncharacteristically, he did not share the details with any of his customary confidants and the details of which are in part conjecture. Since being introduced to Catholicism by Mrs. Cowper he had been reading widely on the subject, encouraged by the good lady's priest, a Jesuit called Father Duguid. He had continued his studies, to his father's alarm, at Auchinleck during the previous summer and this may have been one more reason behind the decision to move him to Glasgow, where there was no real Catholic presence.
Nevertheless, he continued his studies (including Bossuet, whose works converted Edward Gibbon) and in February 1760 wrote to his father that he proposed to become a Roman Catholic and possible even a monk or priest. Although this was still in law a treasonable act, extreme persecution of Catholics was a thing of the past. But such a conversion would have barred Boswell from the law, the Army and, most importantly, inheritance of the Auchinleck name and property. Not surprisingly, therefore, his father was set on avoiding such a thing and demanded his presence in Edinburgh. The emotional stress of Boswell's situation coupled with his customary spontaneity of action and, one suspects, early manifestations of his consuming desire to see the centre of all literary and social activity, led to the action which we saw earlier caused Temple such astonishment - he 'left Scotland abruptly and came up to London in an odd enough way', going to Moffat on the night of 1 March, to Carlisle the next day and then the three hundred miles to London on horseback by the Wednesday, putting up first at the Lemon Tree inn in Haymarket and then at the house of a Roman Catholic wigmaker called Egan. A few days later he took mass at the Bavarian Chapel near Golden Chapel and was 'united to the grand and only true church'.
His father, once he knew where Boswell was, either from good sense or pressure of work, did not rush after him but through relatives and colleagues in London got Alexander Montgomerie, the tenth Earl of Eglington, to find his son. He did so, and moved him first into excellent lodgings and then into his own house. In Boswell's own words
Eglington was a man of great talents, having been an innovative agriculturalist in Ayrshire, a bachelor and, as one of the Scottish peers in the House of Lords, moved in the highest social circles. He certainly introduced the still teenage Boswell to a style and range of persons and experiences which had an even greater impact than that first brush with 'society' at Moffat. He was taken to the spring races at Newmarket, an experience which was immediately versified as 'The Cub at Newmarket'; he was introduced to the heir to the throne, his Royal Highness Edward Augustus, the Duke of York, who was only a year and a half older than him but already an accomplished rake; he met Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy was taking London by storm, and composed a long fan letter in verse to him.
Boswell had found his place and it was London. Although he seems to have left Catholicism as quickly as he entered it he retained many of its beliefs for his whole life and Christianity, as with so many in this age of the Enlightenment, was a constant backdrop to his life and thoughts, however dissipated or extreme they might be. But for now, pleasure was his focus and London was where it could be found. Eglington, probably without realising what he was unleashing, "pointed out to me a most agreeable way of life, which was to be an officer of the Guards; indeed the only real employment that I ever liked; and you promised to use all your interest for me."
But when he wrote and asked his father to obtain him a commission in a regiment of Foot Guards stationed near London it was too much. Even so, the notoriously strict Lord was still willing to be kind. He came down to London to try, with the help of the Duke of Argyll, who had served under Marlborough and was now Lord Justice General, to persuade his son to change his mind and return to his studies in Scotland. Assisted perhaps by his first taste of "that distemper with which Venus, when cross, takes it into her head to plague her votaries" Boswell agreed. They left London on 28 May and returned to Scotland via Cambridge where they called on Temple.
It would be well over two years before Boswell returned to London. He was deeply frustrated; a year after his return to Scotland he was still able to write to Temple in the following tone:
Boswell's resolution to avoid 'the mansions of gross Sensuality' was undoubtedly in part because his second bout of venereal disease was a serious one, lasting about four months, but it was also because his uncharacteristically discreet notes and journal suggest he was finding more legitimate outlets for his sexual and romantic energies. As well as flirting with the young ladies in his social circle he was engaged simultaneously in at least four affairs. One, which might actually have been a resumption, was with the actress wife of his erstwhile friend from his theatrical days in Edinburgh, James Love. Although old enough to be his mother, she was clearly very fond of him, but he used her as a reliable alternative when his other amours were not going smoothly.
Pottle guesses that the woman referred to only as 'A____' was another actress called Mrs. Brooke, "a very beautiful young woman" who was estranged from her husband and was playing in Edinburgh in 1761/62. The third, and most intriguing, was almost certainly Jean Home, only daughter of Lord and Lady Kames. Kames was a colleague of Boswell's father on the bench, and although they could not be described as friends, he and James were together a good deal and his background and personality enabled him to understand the younger man better, and treat him more sympathetically, than Lord Auchinleck, in spite of the fact that he really loved his sons, could manage. Jean would therefore have known Boswell well, and if his journal entries have been interpreted correctly, gave herself to him in December 1761, when she was not only still under seventeen but had married Patrick Heron a mere month or so earlier. Even if Boswell was her first extra-marital affair he wasn't the last and Heron divorced her in 1772. Ten years later, Boswell had to sit and listen to Lady Kames explaining her daughter's unfortunate history. He recorded
Between the spring and autumn of 1762, Boswell's life went through a number of dramatic changes. First he was shocked to hear his father talk of disinheriting him. Whether this was truth or bluff is unknown, but certainly Boswell's recent behaviour, and especially his obsessions with London, the military life and publicity had driven Auchinleck to conclude that the estate was unlikely to be save in his hands. The results of this decision were, however, mixed. On the one hand Boswell had to sign a deeply humiliating letter which effectively removed control of the estate from him when he came into his inheritance; on the other he was given a guaranteed allowance of £100 a year. Further arguments followed, but by the end of March father and son had agreed that, if the latter would go to Auchinleck and complete his law studies the former would support him in his continuing attempt to join the Guards.
He set out in early April and later that month wrote to Erskine that he has
In fact, it is likely that the cause was all too obvious. Although the dating is uncertain it seems probable that in late May Eglington had written explaining that Boswell might have to consider taking a commission elsewhere than in the Guards, and possibly overseas. The reply to this was clearly so unenthusiastic that Eglington washed his hands of the matter, thus effectively dashing any hopes of a splendid military life.
In June he travelled to Edinburgh. He had discovered that Peggy Doig was pregnant and discussed this and many other matters with a fellow Mason, Dr. Cairnie. Late in July the Doctor helped him deal with the local kirk over the matter by paying a fine. While he was there at dinner with Lord Kames, an invitation came from Eglington, who had just arrived in Edinburgh, asking him to come and see him. He put it off to the next day, an admission to himself that one avenue of his life had closed. On 30 July he took and passed the private examination in Civil Law, going through it "easily and with applause". It is worth noting, counter to those from his own times to the present day who believed Boswell to be a dunce, that his father told him that when he applied himself he showed as much genius for the law as anyone he had ever known. He seems to have taken advantage of this complaisance to once more ask permission for a journey to London and, finally, got agreement.
In August he writes to Johnston from "a neat elegant Apartment" in the new house which his father had built at Auchinleck (although Johnson preferred the old one). He describes the trip he will be taking round southern Scotland in early September. In this letter he also mentions William McQuhae, who had once been tutor to him and his brother and was now a close friend. He, with Johnston, was to be the recipient of a significant document. Begun on 14 September 1762, the day he left Auchinleck for Kirroughtrie, it was headed 'Journal of My Jaunt, Harvest 1762'. It was the beginning of one of the largest, longest and most fascinating sets of journals in the history of English literature. This particular journal would be kept uninterrupted until at least the end of January 1765, although this first portion only covered the period to 14 November 1762 and has, unfortunately, only been published in a private edition and as a supplement to the de luxe edition of the 'London Journal'. But the whole series of journals covered a major portion of his life and filled more than 8,000 manuscript pages. Boswell seems to have used them as a way of considering and validating his life. "I should live no more than I can record," he wrote in March 1776, "as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in. There is a waste of good if it be not preserved."
This page hosted by "I must, however, own to you that I have at bottom a melancholy cast; which dissipation relieves by making me thoughtless, and therefore, an easier, though a more contemptible animal. I dread the return of this malady. I am always apprehensive of it."
"My Dear Boswell, To find you are in London surprises me very much. What can have happened to you? I hope you have not acted imprudently............."
"From 9 to 10, I attend the law class, from 10 to 11, the Astronomy, from 11 to 1, study at home, and from 1 to 2, attend a college upon Roman Antiquities, The afternoon and Evening, I likewise spend in study, I never walk except upon Saturdays."
"My greatest inducement for coming hither, was to hear Mr. Smith's lectures which are truly excellent. His Sentiments are striking, profound and beautifull, the method in which they are arranged clear, accurate and orderly, his language correct perspicuous and elegantly phrased."
The Lure of London (1760 - 1763)
But, characteristically, Boswell did not restrict himself to religious experiences. He had also sought out a fellow Scot and 'man of letters' Samuel Derrick who introduced him to sensations of a much different kind. In his journal for 13 March 1763 he remembers
"Southampton Street and [ ] the house in which I first paid my addresses to the Paphian Queen, where I first experienced the melting and transporting rites of Love."
His 'first London love' was Miss Sally Forrester, for whom he retained an affection and who he sought out again when next in London.
"And you brought me right. You pulled me out of the mire, washed me and cleaned me and made me fit to be seen."
A different estimate is given by Pottle who says "Eglington rescued Boswell from religious error by making him a libertine, in every sense of the word."
"But, consider my particular situation. A young fellow whose happiness was allways centred in London. Who had at last got there; and had begun to taste it's delights-Who had got his mind filled with the most gay ideas-getting into the Guards being about Court-enjoying the happiness of the Beau Monde & the Company of men of Genius: in short, every thing that he could wish. Consider this poor fellow hauled away to the Town of Edinburgh-obliged to conform to every Scotch custom, or be laugh'd at-Will you hae some jeel? o fie! o fie! His flighty imagination quite cramp'd & he obliged to study Corpus Iuris Civilis. And live in his Father's strict family:-is there any wonder, Sir, that the unlucky Dog should be somewhat fretfull?"
However, later in the same letter he adds:
"Last Summer, indeed, I went to a house of recreation in this place, & catch'd a Tartar too, with a vengeance.....This season, I never have been, nor do I intend Again to be a Guest in the mansions of gross Sensuality."
These quotes cover two principal aspects of his life at this time; the law and licentiousness. A third was literature.
"I sat with [Lady Kames] till half an hour after twelve, amazed at my present vigour of mind."
Not content with the complexities of balancing these three relationships, he also took up with "a curious young little pretty". She was of a much lower social class than his other amours, which allowed him to express his strong sexual drive without the social, and sometimes physical, complications which he faced within his own circle. Her name was Peggy Doig and, unbeknownst to Boswell, she already had an illegitimate child.
"not at any time been more insipid, more muddy and more standing-water than I am now".
By May he was sending him a cheerful poem and writing that
"there is a city called London, for which I have as violent an affection as the most romantic lover ever had for his mistress",
and day-dreaming of the success he would be in society as an officer of the Guards. Yet he is so reconciled to Auchinleck that he is considering spending the summers there and only the winters in London
"in much the same way that the Spectator describes himself to have done".
Yet in early June he describes himself as having become without any visible cause "the slave of black melancholy".
Get your own Free Home Page
