James Boswell

136 Pages·2007·3.377 MB·English

by  Murray Pittock

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Aberdeen Introductions
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Murray Pittock
JAMES BOSWELL
Murray Pittock
Aberdeen IntroductIons to IrIsh And scottIsh culture
AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies
University of Aberdeen
©Murray Pittock
First published (paperback) in 2007 by
AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies
19 College Bounds
University of Aberdeen
AB24 3UG
This electronic edition published in 2015 by
Aberdeen University Press
19 College Bounds
University of Aberdeen
AB24 3UG
ISBN 978-1-85752-030-9 (pdf ebook)
This title is also available in the following format:
ISBN 978-1-906108-01-4
www.abdn.ac.uk/aup
A CIP record for this book is available
from the British Library
The right of Murray Pittock
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
To Alexander Broadie

Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction
On Biographers and Biografiends 1
Chapter One
Boswell’s Life and the Life of the Mind 9
Chapter Two
Self and Other in the Art of Boswell 31
Chapter Three
Fratriotism: Boswell, Corsica, Ireland and America 43
Chapter Four
Was Boswell a Jacobite? 69
Chapter Five
Boswell and Belief 81
Chapter Six
Boswell’s Li(f)e? Making Johnson Up 95
Notes 113
Bibliography 119

Acknowledgements
The influences on the making of this book were many and varied:
it is a part of a more extended research project on Boswell’s Political
Correspondence in the Yale editions which has been going on for a
number of years.
My first thanks are due to Claude Rawson, the Bodman Professor
of English at Yale, who first approached me with a view to working
on the Yale editions; and to Gordon Turnbull, who as General Editor
of the Yale Boswell, enabled me to hold a visiting fellowship at Yale in
1998 and 2000-1. Some of the ideas of this book were first worked out
at Yale; others formed the subject of seminar and conference papers in
Edinburgh, Oxford and elsewhere. I am grateful to the good offices of the
librarians at the Beinecke, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of
Scotland and the John Rylands Library for their support in the research
that helped to make this book possible: and to Sheriff Neil Gow for the
invitation to preside over the Boswell Society in 2001, and to attend the
re-opening of Auchinleck House that year by the Landmark Trust.
It has been a great pleasure to have been able to discuss Boswell and
eighteenth-century Scotland over the years with so many scholars, and
to have learnt from the writing and addresses of others. In particular
my thanks are due to Tom Crawford, whom I have had the privilege
of knowing for over thirty years, and whose outstanding scholarship
still does not always receive its due; to Ken Simpson, my colleague at
Strathclyde from 1996 to 2003; to James Caudle at Yale; and most sig-
nificantly to Alexander Broadie, to whom this book is dedicated in trib-
ute to the many evenings we have spent putting the long-dead world
of eighteenth-century Scotland to rights. The loyalty of the Faculty of
Advocates to one of their famous, if wayward, sons should also be noted,
in particular the contribution of Angus Stewart QC, for many years
Librarian of the Faculty.
As ever, the conversations I have been able to have with my wife,
Anne, are the seedbed of many ideas which are found not only in these
pages, which will in the chapters that follow provide an interpretation of
Boswell as an artist and a Scottish thinker, together with an approach to
the nature of that thought and art.
For ease of reference, primary texts, particularly those by Boswell, will
be mentioned by title in the text while important and frequently cited
viii James Boswell
secondary text will be referred to by author.
Murray Pittock
Glasgow, 2005
Introduction:
On Biographers and Biografiends
James Boswell (1740–95) is often held to be the first modern biogra-
pher. This shorthand is indicative of the fact that he is often seen as the
first to seek to document his subject, rather than relying on anecdote,
tittle-tattle and memory; the first to present his subject in the manner of
sympathetic centrality which is so much part of what we now see as the
biographer’s art, and which renders it suspicious to some; and the first
to use the autobiographical form of the diary to create an account of a
third person, shifting the form of the epistolary novel from fiction to
biography. Pepys reflects the subject; Boswell creates an object.
There is much to be said for this view, even if it is not altogether
accurate. As Donald Stauffer pointed out sixty years ago, while it was
‘the rise of the novel’ that ‘radically altered the art of English biography’,
Boswell was not the first to benefit from that change. Boswell’s use of
dialogue was anticipated by James Thomas Kirkman’s Memoirs of the Life
of Charles Macklin (1779); his ethical seriousness in portraying Johnson
and the minutiae of the supporting evidence adduced for that portrait
were both anticipated by Johnson himself; and the revelation of charac-
ter, one of Boswell’s crowning glories, was recommended by Johnson in
a 1750 essay in the Rambler (no. 60). Boswell also wrote in opposition
to already published and now seldom read lives of Johnson, particularly
that of Sir John Hawkins. A tradition of spiritual autobiography under-
pins even that marvel of Boswell’s self-revelatory art, his Journal. Yet
whatever the influence of novel, stage, spiritual self-revelation, ethical
seriousness, the stress on detail, the anticipatory role of the novel or of
travel literature, in some sense Boswell, both in his Journal and his Life
of Johnson, surpassed them all in creating an imaginative approximation
to the cultural performance of eighteenth-century mental and social life,
which nonetheless became, despite Johnson’s stress on ‘absolute truth’ in
biography, a myth: Boswell’s myth of Johnson and of himself.1
It is this creative representation of reality which renders the very
modern biography which is held to be Boswell’s central achievement
both popular and suspect. The stark exemplars of Plutarch, the tidbits
of Suetonius or Aubrey, the judgement of achievement in Johnson’s own
Lives of the Poets, all in their turn give way to an intimacy which com-