Rousseau : Goodbye. You are a fine fellow. Boswell: You have shown me great goodness. But I deserved it.
And a dedJames Boswell was an arrogant twerp :
Rousseau : Goodbye. You are a fine fellow. Boswell: You have shown me great goodness. But I deserved it.
And a dedicated follower of foppish fashion
I was dressed in a coat and waistcoat, scarlet with gold lace, buckskin breeches, and boots. Above all I wore a greatcoat of green camlet lined with fox-skin fur, with the collar and cuffs of the same fur.
Boswell was an arch Tory but an ardent supporter of the American revolution. (Doctor Johnson hated the American rebels. Because he was a raging monarchist? No, because the Americans legalised slavery.)
Boswell loved his wife but was obsessed with prostitutes. He was an idiot and a buffoon and a falling down drunk but nobody could resist him, everybody liked him, everybody invited him back, time and again. He celebrated the intensely ordinary joys of life, conversation, friendship, fatherhood, whilst dogged by intense continual bouts of depression, which he called hypochondria. He was heir to 27,000 acres of Ayrshire, a bona fide Scottish laird, but he was always strapped for cash and had to slave away as a lawyer all his working life, which he hated. (For that he blamed his father and his evil stepmother. )
Man alive, he was a psychological catastrophe on two wobbly legs.
Also, he had a great idea – that his own life deserved to be recorded in the minutest detail, omitting no shameful failures. So year after year he wrote thousands of pages of journals including all his trysts with streetwalkers, all his doses of gonorrhoea. I’m not aware of any other man who has written in so much detail about his own paid-for sex, apart from Chester Brown’s graphic novel Paying for It.
Here he is at the age of 22 in 1762 contemplating what’s on offer in London:
I am surrounded with numbers of free-hearted ladies of all kinds: from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph with white-thread stockings who tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling
A year later he is thinking maybe he should get married. By then he is studying in Utrecht, Holland. Feminists may wish to find some brittle object to smash at this point in the review :
There are two Ladies here, a young, handsome, amiable Widow with £4000 a year & Mademoiselle de Zuylen who has only a fortune of £20,000. She is a charming creature. But she is a savant & a bel esprit & has published some things. She is much my superior. One does not like that. One does not like a widow neither.
The guileless 18th century sexism bubbles away like a merry glass of champagne. By now he is married but naturally he also has a girlfriend too (remember Henry Hill played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas : "Saturday night was for wives, but Friday nights at the Copa was for girlfriends." Not so different in 18th century Edinburgh. )
And here is Bozzy contemplating his girlfriend’s sexual past:
How am I tormented because my charmer has formerly loved others? I am disgusted to think of it. My lively imagination often represents her former lovers in actual enjoyment of her. My desire fails, I am unfit for love. Besides, she is illbred, quite a rompish girl. She debases my dignity. She has no refinement. But she is very handsome, very lively and admirably formed for amorous dalliance.
(Which reminds me of Dante’s increasing horror in Clerks when he realises the extent of his girlfriend Veronica’s experience:
DANTE This is different. This is important. How many?!
She counts silently, using fingers as marks. DANTE waits on a customer in the interim. VERONICA stops counting.
DANTE Well...?
VERONICA (half-mumbled) Something like thirty-six.
DANTE WHAT? SOMETHING LIKE THIRTY-SIX?
VERONICA Lower your voice!
DANTE What the hell is that anyway, "something like thirty-six?" Does that include me?
VERONICA Um. Thirty-seven.
DANTE I'M THIRTY-SEVEN?
VERONICA (walking away) I'm going to class.
DANTE Thirty-seven?! )
But anyway, after this conflicted panegyric to his current paramour Boswell the next day got drunk and hired a prostitute “and like a brute I lay all night with her”. Peter Martin, with customary dryness, remarks :
The next morning he already showed signs of his sixth infection, though the suddenness suggested not gonorrhoea but either a recrudescence of an old infection or more likely a mild nonspecific form of urethritis. Okay, not so bad then!
The girlfriends were one thing, the hookers another, but then Bozzy was one of those Weinstein types who are compelled to grope any female within arm’s length:
He managed to fondle a few chambermaids at inns en route p388
But wait. Let’s have a female point of view on all this cheating and whoring. One of his female friends in London stated her opinion of marital etiquette. (That was because he asked – he always asked people the most embarrassing questions. Go Bozzy.) She talked candidly to him of the harmlessness of “an occasional infidelity in her husband, as she did not think it at all connected with affection”. A special mistress or frequent infidelity was one thing, [Liz Lemon in ep 7 of season 4 of 30 Rock would have called it a dealbreaker, as in, “that’s a dealbreaker, ladies”]
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but a “transient fancy for a girl, or being led by one’s companions after drinking to an improper place, was not to be considered as inconsistent with true affection”.
Bozzy well and truly put this into practise when he got married. Either he up and confessed to sex with a prostitute the day after, or he left his journal around for his wife to read. She always forgave him. But, you know, she had other pressing concerns, like, well, she was always pregnant, and , oh yes, she had TUBERCOLOSIS. Coughed up blood for a few weeks, then it went away, then it came back, and finally she died of it. In many ways, this biography is tacit indictment of what women had to put up with.
Margaret Boswell gave birth to their fourth child, David, on 15 November 1776.… but the baby was sickly and given that one third of all infants died within fourteen days of birth, the prospects for his survival looked bleak. And die he did. Dr Johnson wrote to him that the survival of three our of four of his children was “more than your share”. And look at Mrs Thrale, their friend, said Dr J – she’d had eleven children, and only four survived.
So maybe the constant hookers and the constant two-month trips to London to see Doctor Johnson was minor static. What a life, huh?
Bozzy may have been something of a bastard but in many ways you can kind of sympathise with him, which makes reading his bio a queasy experience. For one thing, he lived in Edinburgh and hated it – it was 400 miles away from the ACTION, which was London. Actually, anywhere but Edinburgh was better than Edinburgh. When he went on a trip to Lichfield in 1776 he met Sampson Lloyd, founder of Lloyd’s Bank, and James Watt, famous inventor. Then back in London, he met Captain Cook and also Theandenaigen, Chief of the Mohawks, a year or so before the Cherry Valley massacre. You know, pretty interesting times.
Boswell wrote the brilliant Life of Doctor Johnson and was famous for being the great Doctor’s number one groupie. This led to several persons making this kind of fun with him:
Whenever Johnson spoke “the attention which it excited in Mr Boswell amounted almost to pain. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shouder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropped open to catch every syllable that might be uttered.”
Well… what a wretched human being. A wretched human being who everybody liked a lot. Apart from the almost-raped chambermaids, of course. They probably weren’t fans. #METOOinthe 18thCENTURY.
If this review swerves tastelessly between comedy and horror, that's what Boswell's life was like. Maybe because that's what all human life is like....more
I read this years ago and I need to get back into this filthy uncomfortable rowdy dowdy how did people cope for even a single day world of the 18th ceI read this years ago and I need to get back into this filthy uncomfortable rowdy dowdy how did people cope for even a single day world of the 18th century, because it's so much fun.
Johnson was famous, he'd written (singlehandedly almost) the first proper dictionary of English, he'd edited Shakespeare, and he was notorious also also for his serio-comic chauvinist-English detestation of Scotland, so naturally, Scotsman Boswell, the all time Johnson groupie, wished to persuade SJ to partake of the delights of Scotland and to demonstrate how lovely and refined it really was.
So that was a major fail, but in the end, what we got out of the slightly bonkers enterprise was two excellent books, this one, and Johnson's own account, which is much more high falutin and pompous, yes, but also great stuff. Bozzy's own version is hilarious, stuffed full of verbatim 18th century conversations and rampant snobbery, uneatable meals and miles of horrible unpaved roads.
Being a bit obsessive about these things, I was more than a little shocked that I had forgotten to list this wonderful book here, so I make amends now. Welcome to Scotland, 1773. You'll think you're there, and you'll be glad you aren't....more
This is a book which is not about a thing but is the thing itself. I think there’s a complicated German philosophical term for that.
In the history boThis is a book which is not about a thing but is the thing itself. I think there’s a complicated German philosophical term for that.
In the history books they will tell you Samuel Johnson is dead these 200 years, but I say No Sir. He’s alive, here, right here. He’s walking and talking and wringing the necks of fools right here.
In this book’s oceanic vastness of pages Boswell the drunk, the fool, the butt of japes, the ignoble toady, creates the reality tv of 18th century London. There are verbatim conversations, many of them, whole eveningsworths of them. If Bozzy had had a camcorder he’d have done that but he didn’t so he invented his own version of shorthand and made excuses every half an hour or so during the boisterous hours of high-powered debate with SJ & his pals and nipped off to the lavatory where he scribbled his hieroglyphs on his cuff or on a napkin. Like any reality tv show you get sucked into that world, so that even the boring bits are interesting. It helps that the language is so thrillingly grandiloquent and the people so piquant, so flavoursome.
Oh yes, even thought this biography is as long as Lord of the Rings, there are various bits that Bozzy didn’t dare include, but that.s okay, he wrote them all down in his journals, which 150 years later were all published for our delectation, so you can get hold of everything. Such as the question of Samuel Johnson’s sex life :
Excerpt from Boswell’s journal published as “The Applause of the Jury”
LONDON, 20th April 1783
LOWE. I do not believe his marriage was consummated.
BOSWELL. Do you know, ma’am, that there really was a connexion between him and his wife? You understand me.
MRS DESMOULINS. Yes, yes sir. Nay, Garrick knew it was consummated, for he peeped through the keyhole, and behaved like a rascal, for he made the Doctor ridiculous all over the country by describing him running around the bed after she had lain down, and crying “I’m coming, my Tetsie, I’m coming, my Tetsie!”
In Life of Johnson, this is rendered into more acceptable language:
In particular the young rogues used to listen at the door of his bed-chamber, and peep through the keyhole, that they might turn into ridicule his tumultuous and awkward fondness for Mrs Johnson, whom he used to name by the familiar appellation Tetsie
When Johnson was alive, he was something of a one-man industry all by himself (Dictionary, Shakespeare, Rasselas, Idler, Rambler, Lives of Poets) and after he was dead it seems every other person in literary London wrote a book about him. There were two biographies before Boswell's, and his publishers were kind of anxious - "Come on Bozzy, you're being scooped here, let's get your book out and cash in while people still aren't sick of the name of the great Doctor" But Boswell was supremely confident in what he'd got, which was this book. He waited seven years to publish this Life, and when he did, everyone knew what it was : a masterpiece of world literature.
But : this may be a little distressing, but when you have finished Boswell’s 1350 pages, you will probably then need to read an actual biography of Samuel Johnson, which, remarkably, this book really isn’t. Because it’s so Boz-centric, because Boswell knew what he had (the goods) and it made him a lazy arse who couldn’t be bothered to find stuff out if he had to work for it. Because what had happened was that Boswell was a major SJ fan and wangled a meeting with SJ when he was 22 and SJ was 54. He got SJ to like him, he was a real groupie, but he lived in Scotland. So from age 54 until SJ died, i.e. another 20 years, Bozzy would use his two weeks of holidays to visit London and be with SJ. And those are the days and evenings we get in minute detail in this book. The first 54 years are written about with verve but with an obvious desire to crack on to the bit where Boswell himself enters the story. Boswell finds himself very interesting too.
You could really go mental if you want with all this stuff. You could read this vast thing, then you could read all of Boswell's journals - about twelve volumes. then you could read Johnson's account of A Journey to the Western isles of Scotland, then Boswell's version of the same trip, called Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides. Then as a corrective to all that, you could read Young Samuel Johnson by James Clifford, which is brilliant, and wind up with John Wain's magnificent actual biography of SJ.
You could also throw in Mrs Thrale's memoir too, which contains lots of gems, such as
ON SCOTLAND
A friend of that nation, at his return from the Hebrides, asked him what he thought of his country. “That is a very vile country to be sure, Sir.” “Well, Sir”, replies the other, somewhat mortified, “God made it.” “Certainly he did” (answers Mr Johnson) “but we must always remember that he made it for Scotchmen.”
ON THE POOR
AN ACQUAINTANCE OF DR JOHNSON : "What signifies giving halfpence to common beggars? They only lay it out in gin or tobacco.”
Note : this question is still brilliantly contemporary, people say it every time they pass a modern day beggar except gin or tobacco has become Diamond White and drugs. I myself have said this.
“DR JOHNSON : And why should they be denied such sweeteners of existence? It is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own existence. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer”
You could go on, and indeed, I would urge that you do, because, all disclaimers aside, I think you'll have a great time.
Pressing ever onward with my Sam & Bozzy summer reading I raced through this for the second time.
Yes, it's got a rather off-putting title, and it's aPressing ever onward with my Sam & Bozzy summer reading I raced through this for the second time.
Yes, it's got a rather off-putting title, and it's all about a guy writing a book about another guy. And who cares because they're all dead, right?
Well, not quite - because of Bozzy they're alive, horribly terribly alive.
James Boswell was the last word in political incorrectness - dig it, he once wrote a pamphlet supporting slavery! He wasn't being exactly serious, but really. He also had 14 cases of gonorrhea before he died at the age of 54 of complications relating to gonorrhea and being a full-tilt drunk. From age 22 onwards, whether married or not (and when married in the full knowledge that his wife had terminal tuberculosis), there wasn't a prostitute in Edinburgh or London he wouldn't make a beeline for. And not a chambermaid he wouldn't grope. All this was aside from the various affairs with married ladies. And he wasn't that good looking either.
He was a Scotsman who couldn't stand Scotland or the Scots; he was a literary groupie who liked to collect famous people; he wanted to be an MP and was perpetually irritated to find that no one wanted him; he was a dreadful person in practically every respect, except that most people really liked him and kept inviting him back. So clap or no clap, he dined out doggedly, night after night, relentlessly hoovering up the sauteed scrotum of peasant or whatever was in front of him, and trying to fondle Lady Fontella Bassingham-Ffordingly-ffrench at the same time.
Our author here muses on how deliciously ironic it is that of the two, it was the fool Boswell and not the great genius Johnson who wrote the book which is still read with pleasure in the 21st century. By the 19th century Johnson's works were out of print and had become footnotes to Boswell's Life.
Well, I have to wonder if anyone does read Boswell either anymore. They should, because it's great fun, but who reads anything old.
Anyway, for fans of Sam & Bozzy this book is the cat's pyjamas....more
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