Boswell: the first modern journalist

JAMES Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, when it appeared in London in 1791, was received with pleasure but also misgiving. Friends and victims of the great man grumbled that Boswell had undignified biography by reporting the indiscretions of private persons in company. What they meant, but could not then say, was that Boswell (or rather Boswell and Dr Johnson) had invented modern journalism.

The 18th-century yearning for the sublime, the general, the classical and the timeless was not for Boswell even at his most deluded. He lived and breathed the local, the peculiar, the mortal, the psychological, the dramatic. His meeting with Dr Johnson in a bookseller's shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden on 16 May 1763 altered his life. He was to spend much of the next 30 years observing Sam, reconstructing his conversation, squirreling up anecdotes from other sources, casting it all up into a book that people still read with intense pleasure.

In the welter of Boswell's information, we learn how Johnson had the habit, when bored, of stretching forward one leg and then the other, and also how he mastered his fear of death and insanity. In effect, Boswell achieved timelessness by another route. Thomas Carlyle wrote in his review of a new edition of the Life of Johnson in 1832: "It was as if the curtains of the Past were drawn aside, and we looked mysteriously into a kindred country, wondrously given back to us."

As Johnson, so Boswell. Ever since a 19th century British tourist shopping in Boulogne came on 97 Boswell letters serving as wrapping- paper, the world has been inundated in Boswelliana. There seems not a rundown country house in Britain and Ireland without some antique cabinet spilling forth its hoard of Boswell's letters and diaries. Boswell stands before us in all his anachronistic glory: drinking, whoring, namedropping, posturing, insinuating and intriguing before succumbing to the depression - he called it "hypochondria" or "melancholy" - that hounded him all his life. We know Boswell as intimately as a figure of our own era: as well, perhaps, as ourselves. Such is the caprice of time.

The skill for a writer on Boswell is not so much in digging out information as taking care not to be buried alive. Adam Sisman knows that better than anybody. The familiar story of Boswell's life - birth in 1740, faltering steps at the Edinburgh Bar, rows with his father, escape to London and meeting with Johnson, Holland, Italy, Corsica - Sisman tells in a few pages. Sisman's interest is in what Boswell called his "presumptuous task": that is, how Boswell collected and organised the material for the Life of Johnson with few models to guide him and many distractions, saw it through the press and vanquished the rival efforts of Sir John Hawkins and Hester Thrale.

Sisman has learned from Boswell how to tell a story "in scenes", as we all have. Sisman's great skill is to involve the reader intimately in what is happening to his subject. Here is Boswell in 1787, after suffering one too many slights from his patron, the vicious and miserly Lord Lonsdale: "By 28 December, Boswell was desperate. He resolved to lie in bed all morning, pleading a headache, but tedium forced him to rise between 10 and 11 o'clock.

There was nobody downstairs. Boswell walked back and forth between his bedroom and the dining room and afterwards on the gravel outside until one o'clock, and even there was no sign of his host or his breakfast. The servants ignored him. At last he decided to escape. He walked out from the house with his bag in his hand. At the porter's lodge he was discouraged by the deep snow."

With the Life published, Boswell disappears into the bottle, his wife dead, estate ruined, children amounting to nothing.

It appears from this sympathetic book that Johnson's friendship, and the project of writing his biography, could delay but not defeat Boswell's melancholy. Yet even at the end, Boswell still had lightning flashes of insight which Sisman treasures: "I hurried into the streets and walked rapidly, shunning to meet people as much as I could, my perceptions being liable to such soreness from even looks and manner that I suffered acute pain on being accosted."

Copyright 2000
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