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James Boswell Biography

James Boswell Image

BOSWELL, James (1740–95). A Scottish lawyer and writer celebrated as the biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson. He was born Oct. 29, 1740, in Edinburgh, where his father, who had the title of Lord Auchinleck, from the name of his property in Ayrshire, was one of the judges of the Court of Session. He was intended by his father for the law. He studied first in Edinburgh and Glasgow and afterward at the University of Utrecht, where he went in 1763. When in London in that year, May 16, he made the acquaintance of Johnson, an event of decisive importance for his whole subsequent life. The acquaintance was earnestly sought by himself and originated in his ardent admiration of Johnson's writings. He spent one winter in Utrecht, and then proceeded on a tour through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, and visited Corsica with a letter of introduction from Rousseau to Paoli, with whom he contracted a warm and lasting friendship. He enthusiastically adopted the cause of Corsican independence and after his return to Scotland published his Account of Corsica (1768), which was speedily translated into several languages. Boswell became a member of the Faculty of Advocates in 1766, but never devoted himself with earnestness to the law. In 1773 he was admitted into the Literary Club, instituted by Johnson, of which Burke, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and Garrick were members. From this time he made it his principal business to note down the sayings and doings of Johnson; with whom he associated on most intimate terms, and whom he accompanied on his tour to Scotland and the Hebrides in 1773. It has been estimated that, taken all together, Boswell met Johnson on 276 days. Boswell was married in 1769 to his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, by whom he had several children. After Johnson's death, in 1784, he employed himself in arranging the materials which he had collected for his long-contemplated biography. His Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides appeared in 1785; his Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols., in 1791. Both have gone through many editions. Boswell has been emphatically styled by Macaulay "the first of biographers." His work is indeed full of details, and these are such as exhibit character and are arranged in the most interesting manner. He conceals neither his own faults nor those of Johnson, but presents a picture of which the truthfulness is too vivid to be questioned: and Johnson is, unquestionably, better known by the pages of Boswell than by any of his own writings. Boswell died in London, May 19, 1795. Besides the works already mentioned, he was the author of several productions of great interest to the curious. In 1857 appeared a posthumous volume of Letters of James Boswell, addressed to the Rev. W. J. Temple, from the Original MSS., in which the gay, insouciant character of the man very strongly appears. The sketches of Boswell by Macaulay and Carlyle are famous. Consult Rogers, Boswelliana (London, 1874), and Fitzgerald, Life (London, 1891). For the best edition of The Life of Johnson, consult Hill (Oxford, 1887), in 6 vols., with the standard edition of the text and minutely curious annotations; Bissell, Boswell as a Biographer (New York, 1905); and Brown, The Youth and Early Manhood of James Boswell (Glasgow, 1910).